The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement

the record, again

The King of Limbs came out in February 2011, and the band did not tour it at first. They had built it out of loops of their own playing, and Nigel Godrich, who produced it, called it a very mechanised record. He filmed the band playing it for his series From the Basement.

It was a very conscious attempt to do something special: to record the album again, once it had been rehearsed and played live, to show it in a different light.

Nigel Godrich · Pitchfork, August 2021

The band played it at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios in London. To rebuild the drum loops by hand they brought in Clive Deamer of Portishead to play beside Phil Selway. Vern Moen directed and edited the film.

All eight songs of the album are in it, in an order of their own, opening on “Bloom”, and after “Give Up the Ghost” it closes on “Supercollider”, finished after the album and out that April on a single with “The Butcher”. The programme sold for broadcast ran 55 minutes by God Is in the TV's count and 54 by Spin's, and on the disc Spin listed “Supercollider” as a bonus track.

"Staircase" and "The Daily Mail"

Two of the songs had never been released. “Staircase” was built for the two drummers, with Deamer on a sampling pad as well as his kit. “The Daily Mail” was older. Ed O'Brien said on BBC Radio 1 that December that it had been “kicking around for at least six years”, and that once the band picked it for the session the arrangement came together within a week. It starts at the piano and ends in Jonny Greenwood's parts for seven brass players.

on air, and on disc

BBC Worldwide sold the programme abroad, for broadcast from 1 July. Palladia showed it in America on 23 July, and in August the band's label, XL, put the whole session on the band's YouTube channel for a while. On 19 December it went on sale through iTunes, and the same day “The Daily Mail” and “Staircase” came out as a download single, both taken from the session. The DVD and Blu-ray came by post before Christmas and in the shops in January, with a 32-page book of Steve Keros's photographs. The band put it back on YouTube on 21 May 2020 for At Home, their weekly run of old concerts there in 2020.

Ryan Leas, defending the record in Stereogum in 2015, found that its songs had muscle and movement when the band played them live with Deamer, where the record had gone brittle.