darrell thorp on Puremix

Darrell Thorp talks to Andrew Scheps for more than three hours on Scheps's show for Puremix, starting with a childhood moved around Arizona and California and a church in Tucson where he learned live sound and cut quarter-inch tape for its radio show. After the navy and four months at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences he got into Track Record in Los Angeles, and became an assistant the day the man in the job threw his keys at the studio manager and walked out. Scheps first noticed him on a Goo Goo Dolls session, on his knees in front of a Marshall, moving a microphone for hours without a word of complaint.

Nigel Godrich turned up at Ocean Way one October with Travis, Kid A about to come out, and read out a mic list from memory. Thorp put C12s on the toms instead of 421s and offered to change them; Godrich listened, kept them and called it the greatest mistake he had ever heard. For years after, the Starbucks up the street seemed to play whatever they had just made, Travis, then Hail to the Thief, then Paul McCartney.

Radiohead came in for Hail to the Thief in September 2002. Jonny Greenwood's Max patches needed a whole rented Pro Tools rig to get round the latency, and Thorp made Greenwood's modular synth follow Pro Tools by editing a bar of its clock signal to the grid and looping it, for which Thom Yorke gave him the credit. An offhand joke about coming to England to finish the record got him on a plane. Ed O'Brien once told him American studios have lovely mic stands, which made sense years later at the BBC's Maida Vale, filming The King of Limbs for From the Basement. Godrich told him the work with Radiohead had gone well because Thorp was not a fan of them then, so the air was more casual and calm.