Nigel Godrich would love to record Radiohead the way he made Junun

Nigel Godrich has been asked whether he would lock Radiohead in somewhere like the Rajasthan fort where he recorded Junun, for three weeks.

Would I love to do it with Radiohead? Yes I would dearly love to do that. Could you get them to go there? Probably not.

Nigel Godrich¹

The power cuts would drive Thom crazy.

Nigel Godrich¹

The question came on Monday 9 July at Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, after a screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's Junun, his 2015 film of the album's making. It was the night Greenwood, Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express played Colbert. Anderson, Godrich, Jonny Greenwood, Shye Ben Tzur and the nagara player Nathulal Solanki took questions from the audience and from David Ehrlich of IndieWire, which has published the transcript.

Nothing suitable existed in India, so Godrich shipped a whole studio out in a box. The reverb on the record is natural, from a big space under the palace that was full of pigeons, and they can be heard on it. Greenwood ruled out string instruments from outside the region, players from anywhere but Rajasthan, and Western harmony, with chords used only very sparingly. There’s a hi-fi obsession to recording world music that we find a bit off-putting.¹

He and the others had stood at the back during the screening, he says, getting nostalgic, and they are talking about making another record. Asked what he was thinking when he wrote “Paranoid Android”, he says he cannot remember. Genuinely, how I wrote it was not knowing what the notes are that high on the fret board and just choosing a pattern¹.