Production Advice

Close the curtains, switch off the ‘phone and prepare to lose several hours of your life.

Legendary Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich has launched a new website and it’s awesome. I tried to finding an equivalent British superlative, but I couldn’t ! “Awesome” is the only word for it.

The site is called From The Basement and features exclusive live performances (all shot in gorgeous HD) of artists like Beck, Fleet Foxes, Eels, Gnarls Barkley, Iggy And The Stooges, Jarvis Cocker, Jose Gonzalez, P J Harvey, Queens of The Stone Age, Sonic Youth, Sparks, Super Furry Animals, The White Stripes and Radiohead themselves, all produced by the inimitable Mr. Godrich himself.

It’s been around for a while now, but only in certain regions – now you can watch the videos anywhere.

As Nigel says himself on the homepage,

“The whole emphasis of the show is about being artist friendly and making our bands as comfortable as possible so that they can give great performances without the usual agony of TV promo which everyone has to do but no one seems to enjoy. TV world is a pretty hostile environment for your average musician to have to walk into and bare his soul on cue…

“My own personal goal is that in the future some of these performances might be seen as the truest representation of the state of their artists work, captured in a way that lets their talents speak without the interference of presenters, or audiences. That is what I feel when I watch Talking Heads or Bill Withers on the Old Grey Whistle Test, that they are most definitely playing for me, not someone else in the room. If we can even touch on that kind of directness and quality then I think the whole project will have been a success.

Well, from what I’ve seen, he has certainly achieved that goal.

So, why are you still here ?!? Go and check it out now. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about those lost hours. Honestly though, how better to spend them… and if you like what you see, there’s also a DVD containing many of the performances from the site, which is available from Amazon (Affiliate link, folks)

I’m always on the lookout for sites like this to post about, please let me know any of your favourite sites in the comments ! And feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed to get regular updates, if you like.