#8 of 10: http://t.co/IAEHtG1 Have you really considered that you have been lied to constantly since you were born? (Expires Aug 25 or so)

Aug 18, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: #8 of 10: http://t.co/IAEHtG1 Have you really considered that you have been lied to constantly since you were born? (Expires Aug 25 or so)

The 3rd of a series of 10 weekly questions asked by Chieftan Mews.

In this case it came with a link to The King of Limbs – Live from The Basement on the Offical Radiohead Youtube Channel which the band have been using since 2005 to host their videoclips and some webcast material for In Rainbows and The King of Limbs. They also uploaded all of the remixes from TKOL-RMX 1234567 and The Daily Mail/Staircase along with The King of Limbs on the day the album was released in stores.

Radiohead reported on Dead Air Space that there had been a issue getting The King of Limbs – From The Basement shown in the UK, apologizing for the delay on July 20th as “the original broadcaster decided not to show it”.

On June 5th 2011 BBC Worldwide Music Television announced that they had signed a deal to be the international distributor for The King of Limbs – Live From the Basement.

Their press release gave the following details:

BBC Worldwide Music Television has signed a deal with Radiohead to distribute internationally a new and exclusive live performance of Radiohead’s eighth album, ‘The King of Limbs’.

Radiohead – The King of Limbs: Live From The Basement is a 55-minute performance from one of the most successful and critically acclaimed acts of their generation, who have sold over 30 million albums worldwide. The programme will feature the notoriously elusive band performing the entirety of their celebrated new album in a studio setting with some additional behind the scenes material. It is scheduled to be the first time that the grammy-award winners are captured on camera this year.

The King of Limbs album was released digitally in February 2011 and physically at the end of March 2011, yet this exclusive performance will be the first time the band will have played this collection of songs in public. The band will be performing for acclaimed music show ‘From the Basement’, the brain child of production genius Nigel Godrich, who has either engineered or produced all of Radiohead’s albums since The Bends and has worked with a variety of international acts including Paul McCartney, U2, R.E.M and Air.

Having launched the title at MIPTV, BBC Worldwide has already received pre-sale offers for a number of major territories and expects to have a substantial network of broadcasters in place for its premiere.

Salim Mukaddam, VP Music Television at BBC Worldwide said, “It is a real honour to be working with Radiohead on this project. Radiohead are a band that rarely performs for television, but when they do, it’s a moment to savour. There is already huge anticipation for this performance and we’re delighted that they’ve decided to work with us at BBC Worldwide, confirming our position as market leaders in Music Television. As a fan I cannot wait to see these beautiful songs brought to life in this programme.”

Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management, Radiohead’s management company said, “This will be Radiohead’s first collaboration with BBC Worldwide and the band are excited at the prospect of having their first live performance of ‘The King of Limbs’ broadcast around the world . The band will be filmed and recorded by the From The Basement team, which includes Nigel Godrich their long time producer, Dilly Gent ,who commissioned many of the memorable Radiohead videos and Grant Gee who filmed the Radiohead documentary ‘Meeting People is Easy'”

Radiohead – The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement becomes available to international broadcasters in June and is embargoed for broadcast until 1st July 2011. The programme is filmed in HD, will have no audience and no presenter – just a rare opportunity to see an intimate performance from one of the greatest bands in the world.

( Source: BBC.co.uk )

On the 20th of July BBC Worldwide America announced that rights had been sold to broadcast the performance on the MTV Network in America.

The BBC Worldwide Blog carried a piece the next day written by Salim Mukaddam the Vice President of BBC Worldwide Music Television about the project:

Last year I had the opportunity to bring together my personal passion and professional life when I met with Radiohead’s management, Bryce Edge and Chris Hufford. You could not wish to meet two more welcoming, co-operative, professional and knowledgeable people. Both Chris and Bryce instantly saw the potential that a partnership with BBC Worldwide could deliver. However, any project was obviously going to be dependent on the band – thankfully the band was interested and had a project in mind.

