On film · a member's film · 2021
Thom Yorke: From the Basement
Two years before In Rainbows came out, Thom Yorke sat at a piano for Nigel Godrich's cameras and played three of its songs.
2005
the pilot
From the Basement was Nigel Godrich's idea, born of a talk with Beck about the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus and a long grievance about how television filmed bands. There would be no host and no audience, just musicians playing in a room, filmed properly. He told The Quietus in 2009 that MTV had destroyed the way people filmed performing. For the pilot he asked his friends, and everyone said yes: the White Stripes, Kieran Hebden with Steve Reid, and Thom Yorke.
Yorke's set was filmed in London in 2005, with Sophie Muller directing. He sat alone at a piano and played songs that were not on any record yet. “Videotape” would end In Rainbows two years later, and “Down Is the New Up” and “Last Flowers” went on its second disc.
2006–2008
first heard
The pilot went out as a download in December 2006, with Yorke's “Videotape” and “Down Is the New Up” on it. By then the full band had played both songs on stage that summer, “Videotape” first at the Hammersmith Apollo in May. Yorke told Uncut it was “exciting to get plugged straight into the mains”, with no producer or director in the way.
Sky Arts showed his session in December 2007, and it closes the series' DVD of 2008. Radiohead went back to the basement twice as a band, for In Rainbows in 2008 and The King of Limbs in 2011.
2021
the tape comes out
In April 2021 Radiohead put the set on their own YouTube channel, the first of that spring's films from their archive, which the band said they had found rummaging in the Radiohead Public Library. The upload runs just under 15 minutes and holds the three songs. Several reports that week said it had “Analyse” from The Eraser in it too; Yorke did play it for the series, but it is not in the video.
the film
Thom Yorke: From the Basement· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
sources7
- Radiohead, “Thom Yorke - From the Basement”, YouTube, 14 April 2021, youtube.com (recorded in 2005, the three songs and their order)
- Ben Hewitt, interview with Nigel Godrich, The Quietus, 19 June 2009, thequietus.com (Rock and Roll Circus, Beck, MTV, Yorke on the pilot playing songs from The Eraser)
- Wikipedia, “From the Basement”, en.wikipedia.org (Sophie Muller, the pilot's acts, the songs filmed for Yorke's episode)
- NME, “Radiohead producer to launch TV show”, 18 September 2006, nme.com (the first series recorded, Yorke first)
- Uncut, “Thom Yorke to preview new Radiohead songs”, 6 December 2006, uncut.co.uk (Yorke's words on the show)
- Jasmine Kent-Smith, Crack, April 2021, and the band's own posts that month (the 2021 archive run and the band's words about the Public Library)
- This site's stories of 5 December 2006, 29 November 2007 and 12 August 2008, and the show page for the Hammersmith Apollo, 18 May 2006 (the download, Sky Arts, the DVD, the first full-band “Videotape”)