Radiohead have shared a few of their recording secrets including “yogurt cartons, tubs, bells and a mini-tambourine.” in an interview with The Times Literary Supplement
Since the release of their latest album A Moon Shaped Pool we’ve not heard a lot from the members of Radiohead in regards to the album’s recording but now they’ve spilled the beans, or at least some of the beans, in an interview with author and poet Adam Thorpe for The Times Literary Supplement.
The interview sees Thorpe join the band at the La Fabrique recording studio based in a disused mill in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. He speaks to his close friend Colin Greenwood who reveals some interesting facts about the band’s recording process as well as some of the techniques employed by their ‘artist in residence’ Stanley Donwood.
Check out some choice quotes from the interview below.
Greenwood on performing:
“You focus down on the stage, which becomes your own intimate space. You’re just playing in your room with friends.”
Greenwood On recording A Moon Shaped Pool:
“I can’t talk about it much, as Nigel [the producer] 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!”
Greenwood On Radiohead being perfectionists:
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose we can’t be or we’d never release anything. And we all have different likes.”
Thorpe On Stanley Donwood’s unconventional process:
“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.”
Thorpe on Thom Yorke:
“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.”
(VIA: TLS)