Radiohead launched their new album ‘The King of Limbs’ in February and from that point everything seemed to happen at light speed. The band wanted to work with their long time producer Nigel Godrich. He is one of the team responsible for ‘From The Basement’ – an incredible music show that sets the benchmark for quality in music television. The band’s concept was to perform the whole of their new album for our TV project…

…The result is a beautiful fifty five minute journey into the world of Radiohead. The King of Limbs is a stunning album in itself, but seeing the band bring these songs to life is a joy to behold. The full programme is coming to a TV screen near you soon, with confirmed broadcasts on Palladia in the USA, Canal + in Spain, Fuji TV in Japan, MultiShow in Brazil and SuperChannel in Canada.

(Source: BBCWorldwide Blog)

To date Radiohead – Live from the Basement never made it to television in the UK despite broadcasts occurring in other countries such as Spain, America, Canada, Japan, Brazil and Australia. The BBC Claims that this was due to them being ‘unable to find a broadcast partner’ for the UK even with the BBC having their own broadcasting network in that region.

The ‘lie’ statement from Mews refers to the fact that the copy of The King of Limbs – Live From The Basement uploaded to Youtube was described as ‘in full’ in the Youtube Comments, Chieftan Mews had previously claimed on July 12th that the version broadcast was missing footage of Supercollider ( @nigelgod that buck, took me out of the final cut so I took Supercollider & some juicy footage before being banished to the Zigg. Stuck.Help ).

On February 3rd 2012 AustinLBrock uploaded the full recording of The King of Limbs – Live From The Basement to Youtube with the permission of the band’s management and BBC Worldwide. Unlike the original version uploaded by the band this included the footage of Supercollider from the Bluray and DVD that the band released on the 9th of November 2011.

Mew’s later retweeted a link to the video from AustinLBrock ( RT: @AustinLBrock: [1080p] Radiohead – The King Of Limbs From The Basement [Full Show + Supercollider] #Radiohead #ThomYorke http://t.co/tD0arRGD ).

We’d love to hear what answers other people sent to Mew’s ‘quiz’!
Let us know in the comments or email muggs@ersmenoo.com.

1/10: Was/Is this all a w.a.s.t.e. of your/our time? Stay detuned.. .. .. .. .. .␄

Oct 7, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: 1/10: Was/Is this all a w.a.s.t.e. of your/our time? Stay detuned.. .. .. .. .. .␄

This was the last of the #10 series of tweets from Chieftan Mews sent out each Thursday for 10 weeks. On the same day as this tweet Mew’s sent a second message stating that he was ‘free’ (Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.) assuming that the quiz had lead to him escaping from the Ziggurat from where he’d been trapped over the previous months.

w.a.s.t.e stands for We Await Silent Tristenro’s Empire and is the name for Radiohead’s official online store and fanclub since 1992. According to Follow Me Around it is from a 1966 novel written by Thomas Pynchon titled The Crying Of Lot 49.

Wiki gives a brief description of the book as:

The shortest of Pynchon’s novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon’s invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example of postmodern fiction.

Time included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005

The novel follows Oedipa Maas, a Californian housewife who becomes entangled in a convoluted historical mystery when her ex-lover dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate. The catalyst of Oedipa’s adventure is a set of stamps that may have been used by a secret underground postal delivery service, the Trystero (or Tristero).

According to the historical narrative that Oedipa pieces together during her travels around the San Francisco Bay Area, the Trystero was defeated by Thurn und Taxis – a real postal system – in the 18th century but went underground and continued to exist into Oedipa’s present day, the 1960s. Their mailboxes are disguised as regular waste-bins, often displaying their slogan W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire, and their symbol, a muted post horn.

( Source: Wikipedia )

Amusingly according to a interview with Thom and Jonny in 1995 the band started their own church titled ‘The Holy Church of Waste’ while on tour in the US.

Jonny: (cutting Thom off) No, we’re reverends…..

Thom: (Cutting Jonny off) Oh yeah, we’re reverends…we’re all reverends.

Jonny: We started our own church.

Thom: The Holy Church of Waste.

