The wait is over Wednesday lovers!
Welcome to your midweek New Cue bump. Today we’ve got a mammoth chat with super-producer Nigel Godrich about his excellent live music show From The Basement and, because the interview was conducted by Niall, he also managed to squeeze in 4000 questions about Radiohead too.
Today’s edition, which contains some excellent inner-circle intel on the making of Kid A, Nigel’s tea-making skills, how The Smile album came together, recording the Band Aid 20 single and much more, is for subscribers only. It costs £5 a month to subscribe and you’ll get three editions of The New Cue a week. Nice price, thrice content. We’ll work on that catchphrase and get back to you.
Enjoy the edition, see you Friday
Ted, Niall and Chris
Lost In Music: Nigel Godrich
How music lovers became music lifers
Nigel Godrich is one of the most influential music producers of his generation. He’s best known for his work with Radiohead, with whom he has collaborated since working as an engineer on their 1995 album The Bends. He took up full production duties for 1997’s game-changing OK Computer and helped them reshaped the rock landscape again with 2000’s Kid A. He’s gone on to produce every Radiohead album since and also become an artistic foil for Thom Yorke on the frontman’s work outside the group. Most recently, Godrich produced A Light For Attracting Attention, the debut album by The Smile, a new project by Radiohead’s Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. He was also behind the desk for the new Arcade Fire album We. Across his career, Godrich has also worked with Paul McCartney, U2, R.E.M., Beck and many more.
Last month, Godrich relaunched From The Basement, his high-end live music show that airs on YouTube. The current series will air from June until October and take in performances from IDLES, Sons Of Kemet, Caribou, Squid and Nilüfer Yanya. Today, a new episode featuring a set from Warpaint will air and you can watch it on From The Basement’s YouTube channel.
Last week, Niall spoke to Nigel over Zoom about From The Basement as well as digging into some choice cuts from across his career.
Hello Nigel, where are you at the moment?
I’m in London, I’m in my studio in Brixton, which is basically a big room with lots of recording equipment and stuff, [Nigel turns his camera round to show us the room] that’s basically it.
How long have you been down there?
I have been here for four years or something. The last few years have been very hard to quantify time-wise, haven’t they? Something like four years.
That room looks familiar, is that where you’ve been doing the new series of From The Basement?
That’s right. I’ve had a few different large studios in London and when I was looking at this place, one of the things that struck me was, ‘oh, it’s just about big enough to film in’, because the main reason that we stopped doing From The Basement all those years ago was that it’s so expensive and we thought about trying to find a permanent location that we could use to bring the cost down and make it more economical and that was one of the contributing things that made me realise that we could probably do it again, because it’s just easier, home turf and a bit more space and time to play with.
What is it when you get that itch to do some more From The Basement sessions rather than, say, make a new record?
It’s like a busman’s holiday really, it’s a completely different thing. It’s not vocational as much, it’s more of an extrapolated hobby, something that I really enjoy doing. It’s more like scratching an itch of being involved in live music. When you’re making a record, you’re really constructing something, it’s like doing Lego, it’s a very fine minutiae in a laboratory, creating something and building it slowly. You start with nothing and you end up with the Notre Dame built in Lego and sometimes you miss just being around people playing live music. That’s what was really fun about doing From The Basement. The original instigation was to try and do an exceptionally good version of a live filming event, but it’s not my job, it’s just something I want to see. So I was like, ‘wouldn’t it be fun to do that?’.
When you’re making records with bands, there’s a moment when you sit down at the beginning and you’re just playing through the material and it’s very exciting when people are in a room and just playing their instruments, if they’re good songs and they know what they’re doing, it’s an amazing feeling and the idea of trying to kind of capture that moment, which is a short period because then you have to translate that into something that bears repeated listening. It’s not as simple as going to a gig.
The From The Basement sessions look great and have a really rich sound, which is where TV music shows usually fall down. No-one should ever judge how good a band are live by watching them on Jools Holland. These things feel more like companions to the records instead of lesser versions.
