Radiohead drummer and solo artist Philip Selway has a musical relationship with Fife troubadour James Yorkston which stretches back several years.
This latest appearance at Yorkston’s Fife-based Tae Sup wi’ a Fifer show – which this month tours Scotland before returning to St Andrews – comes after Selway played for him at Kirkcaldy’s Adam Smith Theatre in 2017.
‘I’m a fan’
“I’ve been a fan of his music for a long time,” says Selway of Yorkston.
“We first properly met at the BBC Folk Awards, this is going back years and years. We struck up a conversation and stayed in touch, then last summer we went out on tour.
“That was the first time we actually got to play together, which was so exciting for me.
“When you’ve spent a lot of time listen to somebody’s music, there’s an immediate connection when you start playing together. I’ve been very much looking forward to this tour.”
Selway releases his third album Strange Dance this month, the follow-up to 2014’s Weatherhouse, not counting his 2017 soundtrack for the film Let Me Go.
In the interim there has also been other film work, a collaboration with the Rambert Dance Company and the small matter of Radiohead’s own 2016 album, A Moon Shaped Pool and its tour.
“When everything went into lockdown, my mind turned towards making this current album by drawing on all the different musical relationships I’d built over the past decade,” says Selway.
“I didn’t want to write a lockdown album, but that was a context it was written, and that’s the process when you’re writing stuff, anyway. You shut yourself away for a period so you can really craft it.”
Garden studio beginnings
At this stage, Strange Dance was Selway in his garden studio writing songs alone. But as lockdown opened up he became aware of the scale of the music he wanted to produce, and of the fact he wanted to introduce lots of collaborators.
The album features Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley, multi-instrumentalist Quinta (both featured on Selway’s score for the film Carmilla, included in the album’s deluxe edition), Hannah Peel and Italian producer Marta Salogni.
It also features drummer Valentina Magaletti, after Selway “sacked myself. I started off playing drums for a day and a half, but realised it wasn’t happening.
“I knew the textures I wanted, but I hadn’t played for a while, and with the speed I wanted the sessions to move at, I felt going to somebody else could keep the momentum going.
“Marta suggested Valentina, and it was a blessing in disguise I couldn’t deliver the goods, put it that way.”
Big soundscape
There was plenty to keep him occupied. “The record was to have a big musical soundscape, accommodating all these different musical voices and really exploring orchestral elements, while also being something quite intimate as well,” he says.
“At the heart of the record, my singing is almost like pillow talk, and I guess that’s where the songs started.
“I wanted to know they would work in the context of just me and a guitar or a piano, that they could land in that format as well.”
In the spring, he’ll be going on a full tour to promote the record, but in the meantime fans will get to hear these songs in special stripped-back format in St Andrews, with Yorkston in accompaniment.
Philip Selway plays Tae Sup Wi’ a Fifer at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, on Sunday February 19, with James Yorkston and Nina Persson, Rachel Sermanni and Marjolein Robertson. taesup.co.uk, byretheatre.com