Jonny: Well, we can legally marry people and bury people in 13 American states, including California.

Thom: So if anybody needs, you know, to get married, we can do it for them now. (to Jonny) How much did it cost us? Twenty dollars?

Jonny: Ten dollars or something. So we are going to conduct a mass community-style wedding at our LA show, that’s tomorrow.

You can read the rest of the interview on Follow Me Around here.

While we do not yet know if this was ‘just a waste of our time’ on November 9 Radiohead announced on Dead Air Space that they would be releasing a Bluray/DVD edition of The King of Limbs – From the Basement with Supercollider ‘added as a bonus track’.

We’d love to hear what answers other people sent to Mew’s ‘quiz’!
Let us know in the comments or email muggs@ersmenoo.com.

If @nigelgod deletes my scenes from the final cut, I will gladly show him a new way down the staircase! ␄

Jul 1, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: If @nigelgod deletes my scenes from the final cut, I will gladly show him a new way down the staircase! ␄

On June 21st 2011 Phillip Selway announced on Dead Air Space that Radiohead had filmed a episode of From The Basement, in addition to the news was a HD quality Youtube video of a new song titled Staircase (Previously known to fans as ‘A Walk Down the Staircase’ from Thom Yorke’s solo shows and tour with Atoms For Peace in 2010).

Mew’s addresses this threat to Nigel Godrich the mastermind behind From The Basement. Started in 2006 as a Podcast From the Basement is a music program that focuses entirely on a performance doing away with the traditional format of a host and live audience. Thom Yorke performed on the first episode and Radiohead featured in a full length episode for In Rainbows – Live From The Basement.

Chieftan Mews who made his name hosting The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time clearly is not pleased with this idea and later takes revenge by withholding the footage of Supercollider performed during the set.

As usual Mews signs off with EOT (End of Transmission) to mark the final tweet for the day.

I am stuck in here with some juicy footage: http://www.the-ziggurat.com – Please call a medic or psychiatrist for me immediately. ␄ / @nigelgod that buck, took me out of the final cut so I took Supercollider & some juicy footage before being banished to the Zigg. Stuck.Help

Jul 6, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: I am stuck in here with some juicy footage: http://www.the-ziggurat.com – Please call a medic or psychiatrist for me immediately. ␄

Jul 10, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: RT: @heidybloom: @ChieftanMews you were edited out of the final cut, mews! Should I call a medic?

Jul 12, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: @nigelgod that buck, took me out of the final cut so I took Supercollider & some juicy footage before being banished to the Zigg. Stuck.Help

These are the first of a series of ongoing tweets where Chieftan Mews states that he was stuck in the Ziggurat with footage taken from The King of Limbs – Live From the Basement.

He accuses Nigel Godrich of removing him from the film and reviles that there is a performance of Supercollider missing from the version shown on television and online. This later proves to be correct when on November 9 Radiohead released The King of Limbs – Live From the Basement on Bluray/DVD with Supercollider as a bonus feature.

http://www.the-ziggurat.com is the web address for The Byzantine Ziggurat a abandoned part of the Radiohead website.
The Memory Hole on Radiohead’s Website describes it as thus:

This was the Strategic Defence Initiative. A ponderous structure stuck in hyperspace which we are not sure what to do with at the moment. But one day, it’s time will come, of that there is no doubt.

Since 2008 it simply contains a looped flash video of coloured blocks that was used as the background for InRainbows.com which hosted the ‘pay what you want’ store for In Rainbows. As of May 2011 the site is no longer available but you can view it here via the Web Archive.

On August 1st Servo uploaded a copy of the video from The Ziggurat to youtube and posted it to Chieftan Mew’s wall on Facebook.

Screenshot of Mew's Reply to a question on Facebook, August 1st, 2011.

Chieftan Mews replied on the 3rd of August with the following message:

My face emerges at the 30 second mark at the lower/central portion of the screen and then disappears a short time later. Please call a plumber or a lumberjack immediately.

