Nigel Godrich on Coda Collection

Nigel Godrich talks about From the Basement from his studio in London, as the Coda Collection starts streaming the series. Most of the musicians he knew hated the grind of television promo, so his pitch was to do it properly, live, with no audience, no presenter and no editing afterwards, a performance to the camera. The model was The Old Grey Whistle Test, whose clip of Bill Withers playing “Ain't No Sunshine” still turns up whenever he is mentioned on television. James Gadson, the drummer in it, told Godrich they spent the whole day getting the sound.

Radiohead took three days over each of their sessions, because by the third day everyone relaxes. The In Rainbows session worked so well that they went back and rebuilt the whole setup without the cameras, just to record. The King of Limbs, he says, began with mechanised things, and the fair complaint at the time was that it didn't feel like a band, so the band went away, worked out how to play it, took it on tour and came back to play it in a room, catching the band version. Kid A was written in the studio by a smaller part of the band, and the others then had to go away and learn to play it. “That music would not exist if it wasn't made the way that it was made.”

Mark E. Smith wandered on 10 minutes into his band's set with a plastic bag of beers and started fiddling with their equipment. Iggy Pop was thrown at first by the lack of an audience. My Morning Jacket asked Godrich what he wanted and played for an hour. In the end the show was too expensive to last, with five cameras running where a film uses two. On the Smile, the band of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner, Godrich gives nothing away, except that Skinner, its drummer, is about to get a lot of attention, and deserves it.