A party guest's blog puts Radiohead in a Hollywood Hills studio

Radiohead have spent three weeks recording with Nigel Godrich in a house in the Hollywood Hills, a guest at the party that ended the sessions on Saturday 30 January has written. The guest, Jia-Rui Cook, a writer who has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, said the engineer Bryan Cook had helped turn the house into a studio and spent the three weeks there recording the band. Her post, on her blog Postmark Here, came down soon after it was picked up. Beats Per Minute kept a copy of the post.

The band were in Los Angeles in late January. When they announced their Haiti benefit at the Music Box at the Fonda on 21 January, they said they were in the middle of recording.

Beck, Salma Hayek and Danger Mouse were at the party, she wrote, round a pool that Dean Martin and the Rat Pack once used. Thom Yorke periodically toyed with the iPhone that controlled the speakers. Usually he skipped forward to a Rolling Stones song.²

Godrich told her the band picked Los Angeles to escape the English winter, lazed in the sun at first, and got down to work when heavy rain came. If their last album was In Rainbows, I guess they could call this one In Rainstorms.²