( The Lumberjack is probably a reference to a classic Monty Python Sketch entitled The Lumberjack Song which continues the ‘Woods/Trees’ theme. For any poor souls who have never heard it you can watch it on youtube Here. )

Mews replied again to another fan with more details on the 5th of August:

Chieftan Mews I emerge from there, yes. A little more to the left of your red square and to the bottom at the 0:36 mark specifically.
5 August 2011 at 04:41

Chieftan Mews http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFYaYE-8tEQ&t=0m36s
5 August 2011 at 04:41

The link takes you to 0:36 in the video Servo uploaded to Youtube

Screenshot of 0:36 in The Zigguart video as posted to Youtube by Servo.

Looking to the bottom-left part of the screen you can see the shape of a head (The dark blue is hair and green for the face)

Starting from the 5th of August 2011 Mews sent a series of weekly tweets counting down from #10/10 to #1/10

On the 7th of October Mews tweeted that “Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.” and followed by the statement that he had been “set free by Supercollider.”

Recently in January 2012 a link to the Ziggurat was added to Dead Air Space’s list of Links with the following note:

radiohead.com/Archive/Site8/z
found this while looking for something else.. it is now my screen saver

Servo claims that the film loop on The Ziggurat has been changed and is different to the version he posted to Youtube and Facebook last year as it no longer contains the face at the 36 second mark. You can read his theory on this here at Ims Menoo.

The Byzantine Ziggurat itself has a long and interesting history.

A Ziggurat is a massive structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau, having the form of a terraced step pyramid of successively receding stories or levels. Wiki also gives the following:

Notable ziggurats include the Great Ziggurat of Ur near Nasiriyah, Iraq; the Ziggurat of Aqar Quf near Baghdad, Iraq; Chogha Zanbil in Khūzestān, Iran; and Sialk near Kashan, Iran.

According to Herodotus, at the top of each ziggurat was a shrine, although none of these shrines has survived. One practical function of the ziggurats was a high place on which the priests could escape rising water that annually inundated lowlands and occasionally flooded for hundreds of miles, as for example the 1967 flood. Another practical function of the ziggurat was for security. Since the shrine was accessible only by way of three stairways, a small number of guards could prevent non-priests from spying on the rituals at the shrine on top of the ziggurat, such as cooking of sacrificial food and burning of carcasses of sacrificial animals. Each ziggurat was part of a temple complex that included a courtyard, storage rooms, bathrooms, and living quarters, around which a city was built

You can read more about them here.

Byzantine is the name of The Byzantine Empire.

Wiki explains it as the following:

The Byzantine Empire (or Byzantium) was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centered on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the “Roman Empire” (Greek: Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων, Basileia Rhōmaiōn)[2] or Romania (Ῥωμανία) to its inhabitants and neighbours, it was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State and maintained Roman state traditions.[3] Byzantium is today distinguished from ancient Rome proper insofar as it was oriented towards Greek culture, characterised by Christianity rather than Roman paganism and was predominantly Greek-speaking rather than Latin-speaking.

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume II” Appears on Page 2 of the Amnesiac Book.

During the Hail To the Thief era The Byzantine Ziggurat looked like this:

The Byzantine Ziggurat cia. 2005 via the Web Archive

Logging in you where provided with a chatroom as part of digital-landfill.co.uk which today also shows the In Rainbows video loop.

Before 2005 The Byzantine Ziggurat was home to the Waste Game which was online treasure hunt of sorts for Amnesiac containing 3 chapters of which only the first two where ever run. A record of the game can be found at Waste-Game-News.com Mike gives the following introduction:

What is the “Waste Game” or the “Byzantine Ziggurat?” It all started like this. At the time, Radiohead had put up a new website, and this was a page called the Byzantine Ziggurat. People were freaking out about how to figure out the password.

And by freaking out, I mean some were going totally out of their minds. I was one of them. I started keeping a copy of everything to do with the game, as did others, some of which helped me collect stuff, and this website was born. While the game was still going, this site helped others keep track of the latest news.

the waste game (Byzantine Ziggurat) was designed and executed by Radiohead,
Stanley Donwood, and many other associates.