Yeah, I think what I’ve found is through my obsessive nature, what you should end up with is more like the equivalent of a live EP but filmed. That’s how I see it. I am glad that you say that, I’m glad that you think that because that is the intention really, to make something exceptional, to try and do your best to try and one would hope that it will be a sort of elevated version of that, it’s not wheel them in, wheel them out again, it’s take the time.
One of my very first thoughts about it was when I was doing a Beck record and we had this drummer James Gadson with us, he was Bill Withers’ MD. There’s famous Old Grey Whistle Test footage of Bill Withers playing Ain’t No Sunshine and James is in there. It starts on Bill Withers then it zooms out and there’s this guy with this enormous afro and a gold tooth and a toothpick playing the drums and it’s amazing. I was asking him about that because it’s such an iconic bit of footage, exactly the kind of thing that I felt was missing, and he said that they spent the whole day getting the sound and that really resonated with me because I’ve been in those situations. I mean, Jools Holland is an institution and beyond criticism but there’s a lot of volume there, what we’re doing is something different, it’s more focused on particular things. That was the idea, the priority was making it sound good. I’ve done plenty of TV and radio sessions when you get in and you’re just working against the clock because you have a very small window to get things done. We have the luxury of our own space and I can take my time with the audio afterwards.
How much has the idea evolved given the technological advancements since you started doing it?
From an audio perspective, not at all because it’s exactly the same equipment I’m using and everything’s the same and it’s the same person doing it. But interestingly, the first time we ever did the original From The Basement in 2005/2006, the reason that we managed to get funding was because we were filming in HD, which was a new technology then. It enabled us to get money from Sky Arts, which was a new HD channel that didn’t have any content and needed content. Of course, what’s happened to television since then is now everything’s 4K. What’s happened is the visual side of it is technologically the state of the art, it’s gone forward. But I would say nothing else. I mean, in terms of recording live music, it’s the same story, we’re still using the same microphones that The Beatles used and that’s something that people talk about when they talk about recording technology versus film and video. Basically, the things that we used to record in the 60s and 70s are too expensive to be made today so we still use old gear because it’s the best quality. All my equipment is 50 years old. It’s quite funny.
Let’s go back to the beginning of your career. What was your first job in music?
I discovered that the only way that I could get into what I wanted to do was to basically to get a job like an apprentice at the bottom. I wrote 100 letters to the 100 24-track studios that were in London in the late 80s and I got a job. My first job was as a tea boy at this place called Audio One that was basically the rebranded Trident Studios, which is in the West End, a very, very famous studios. In the 60s, The Beatles recorded there, Bowie recorded there, Queen were part of the whole thing. It was like a real institution. But basically, I had a pager and I sat on the fourth floor next to the kettle waiting to be beeped, ‘three teas and two coffees in Studio One please’. You were basically finding the opportunities to be able to get in the room and be around the equipment and when people weren’t there, you could go and fiddle around.
Did anyone pull you up on your tea skills?
I was a good teaboy. I make a great cup of tea. I actually worked in a cafe before that so I knew how to make a good cup of tea, very important. Tea making was a very important skill for the up-and-coming record producer back in the day. That’s how Flood got his name. It was the same studio. Two guys started on the same day, they nicknamed one of them Drought and they called him Flood because he was always bringing tea. But they told me when I worked there, “Oh, count yourself lucky, in the old days the assistants had to cook everyone breakfast when they arrived in the morning.” It was that kind of vibe, but it was a really great place to work because it was a very substantial, important place.
Did you feel immediately that you were in your natural habitat?
No, I remember sitting there and thinking, ‘Well, I’m on the first rung of the ladder.’ I was very aware that this was like a temporary situation, the idea was just getting into the right place, basically. I actually was in a band and we went to a studio in Wapping Wall called Elephant Studios, it used to be in Elephant & Castle, that was the first studio I ever went to and it was to do a demo with a band that I was in. That was when I walked into a studio and realised that I wanted to be in this place. It was just this amazing environment, a quiet laboratory of sound. It was very exciting because one of my favourite Pogues records, Rum, Sodomy And The Lash was recorded there so I was asking the guy questions. I was impressed as a 16 year old kid.
