Broadcast on New Year’s Eve 2007 via Radiohead’s website, Scotch Mist rounded off a year where the already legendary British band had rewritten the rock rulebook. Following over a decade of major-label patronage from EMI, they were now an independent outfit and self-released their album In Rainbows as a download under a radical model that invited customers to ‘pay what you want’ (including, if desired, £0).

To accompany the new album, the band recorded a pair of performance films that were intentionally spontaneous and homespun, in marked contrast to the expensive, conceptual music video productions of previous albums. The second of these webcasts, Scotch Mist, features a full run-through of the In Rainbows album in the intimate surroundings of the band’s Oxfordshire recording studio.

Directors Garth Jennings (one half of the award-winning creative duo Hammer & Tongs) and Adam Buxton (of comedy double act Adam & Joe), placed cameras throughout the studio to capture the performances in an up-close-and-personal manner that breaks through the band’s carefully curated air of mystery and cryptic imagery, and brings the artistry and emotion of their songs to the fore.

These performances are interspersed with spoken-word interludes, visual skits and a more traditional music video segment for what would become the album’s second single, ‘Nude’, featuring the band members performing in front of a high-speed camera, slowed down to a hazy snail’s pace. As Buxton explained on his blog in 2008:

“We got each member of the band to thrash madly about as fast as they could for 7 second bursts (which, because of the 1000 fps shooting rate, was all the camera could store at any one time) then loaded the results onto my laptop and that was more or less it... There’s not much to it but it’s kind of moving I think. Having said that, when you’ve got a song as lovely as ‘Nude’, you could pretty much film a hairy arse in slow motion and it would be moving.”

The internet has given musicians unprecedented levels of control over the distribution of their work, from forming close-knit online communities around their music to orchestrating ‘internet-breaking’ surprise launches. Radiohead were far from the first, or last, artists to embrace the possibilities of online platforms: rock ‘n roll survivors Aerosmith released the track ‘Head First’ in 1994 on the CompuServe platform, while David Bowie’s album Hours... was first made available as a download on his website, BowieNet, in 1998.