..Sounds rather familiar doesn’t it?

Surprisingly it seems the game had two winners! Waste Game News describes the Chapter 2 Prize Kit as including “a Certificate of Byzantine Zigguration signed by the band, two posters, a backstage pass from the 2001 Oxford show, Zigguration Tests taken by each member of the band, and a video of the 2001 Dublin show.”

The Zigguration Tests where a written exam written by Stanley Donwood and apparently administered by Mel from W.A.S.T.E. All five band members sat them but only Ed’s exam paper has been made public. You can check it out Here along with photos of the rest of the prizes.

As of May 2005 Radiohead no longer maintains the waste-game.com domain name, it appears that Chapter 3 titled ‘Playing Zeus’ morphed into what was to become The Scrapbook on the Radiohead website as Mike states that in a conversation with maxk from W.A.S.T.E on April 5 2003 that Chapter 3 was to have 2,700 rooms(pages). There’s quite a few old websites from fans who where working to solve the game so best bet is to do a web search for ‘The Byzantine Ziggurat’.

Greek Mythology has been a reoccurring theme for Stanley Donwood’s artwork since 2000 and Mew’s has used Greek in a tweet (My bucks, must I go out on a limb here and say more is revealing at Ελληνική οδός? That man: ims menooo! Juicy pre-watching. Beware you not!) relating to Stanley.

However in this case Mew’s seems to be tweeting more about the status of Ziggurat being ‘abandoned’ asking Stanley Donwood in a later tweet if he would toss a difficult artwork to the Zig. ( @StanleyDonwood I see you have finally cut “Lost Angeles”. Are you going to toss that into the Ziggurat too? ). On the 22nd of September he responded to a question on Facebook asking where he was:

Mew's reply to a question on Facebook, 22nd of September.

Question from Fan: where ya at mewsy?
Answer from Mews: In your garbage can

Therefore we can assume that Mew’s sees the Zig as something of a trash for abandoned projects.

I was set free by Supercollider. My first line of business was to make sure that those two don’t appear on Late Night on Monday.

Oct 1, 2011:

RT: @inkybrown: I asked C&P for a statement about @ChieftanMews . Philip said no comment. Colin said he’s disgusting and he’s not supposed to talk about it

@inkybrown I was set free by Supercollider. My first line of business was to make sure that those two don’t appear on Late Night on Monday.

Mew’s first re-tweeted then replied to Inkybrown who managed to ask Colin and Phil about Mews after one of the Roseland Ballroom Shows in New York.

Since July 6th Mew’s has stated that he was stuck in the Ziggurat ( www.the-ziggurat.com ) with footage of Supercollider missing from The King of Limbs – Live at the Basement.

It seems Mew’s got his revenge as only Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to perform Give Up The Ghost, the episode was screened on Monday October 3rd in the US.

You can watch the performance here.

Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.

Oct 7, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.

On July 6th Mews tweeted that he was stuck the Ziggurat (http://www.the-ziggurat.com) a old part of the Radiohead website that since In-Rainbows is nothing but a full screen flash video showing a colourful loop of blocks. After repeated pleas for help Mews said that he was ‘set free’ by Supercollider.

Servo states that the contents of The Ziggurat has changed since July 2011 when Mews was said to be in there. You can read about it on Ims Menoo here

It could possibly relate to the fact that The King of Limbs – From the Basement was released on November 9.

While fans had been expecting a webcast of some kind the DVD/Bluray came as a surprise.. though nobody was really that surprised to discover the previously unaired recording of Supercollider as a bonus feature.

RT: Radiohead – The King Of Limbs From The Basement

Feb 4, 2012:

RT: @AustinLBrock: [1080p] Radiohead – The King Of Limbs From The Basement [Full Show + Supercollider] #Radiohead #ThomYorke http://t.co/tD0arRGD

AustinLBrock is a Radiohead fan known for uploading concert footage to Youtube etc. With permission he uploaded the entire King of Limbs Live from the Basement DVD to Youtube.

Mews was nice enough to provide a Retweet.