Radiohead have always been different. From their pioneering albums to the way they release music (ie, for nothing), the critically adored brainy Oxford quintet, led by Thom Yorke, have spent 40 years flying in the face of how international rock stars behave. Even their hobbies are odd. Because while, say, Rod Stewart spends his downtime building huge train sets and Alex James of Blur makes his cheese, the Radiohead drummer Philip Selway has spent four decades volunteering and being an ambassador for the mental health charity Samaritans.

"I see my roles as similar,” he says with a smile when we meet in London, ten months after Radiohead played for the first time in seven years, and just as the band get ready to tour again, in Australia and Japan next year. “As a drummer, the focus is on someone else. It’s supportive and that’s transferable to being a Samaritan.”

It is extraordinary how much he puts into the organisation. In the 1990s, when Radiohead released Creep and left Oxford to tour the world for what would be the best part of 20 years, Selway barely stopped manning the helplines to talk to those in need, picking up on missed shifts when he returned home.

“It has been a very healthy process for me,” Selway, 59, says of his two worlds. “Being in a band becomes inward-looking. It’s a fast track to narcissism, and you are part of this bizarre world that can feel quite ungrounded at points, but being a part of this organisation, going into the Sam centres for your shifts? It got me out of my mind. It puts that other world into perspective.”

I speak to Selway to mark World Suicide Prevention Day, which takes place on September 10 and comes with a new initiative from Samaritans urging us to talk to — to “interrupt” — our friends and family when we feel we can help. Every 90 minutes, one person in the UK dies by suicide and it is the leading cause of death for the under-35s in England and Wales, with men making up three quarters of the deaths. Samaritans volunteers answer a call every ten seconds.

“We want to open up the idea that if you are concerned about somebody, it is actually OK to interrupt them,” Selway says. “The interruptions can break a train of thought. We are all very respectful of people’s bubbles but it is OK to just check in with somebody and show that you care. It can be lifesaving.”

I know some of you will be saying something along the lines of, well, Radiohead make depressing music, so of course the drummer should be involved with Samaritans. I would counter by saying that the band’s music is a rush of beauty and euphoria but, still, I ask Selway the question: what does he think when people drone on about Radiohead being miserable, “complaint rock” as Alicia Silverstone’s character called them in Clueless?

“Well, there was a period when if you had a natural disaster on a film, we soundtracked it,” he says with a grin, “but last autumn, when I looked out on the tour, that is not what I saw at all. Those shows seemed like very uplifting experiences and when you find the right connections, you can be talking about the hardest things in the world, but the connection is uplifting in itself. I mean, lyrically we go to tricky places and with Sams we go to tricky places in conversations. But that connection underpins everything — it’s uplifting and that’s what you take away.”

Selway signed up to Samaritans in freshers week at Liverpool Polytechnic. He had met his bandmates at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire and they all headed off to various different places, before eventually reuniting in Oxford. In Selway’s first week as a student, a bookmark was put under the door of his halls of residence for the Samaritans equivalent Nightline and he become a volunteer for both.

“The leaflet said, ‘Do you feel you can be a good listener?’ ‘Can you be non-judgmental, open-minded?’ That resonated with me,” Selway says. “They were personality traits that, for the first time, I’d seen presented as something positive.

“Having gone to an all-boys’ school, I didn’t feel like those aspects of my personality — my empathy — were particularly valued or useful. It was the first time that side of me was seen as a strength.” Has he been close to anyone who took their life? “I’m lucky,” he says, “inasmuch as I have not lost anyone close to suicide, but we all will come up against it at some point and I’m no different. It’s been in my orbit, and people mask it extremely well.”

He says the training was “profound” — it teaches the importance of listening to the silence of callers, allowing them to speak. Most of the calls, Selway says, last less than an hour but some are longer. How, I ask, do Samaritans know the right time to end a call? “You can’t put a time limit on somebody with suicidal thoughts but you reach a stage in conversation where things have reached a certain equilibrium,” he says. “There is a point when it becomes counterproductive to speak longer.”

Times have changed when it comes to talking about suicide. Discussions are less of a taboo and Selway, an Oxford United fan, talks about a recent player, Will Vaulks, whose life was affected by the suicides of his grandfathers and how the club openly addressed that tragedy. And in 2022 the Oxford United legend Joey Beauchamp took his own life, which, again, was widely discussed.

“I just don’t feel those conversations would have happened in the past but they’re more necessary than ever, because on social media our kids have less privacy and more vulnerability,” Selway says. He is father to three grown-up sons, Leo, Jamie and Patrick, with his wife, Cait. “It’s a far more relentlessly stimulating world than when I started as a volunteer, with fewer places to have respite. When my boys were teenagers it was Snapchat and a pressure to stay on there all the time — it’s that need for constant engagement and it’s not a healthy place to be.”

I mention a cover the music magazine Melody Maker ran in 1995, after the death of Kurt Cobain and the disappearance of Richey Edwards, that had Yorke’s face on the front with the headline: “Is this the next rock martyr in the making?” Yorke was appalled.

“Understandably,” Selway says. I say I cannot see a publication being that flippant now. “That would be lovely to think,” he replies, sounding a bit unconvinced, “but there are different stresses now. You get more of a pile-on than you used to online. That headline was out of order — Thom is not some avatar, he’s a person with family and feelings — but we still see it. That is why it’s so important to keep the conversation going.”

Radiohead’s 20-date tour last year started in Madrid and took in Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin. “We were having a ball from the get-go,” Selway says. “The rehearsals were lovely. It was a privilege to do and I think we did our best show ever on that tour.” Which one? “First night in Berlin. But the whole tour felt very precious, how lucky we are to have gone from being a school band and still feeling like a school band but being better at doing it 40 years on.”

A few months ago the guitarist Ed O’Brien said Radiohead had plans to go back on the road in 2027 and do a continent or region a year. The first phase of that plan has now been confirmed, with concerts in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Tokyo next May. It is time for fans to make that connection again. “Who knows if we’ll still be able to do this in a decade but I hope we go on and do it for however long,” he says. “Because there is a lot of love that underpins this.”