Welcome friends and music lovers.
Here lies the website of From the Basement - A sort of music show / labour of love produced by a small group of dedicated individuals. We shoot it all on HD video and the sound is produced by me.
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.. It also doesn't hurt that a lot of the people we've filmed are friends or people we've worked with before so they trust us and know that we understand what recording music is about as well as making good TV.
All in all I think it all adds up to something unique and special which I don't feel happening anywhere else in either the music side of mainstream TV or online.
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.
Nigel Godrich
Things have been moving along swiftly in FTB world...
I am very happy to say that FINALLY we are updating the website and in an effort to make the whole thing reach as many people as possible are going to put up all the content from our first 2 seasons online for you to view for free. I'm really proud of all the work we've done and want everyone to be able to see it without having to go to youtube or whatever.. no need.. much better here.
Also other big news... there is a new live channel on the site. This is pretty cool - you will be able to watch live streams of performances as they happen.
This has been enabled by a partnership with Nokia. They are great supporters of the show and we're very happy to have them help add this extra dimension to FTB.
To start it all off we'll be broadcasting a live performance from The Dead Weather on 22.6.09 at 9pm (UK Time) on www.ftblive.com