Nigel Godrich on the eBay cameras behind Radiohead's webcasts

Nigel Godrich has told Pitchfork how he made Radiohead's webcasts during the In Rainbows sessions. Basically, the webcasts were done by me and 10 video cameras I bought off eBay.¹ Some were the kind TV news used in the 1980s. Bored in the studio, he set up a little television studio of his own and filmed everything, and he still has a great deal of that footage.

The occasion is From the Basement, the live-in-the-studio series Godrich produced, engineered and curated. It came back on 23 July, streaming in full on the Coda Collection, a subscription channel on Amazon Prime, at an episode a week. The first is Radiohead's session for The King of Limbs, filmed in 2011 with a brass section and an extra percussionist. The band's other full session was for In Rainbows. Godrich calls the 2011 film a deliberate attempt to record the album again once the band had rehearsed it and played it live, and he is proud of how they play on it, on a record that was very mechanised.

The series first ran from 2006 to 2009, mostly at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios, where an olive-green room and a red carpet the crew brought in gave it its look. Godrich told the Coda Collection's Greg Kot that it began as his answer to TV promotion, where an act came in, played and left, and that it was always meant for the web, before the web could stream it.

On The Smile's album, which he told the Coda Collection was finished when the series returned, Godrich can say nothing yet. Asked whether their Glastonbury stream in May recalled the Radiohead webcasts, he says that was what Thom Yorke was after, and that he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to somebody to do the same thing I did for nothing, so ironically, it's quite funny.¹