1997 · album
Nigel Godrich’s contemporary account of turning a country house into a recording environment for Radiohead.
For OK Computer, Radiohead and Nigel Godrich took recording equipment into St Catherine’s Court near Bath. The house offered rooms in which to play together and a library in which to listen back. In a 1997 interview, Godrich described the setting as part of their attempt to make a recording environment they could enjoy working in.
These historical places remain in the list while their map positions are researched.
Andrea Robinson’s interview with Godrich in The Mix, preserved by the Citizen Insane archive, places the control room in the house’s library. The group chose to retain the room’s atmosphere rather than surround the desk with acoustic treatment that they found unattractive. Godrich remembered opening lattice windows toward the gardens. These details make the house a working choice with sensory consequences: how a room looked and felt mattered alongside how it sounded. The equipment could move, allowing the musicians to choose a setting instead of accepting a fixed studio environment. [1]
Godrich described musicians playing together in a large room, able to see one another, with individual foldback mixers. He valued the responses between players and the speed with which performances could be captured. This places the album’s making within relationships across a room: eye contact, listening and the ability to react while a song develops. The house supported that arrangement without becoming the location of every step in the record’s production. His contemporary account preserves a particular working environment within the album’s larger recording history. [1]
St Catherine, near Bath
During the making of OK Computer, released 1997
Radiohead and Nigel Godrich recorded at St Catherine’s Court near Bath while making OK Computer, using the library as a control room and arranging the band so its members could see one another while playing. [1]
St Catherine’s Court is a private property. The recording history does not establish public access to the house, library or gardens, and no precise room or entrance pin is supplied.