How was it going through the Radiohead vaults for the reissues of OK Computer and Kid A Mnesia? Is there anything you were surprised about?
They’re very different animals. OK Computer was more of a regular process in as much as we had some songs and we went into various places and tried to record them and did it different ways and ended up with the best possible outcome, whereas Kid A was taking everything that you’ve gained and worked for and throwing it in the air and looking at the pieces and going, ‘Okay, well, this is what we’re trying to do’ and starting again. And, obviously, I worked on the Kid A stuff more recently and there’s a lot more of it, and there’s a lot more stuff that went by the wayside that was for good reason.
It’s funny when you go back and look at stuff, especially when you’re looking at it from the perspective of looking for things that haven’t been released or extra material that might be interesting, everything is for a reason, you left it off for a reason, you go back and what I was surprised by was that all of the decisions that I made were absolutely right. And also my memories of things, I can remember recording Everything In Its Right Place and it was just me and Thom in a room trying to do something that was not what we’d done before and I remember him singing the vocal once, singing it a second time, looking in his notebook, saying, “ah, ‘yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon’, I can’t say that,” and me saying "yes, you can, you’ve got to say that, let’s do that!" and doing that take and it being like this magical thing, then going back to the tape and looking at what’s on the tape and there it is, the first take it’s got no lyrics, the second take it’s a repetition of “the two colours in my head” thing and then the third take it’s “yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”. That’s exactly how I remembered it. And even though it’s more than 20 years ago, I can remember that process and it’s there written down in a physical form for me to see.
When you reach 51, you start questioning things that you remember and how you remember them and ‘was it really like that?’ and ‘did I actually do that?’, so to go back and look at something and it be plain as day how you remembered it was like, ‘oh, that’s fascinating.’ The other thing that was really funny about going through Kid A was the fact that we hadn’t really got the concept of file management together yet. I had to look on a video that I had of us recording to find the box that was the hard drive, which had everything on it that was not on tape, because we were working on tape and we were also working on a computer. It was like, ‘what are we looking for again? I’ve forgotten.’ It’s a SCSI drive that looked this particular way, something that is completely obsolete now. They found it on a shelf, dusty at the back, nobody knows what it is and then not being able to open all the stuff on it was pretty funny. There’s some bits we can’t find.
They’re in a room somewhere, like at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Yes, exactly. There is one of those, a kind of Radiohead equivalent of that.
How different is the relationship with you and Thom from project to project, does it change if you’re doing Radiohead to Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes or to a solo project like Anima?
Well, obviously, it’s really different. I mean, the whole kind of instigation of us like doing The Eraser was off the back of that I was not going to work with the band again because we thought I needed a break, we’d gone through Hail To The Thief and it was like, ‘foof, everyone’s tired.’ and they went off to start working on songs for the next record. I was like, ‘okay, it’s fine.’ Thom was like, ‘Maybe we’re gonna work on our own, we’re gonna work it out,’ and I was totally cool with that, and then I basically got a call two days later saying that he wanted to do this solo thing and so we started working together.
What we found was, interestingly, when we were in a room when it’s with Radiohead, I was always butting heads with him because it was basically me and the band, I’m trying to manage a relationship between him and the band and it’s me butting heads with him and trying to work on behalf of the band. As soon as he and I were alone, we found that the dynamic was completely different, we were pulling in the same direction and it was incredibly productive. So it worked really well and we did that record and then actually I ended up doing In Rainbows anyway.
You know, relationships change. It’s nearly 30 years now we’ve been working together so things do change and the way that you work changes. But I think that what’s evident is that you only really have formative relationships like that once. So Thom will never find another me and I’ll never find another Thom because we’ve just worked for so long together. And that goes as well for the other guys in the band but in a different way, because obviously Thom and I have gone off, I’ve done something like 14 albums with Thom, whereas I’ve only done nine or something with the rest of them. There’s so many different permutations of how it works but the fundamental bottom line is it works. We just have this ability to just be very productive together and that’s a really precious and important thing and it changes in within the context of whatever we’re doing. It doesn’t really matter, so then we go and do Atoms For Peace and it works in a different way but it’s still fundamentally the same relationship. It’s crazy. It’s a long-standing thing.
