Radiohead Recording Process Revealed in Behind-the-Scenes Interview
Radiohead have offered a glimpse into the recording of A Moon Shaped Pool in their first interview published since the album’s release. In a piece for the Times Literary Supplement, author and poet Adam Thorpe, a friend of Colin Greenwood, joins the band at La Fabrique recording studio, an old mill near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France. While there, he observes the band, chats to Colin about the record, and witnesses Stanley Donwood’s unorthodox creation of the album art, the basis for which he painted in a nearby barn with its speakers wired up to the studio.
Thorpe asks Colin Greenwood whether he’s pleased with the recording:
I can’t talk about it much, as Nigel [Godrich] is really secretive about our ways. But I like a lot of it. It’s beautifully lyrical in places. There’s one with a straight chord sequence, so that can go next to the cold spy one. The fluffy puppy next to the warthog!
Asked if the band are perfectionists, Colin responds, “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose we can’t be or we’d never release anything. And we all have different likes.”
At one point, Thorpe glimpses a makeshift rehearsal: “Jonny establishes a rhythm, part-calypso, part-reggae, with his yogurt cartons, tubs, bells and mini-tambourine. ‘Sounds a bit like Marvin Gaye,’ Ed comments.”
Thorpe goes on to describe Donwood’s setup:
In one of the larger granges, numerous canvases display abstract explosions of colour. The barn’s speakers are wired up to the recording studios: the band’s resident artist Stanley Donwood reacts in acrylic to what he hears, the results to be modified and manipulated on computer for the LP’s cover.
Thom Yorke makes only a brief appearance, but he draws a colorful description from Thorpe.
Dining with the band one evening in an Arles square thirteen years ago, I heard Thom Yorke announce that he would quit rock music when he was forty. He didn’t want to be a Mick Jagger, still prancing about in his withered old age. Fifty now looms, but when he appears crossing a lawn in a kind of Flaubertian dressing gown and towel turban, cool behind reflective shades, he could be twenty, aside from his salt-and-pepper stubble.
Read the full interview here.
Watch the “Daydreaming” video:
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