In 1992 Radiohead were playing small venues out of a van. In the second half of 1993 they were in the United States for months at a stretch, and that is the tour that caught up with Philip Selway. Writing in the Guardian, the drummer describes withdrawing into himself, impostor syndrome, and a persistent sense of being very far from home. The anxiety had to come out somewhere — for other people it is drink and drugs — and for him it came out in his playing. At one show opening for Tears for Fears, with Blondie’s Clem Burke, his drumming hero, on the other kit, “every limb seemed to be going at its own speed. The kick drum became like trying to open a heavy door.”
The piece is a first-person argument rather than a reported one, and its claim is narrow and worth taking seriously: the psychological cost of touring is occupational and structural, not a failure of individual resilience, and the support that exists at stadium scale has never existed on the rung below — where the pressure is higher and the money is not there.
What the work actually is
Selway’s inventory of small-tour life is precise. “At that level, your margins are nonexistent, your workload is much greater — loading the gear and so on — and you’re driving yourself between shows.” Add emotional and geographical displacement, living on top of each other, the soundcheck-gig-meet-people cycle, and an ambient anxiety that “some people guiding you may not have your best interests at heart.”
There are two features of that life he is most careful about. The first is that there is no exit until the tour ends: “You can feel really vulnerable, and there’s no way of getting off that roundabout until you get home.” The second is the reason nobody raises it: “It’s difficult to talk about because nobody wants to rock the boat, and other people might be going through the same thing, so you don’t want to burden them.” A workforce that has been told to get its head down and get on with it, and that reads disclosure as a burden on colleagues, does not reach for help early.
The support that exists — and who it misses
Big tours can hire therapists. On Radiohead’s autumn 2025 tour, with the Music Industry Therapist Collective, the band put a programme in place for the whole touring party: introductory sessions during rehearsals and production build, then confidential drop-in therapy available to anyone on the tour, road crew included, for its duration. That is the level Selway says has always been covered, and the level where the touring party has staff and a budget.
What did not exist was anything for the bands playing the venues Radiohead played when they started. Hence the Pay It Forward Fund, set up by Tamsin Embleton and the Music Industry Therapist Collective — funded initially at £272,000 to finance 150 tour teams of practitioners over three years, delivering occupational health, mental-health education and pastoral care to crews and artists on smaller tours. Applications are open now.
The design decision worth noting is who does the talking. “If someone is looking to reach out to a therapist, it can be really good to talk to someone who has lived experience in the music industry,” Selway writes, “so this project will mean people have someone to talk to who understands what they’re going through.” That is a bet on occupational literacy over clinical generality — a therapist who knows what a load-out at 2am, a bad monitor mix and a predatory manager feel like.
What turned it around for him
Not therapy, in his account. It was expensive pre-Zoom phone calls home to his wife, a manager who noticed and “broached it with me very nicely,” and watching how James and then REM navigated touring: “Seeing how other people navigate it all was fascinating” — mentors, in the ordinary sense of seeing that the job is survivable.
His own frame for the fund is that a single conversation is the entry point, which is consistent with the fact that he has volunteered for the Samaritans since he was a student: “I know how important it is to talk.” The ambition is that this becomes “an everyday part of touring” rather than a three-year project.
What the piece doesn’t do
It is advocacy by a participant. Selway is endorsing a fund run by the same collective that ran his band’s tour programme, and he is describing conditions without asking why touring at that level pays so little that a support scheme has to be charitable. The underlying economics — the Guardian’s own reporting on what small bands actually earn on the road — is gestured at and left alone. And there is no outcome data yet on what a pastoral-care programme changes: crisis rates, attrition, whether people stay in the industry.
The framing is still the interesting part. Treating the road’s toll as an occupational-health problem, and putting therapists with industry experience on small tours rather than sending musicians to general practitioners, is a mental-health-access argument made by someone who lived the thing he is describing.
Read the full story at The Guardian.