Scotch Mist

the studio with the cameras on

By the end of 2007 In Rainbows had been out as a download since October, and the CD was due in the shops on 31 December. Thom Yorke announced on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, that they would mark it with a pre-recording of some songs and other bits on New Year's Eve. The film is Scotch Mist, directed by Adam Buxton and Garth Jennings, who had worked with the band on Thumbs Down, their webcast from the studio in November.

The studio was already wired for it. Nigel Godrich had bought old television cameras from the 1980s on eBay during the sessions and put about 18 of them round the room, with a small control room of his own. Buxton made helmet cameras for the band out of the one he used at his comedy nights. There is no audience. Kitty Empire, writing in The Observer, noticed Yorke getting hairier from song to song, which gives away that it was filmed over weeks rather than in one night.

the film

All ten songs of In Rainbows are in it, in an order of their own, opening on “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”. “Faust Arp” leaves the studio: Jonny Greenwood and Yorke play it on a windy hill at dusk, which Buxton's blog places at Wittenham Clumps, in sight of Didcot power station. Between the songs a voice reads poems, the In Rainbows pictograms come and go, and the five run from a fireworks display that spells GOOD NIGHT.

It closes on a new film for “Nude”, shot at 1,000 frames a second in bursts of seven seconds, each of the band thrashing about at full speed, then slowed to a drift. Buxton said of it later that a song as lovely as “Nude” would make anything look moving in slow motion.

We didn't have to go through three weeks of video commissioning and receiving dodgy scripts set on abandoned skyscrapers in downtown LA or something.

Colin Greenwood · Pitchfork, March 2008

on air, and in the archive

Scotch Mist went out at midnight on New Year's Eve on radiohead.tv, and in America on Current TV, the cable channel Al Gore had started. YouTube put it on its home page on 2 January, and MTV2 showed it again on 13 January. Empire thought it had less of the mischief of Thumbs Down, but called it a fine night in. Clips from it became the band's own videos on YouTube for several of the songs, and they still are.

It is on the band's YouTube channel and in the Radiohead Public Library, and in May 2026 the BFI National Archive took it in, one of the films made for the internet that it chose to keep.