Which record that you’ve been involved with do you think is the most overlooked?
Here We Go Magic’s A Different Ship. It’s a band I really loved and it’s one of those stories of finding something you really love and working trying to help them and then them imploding pretty soon after the record was finished so the whole thing just ground to a halt as it was in that format, a couple of people left. It’s a shame because I think they were a really great band in that format and they could have moved forward and carried on being great band. I feel like that’s a little gem.
What’s been the hardest period of your career?
I definitely had a beam me up moment when we were doing that Band Aid 20 single!
Haha, go on…
Well, it was just one of those things where you feel like, ‘if I can contribute something then I can help and it’s such a good cause I should do it’ and getting musicians together to do something like that is quite difficult. I was working with McCartney at the time so I managed to strong arm him into coming in and playing bass. And obviously Geldof’s hassling Thom so I had this sort of funny superstar band, which is Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Danny Goffey on drums and Paul McCartney on bass and Fran Healy doing the frontman-y bit to get the backing track. It just was a bit of a clusterfuck trying to get the actual track together. The whole thing is just so not me and then what happened was we just couldn’t really get a good take so I was up until three in the morning trying to like cut it together without much help from certain parties. It was like, ‘What’s going on here?!’.
Tell me about the making of The Smile record. Out of all the Radiohead and Radiohead-affiliated records, that’s the one to me that has the most mystique, it seemed to come out of nowhere that Thom and Jonny had started a new band.
I think there’s a little bit of cards to the chest about the whole thing. I think it just came out of Jonny writing all these riffs, waiting for something to happen. I think he was writing music and it’s been such a weird time the last few years, Ed’s gone off and done his solo record so that’s kind of been out of the picture and then Covid hit, I think there was a desire to make music so him and Thom were getting together writing stuff. It’s just a quite organic process, it was over a long amount of time, over a couple of years. It started here in this studio and then I went off and did the Arcade Fire thing so that slowed everything down a little bit. And then when once that was done, I came back and finished it off. But it’s the same thing, it’s the same kind of ingredient, those people that I’ve worked with all this time so we’re kind of just doing what we do and we have our ways of getting things done.
With that in mind, how was it walking into Arcade Fire to produce We, working with a big band you hadn’t collaborated with before?
The thing with those guys is it’s a completely different animal. They’re very much the ultimate home studio recording artists in a way, they’ve always done stuff on their own and I think it was quite different for them to have a producer-producer. In some ways, it worked really well, in some ways it maybe made it a little harder, because I have my feelings about things and integrating that into the whole thing can be complicated. But I think, at the end of the day, we worked well and there’s a lot of material that actually isn’t on the record that is really good. But I think that they made a good decision by keeping that record short and sweet, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve known those guys for years. It’s a classic thing where you meet people around and about and then always in the back of your mind, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is a possibility.’ It was kind of miraculous that it happened, really, because of Covid what we did is we went to the middle of nowhere, outside El Paso, Texas, and basically lived in a cult for a couple of months. Nobody came in and nobody came out, people delivered the shopping, that sort of vibe just so we could be able to do it. It was a method to make it possible.
That sounds intense.
It was intense, yeah. Making music is intense sometimes, especially when you’re dealing with other human beings because there’s so much that goes on in the soup of making music, that’s why it’s wonderful.
Do you think there will be another Radiohead album?
I don’t know. Obviously, I can’t answer that!
This piece is coming out to coincide with Warpaint’s From The Basement session, how was that?
Oh, well that I love because, again, it’s a band I’ve never recorded but I know them all really well, they’re friends and have been friends for a long time for many years. It’s serendipity that it becomes a version of a way of working together that is really pleasing for all of us, just a day in the studio, and we get to record, capture this thing live and I get to fulfil my little fantasy of doing something with them.
ND