There’s a Star Wars stormtrooper suit in Nigel Godrich’s gorgeous wooden-floored studio in south London. Godrich donned the white plastic for cameos in two of the recent sequels, it turns out. How did that happen? The music producer smiles enigmatically. “You’ve got to drink at the right bars.”
So that’s how it works. Well, Godrich must have been picking the correct watering holes for 25 years because he has become the most fêted producer of his generation, working on records by — and standing up to the egos of — Paul McCartney, U2, Roger Waters, REM, Beck and, most famously, Radiohead.
He has been described as the sixth member of the Oxford band, producing all their albums since OK Computer, three of which he won Grammys for. Only a handful of producers have name recognition outside their industry: George Martin, Phil Spector, Trevor Horn, Rick Rubin. Godrich is certainly one of them.
The Londoner is also one of those rare producers who emerge from the murk of the studio and take the stage. He is a member of Atoms for Peace — with his friend Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Los Angeles drummer Joey Waronker — and also of Ultraísta, with Waronker (“a human octopus”, Godrich says) and Laura Bettinson, a singer, songwriter and synth player from London.
Godrich, 49, and Bettinson, 32, are at his studio, a former furniture factory, each with one of her small dogs in their lap, to talk about Ultraísta’s second album, Sister. It’s an extraordinary collection of layered vocals, hypnotic strings and shifting grooves that draws on the trio’s shared love for afrobeat, electronica and art, and was apparently “inspired by tequila’’. Imagine Radiohead’s dancier, more melodic stuff fronted by a woman with a darting soprano and cropped pink hair.
“Joey and I are certainly not front people. We’re making something very organic and sort of groove-based, and Laura was constructing stuff with her voice and loops. It felt like a really good match,” says Godrich, who with his spiky mane looks like the trendy new dad that he is — he has a five-week-old baby at home. He first encountered Bettinson in the Noughties, when she was doing a solo set with a loop station at the Old Queen’s Head pub in north London. “It was in her previous incarnation, Dimbleby and Capper,” he says.
“Oh no, you’ve said it out loud!” Bettinson says, cringing as musicians do when reminded of former lives.
“I have to click my heels three times and turn around,” Godrich says with a smile.
They got chatting and discussed collaborating, although there wasn’t much in the way of a coherent strategy. “I was definitely not aware that I was coming into the project as a singer,” Bettinson says. Nor did she have much of an idea who Godrich was. “I remember walking into Nigel’s studio and I was, like, ‘Ah, I think this guy’s kind of a big deal.’ I hadn’t really grown up listening to Radiohead at all, or a lot of the albums that Nigel had worked on. I think in some ways that helped. I definitely wasn’t intimidated.” She looks over at Godrich. “I was more intimidated by your white studio.”
“Don’t spill anything!” he says in a pernickety dad voice.
Each broadened the other’s horizons, though. “She played me FKA Twigs years ago. There’s this meeting of different universes,” Godrich says. “Our back- to-back DJ sets are quite eclectic,” Bettinson adds.
Ultraísta, named after an interwar literary movement born in Spain, released their self-titled debut album in 2012. After that they were all busy with other work, so it took several years to make the follow-up. Godrich and Bettinson both wrote songs, or parts of songs, for it. Did they talk about what they were about? “Never,” Bettinson says. “Ha ha.”
“I’m not going to be, like, ‘OK, Laura, this song is about this girl who broke my heart,’ ’’ Godrich says. But the songs must be more personal than the ones he produces for other people. “Yeah, for sure. I don’t write lyrics for bands I’m producing, but I do shape the music and it’s a bit of a grey area — is that writing? I think it is. But this is a labour of love. We get to do things that we don’t normally get to do.”
“I usually get to do a lot more,” Bettinson says, refreshingly unwilling to toe the party line. “I’ve always been a solo endeavour. I enjoy this, but it’s completely different. You are making more compromises.”
Whether it’s a project like this or a world-famous band working with a celebrity producer, music-making can be a precarious business. It requires a delicate combination of diplomacy and assertiveness, although at the beginning delicate may not be the right word.
“It starts generally with throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Godrich says. Working with bands and solo artists is very different, he adds. “It’s like a zoo and you have a cage with one thing in it and a cage with five things in it. It’s going to be a very different party in both of those. But if you’re, you know, the zookeeper . . .” He laughs. “Can I keep this analogy going?”
Working with McCartney on Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005), Godrich didn’t shrink from offering his opinion, including getting rid of Macca’s band. “He’s an incredible musician, so why would you not want to hear that? He’s very prolific and so we had a lot of discussions about what was going to make it.” The album got some of the best reviews of McCartney’s post-Beatles career.
Godrich’s easiest project, he says, was Beck’s Mutations in 1998. “We just piled through and in 14 days made this amazing record.” Waters sounds slightly trickier. After recording Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017), he told Godrich that “it was a bit of a trip down memory lane . . . for you.” Godrich smiles. “And he’s not wrong because I’m basically a massive Pink Floyd fan. So I’m trying to get him to do the thing I know that he can do.”
Godrich knows that he will be defined by his work with Radiohead. “They’re a totally different animal because I regard them as more like my family. Thom and I have been working together for 25 years.”
Godrich’s experiences with the band range from OK Computer, the record that made his name as an experimental pioneer in 1997, to A Moon Shaped Pool, recorded while his father had cancer. “The day that he died, at 7.30am, I went to the studio and recorded the Burn the Witch strings. My dad was a string player and I could hear him saying, ‘Go to work,’ in my head.”
If Godrich’s work ethic is fierce, so are his opinions on the Spotify revolution. “Streaming works very well as a TV model because there’s a necessity to put money in at the beginning to produce the content,” he says. In music, however, “somebody figured out, ‘Oh, we can just get them to give it to us for nothing.’ Record execs are now flying around in helicopters again, but the front end is even poorer than it was before.”
He thinks too that streaming has undervalued the album, a format that “has moved me beyond anything else art-wise that I’ve experienced. The album created Dark Side of the Moon. Streaming has inspired three-and-a-half-minute shit.” He pauses. “End of rant!”
As the co-creator of some of the finest long players of them all, Godrich has as much right to rant as any.
Sister is out on Partisan