Never miss a beat Beyond the stool: drummers in the spotlight

Poor Philip Selway. There he was, pouring his heart out to DIY about the anxieties he experienced coming out from his drum stool, the ups and downs of learning to sing after you’ve reached your fortieth birthday and intricacies of juggling one of the world’s most famous bands with taking your kids to the IMAX, and meanwhile his erstwhile school pal and trusted band mate of almost three decades, Mr Thomas Edward Yorke, was plotting the surprise release of his second solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. While our Philip went through the usual channels, dropping the gorgeous ‘Weatherhouse’ – a gargantuan leap from his debut, by the way - via Bella Union as a traditional Monday morning physical release, Yorke came out of nowhere, tweeting a characteristically mysterious BitTorrent link and stealing a march on his longtime timekeeper by a full ten days. It all felt a bit like Yorke and producer-cum-co-saboteur Nigel Godrich had gotten a bit devil-may-care after a couple of Friday evening glasses of red and, with nothing on the box – pun intended – decided to toss Yorke’s sophomore LP out into the world. The rest is digital record distribution history, and while it doesn’t rank with In Rainbows’ ground-breaking honesty box approach, things didn’t turn out too badly for the Radiohead singer. By Saturday night the record had been downloaded over 100,000 times and at $6 a pop, that’s not a bad day’s work. Yorke’s been known to throw the odd tantrum and we get the feeling Selway has seen it all before. Characteristically unruffled, he’s managed to dust himself off and line up a string of tour dates for early next year where he’ll get the chance to angle the limelight back on to himself. And he isn’t the first drummer to do so.