nigelgodrich.com

THE ARTS: The holistic approach to music: POP: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney meets Nigel Godrich just in time for the producer's 'mid-life crisis' Financial Times; Aug 27, 2001 By LUDOVIC HUNTER TILNEY

Record producer Nigel Godrich comes across as a most unlikely Alfred Hitchcock. Open and friendly, it's impossible to imagine him taunting his pop-star charges - Radiohead, say, or Beck - by telling them how useless everyone thinks they are, as the Master did to poor Joan Fontaine during the filming of Rebecca (he wanted to make her feel her character's loneliness).

Yet Godrich sounds an authentically Hitchcockian note when he talks about how to get good performances from the musicians he works with. "Ultimately in a studio," he explains, "what you're essentially trying to do is trick somebody into performing well, whatever that takes. So if it means that you have to massage them or starve them . . . "But as an image crystallises of Godrich in the recording studio waving slabs of cake at hungry rock bands to make them play better, he adds that he doesn't feel he's ever done anything really unpleasant. It's psychological gameplay, not torture.

His form of studio trickery has certainly reaped dividends. Now aged 30, he's produced some of the most notable albums of recent times. His breakthrough came in 1997 with Radiohead's OK Computer, reckoned by many to be a modern masterpiece. He also worked on the follow-ups Kid A and Amnesiac, as well as Beck's Mutations, Travis's last two albums, The Divine Comedy's Regeneration and Pavement's valedictory release Terror Twilight. Although he hates to be pigeonholed - he lets out a comic wail at the idea of there being a generic Godrich sound - it's fair to say that he's one of the few producers of rock or guitar pop to have made a name for himself over the past few years. "There aren't many people in my position," he concedes. "Maybe that's why I'm getting attention."

Originally a guitarist, with a liking for Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, he switched to production partly as a result of his family background: his father was a sound supervisor for the BBC. Years of toil at a large studio complex followed, with Godrich serving his apprenticeship as an engineer. "You can't really go to college to learn how to do it," he explains. "There aren't any proper rules, so the best way to learn is by watching other people."

At first the producer he most admired was Trevor Horn (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Yes, Art of Noise). But he quickly realised that he couldn't replicate Horn's gift for sonic showmanship and so began to hone his own style, which he describes as being "more organic". There's no mention of overdubs, reverb or other such arid technicalities when he discusses his profession. Instead he talks about the need for producers to understand the creative process and be able to work with people, to have a vision of what a band is capable of doing as well as the expertise to put it in practice.

At times it sounds almost holistic. "The greatest experience you can have in a studio is when everybody's playing together and something happens, and suddenly you don't know what's going on. You can't tell what's coming from where and neither can they, and that's when, corny as it sounds, it all gets a bit spiritual."

The less spontaneous side of the process is evident when he describes the making of Radiohead's OK Computer. "They would have a song, and it was like, how are we going to do this? You can record it 10 different ways and not like any of them. Some of the greatest songs are never released because they weren't satisfied or the recordings weren't good enough."

His involvement with Radiohead began when he worked as engineer on their second album The Bends, which came out in 1995. Later the band asked him to produce OK Computer. It was half-recorded in a converted apple store in the countryside during the BSE crisis, next to a power station where culled cattle were apparently being burnt as a potential source of fuel; a fact that may help explain the album's mood of jittery anxiety about techno-industrial society.

Its success - 4m copies sold globally, the band acclaimed as rock music's saviours - was hard for Radiohead to handle. "Thom (Yorke, the band's vocalist) felt in particular that it was no longer about him as a person, more about what he stood for." But it opened doors for Godrich, who suddenly found his professional services being sought by stars such as Axl Rose, singer with heavy metal behemoths Guns n' Roses.

Forsaking a life of Spandex and guitar solos, he instead produced the album that he says made him feel valid: Mutations by Beck, released in 1998. It came about after a chance encounter with Beck's manager at an Oasis concert he went to while staying in Los Angeles. Next he found himself conducting a whirlwind two-week taping session with the genre-hopping singer-songwriter - "the most productive time I've spent anywhere, let alone a studio" - resulting in a selection of mostly folk and country songs that he still loves, "mainly because I didn't spend two years recording it". That's how long Radiohead took to make their diptych Kid A and Amnesiac, with Godrich again performing the production duties. "It was a long and drawn-out process," he admits, though an enjoyable one too. "From my point of view, I have a band which is three guitars, keyboards, bass, drums and a vocalist, and the brief is that we're not going to play guitars, nobody really knows what to do, and I'm in the middle of it trying to make it work."

The end product was a challenging set of abstruse, mostly electronic songs first unveiled when Kid A was released last year. It was as if, Godrich feels, Radiohead were saying - especially to people in their own age group, the early 30s - that "we're not some rock band that's going to make another rock album that you're going to go out to buy". And in spite of a fairly frosty reception, particularly in the UK, the uncompromising stance has been justified: Kid A reached number one in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, while Amnesiac has been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, awarded next month to the best British album of the past year.

It must be odd, however, to work so intensely with one band and then go off to produce another. "That's the hardest thing about it. You forge these incredibly close bonds with people; the dynamic is almost like being married. And then sometimes you can find yourself in a corridor with a few of your wives and it can be difficult," Godrich laughs. But his outlook seems to have been shaped largely by his experiences with Radiohead, with whom he feels the greatest sense of personal investment. "Guitar groups are on the way out," he believes. Now that he's turned 30 - middle-aged in rock years - he thinks that it's time for a period of reflection; what he jokingly refers to as his mid-life crisis. "The worse thing that could happen is that it could become stale. I just wouldn't like to become somebody that people refer to in some sort of a predictable way."