![]() “It was the first thing we did when we got to Paris, before we started recording,” Yorke says. The rich colors of this 2000 Donwood canvas, titled “Get Out Before Saturday,” reflect the influence of a David Hockney show that the band took in the previous year at the Centre Pompidou. Mostly, I tried to write down what happened when I woke up.” “Things had shadows and the gravity worked and there was litter on the ground. “At the time, I had very realistic dreams,” he says. “It was a joke, obviously.”ĭonwood based this drawing of a tree stump on a dream he had. “There was some financial shock that happened, and I was trying to finish the lyrics to ‘Idioteque’ at the time, so it became part of the same thing,” he says. This cartoon incorporates some ominous words that will be instantly familiar to Kid A fans - though they weren’t song lyrics yet when Yorke drew it. The original canvas, titled “Residential Nemesis,” fetched £137,500 when it was included in a recent Christie’s auction (or approximately $187,000 in U.S. The snow had become a canvas for showing a very up-close and personal reality of war.”ĭonwood used “a thick acrylic paste that they normally use to cover up holes and defects in walls” to create the white foreground of the seemingly abstract image, which was used as the cover of a special board-book edition of Kid A in 2000. “But this patch of snow had footprints in it, crushed cigarettes, engine oil, blood, and it was just horrible. Snow always makes everything nice,” Donwood says. “It was just a square of snow - this lovely thing that you have on Christmas cards. One of the earliest works in the series, this large 1999 painting was based on a newspaper photograph of a bombed-out apartment complex in Yugoslavia. Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings We were trying to scrape hope out of the dirt somehow.” “Trying to embrace some sort of future, even if it’s a nightmare. “When we went through the multitrack tapes of Kid A and Amnesiac, the music and the artwork ended up becoming something a little bit more transcendent,” Yorke says. Now, as they look back with a pair of art books (the hardcover catalog Kid A Mnesia and the chapbook-style Fear Stalks the Land!) and a deluxe reissue of the two albums, Yorke and Donwood hopped onto Zoom to talk about those heady, experimental days. There was an air of chaos suddenly, and that was really fun.”īy the end of the process, Radiohead had leapt into a new universe beyond rock’s horizon on 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac - accompanied by a rich world of eerie, dreamlike visual imagery that mixed painting, drawing, and digital design. But then suddenly we’re in our own space, and Dan could create a perfect studio with dust on the floor and rats and a nice little fireplace, and we could go skin up and listen to the music. We could be in the corner and be polite, and we got something from that. “When we did OK Computer, we were working with a scanner, and it didn’t make any mess. “What it meant was embracing the artwork as artwork for the first time,” Yorke says. They’d created all the artwork for Radiohead since 1994 now they found themselves exploring new techniques in tandem with the advances the band was making in the recording studio. Stanley Donwood, an old friend from their days studying art together as undergrads at the University of Exeter. “Trying to get away from wherever the fuck we had found ourselves to somewhere new.”Īs the creative tension mounted, Yorke took refuge in the visual imagery he was developing with Dan Rickwood, a.k.a. “We were trying to chase ourselves away and run as fast as we could in another direction,” Yorke adds. The sessions for what would become Radiohead’s fourth and fifth albums stretched on for more than a year of challenging work at studios in Paris, Copenhagen, and their hometown of Oxford, England. As the flashbulbs erupted, we were just paralyzed.” “We’d gone on this trajectory, and then suddenly there we were with this massive, ridiculous amount of expectation - but at the same time sort of frozen to the spot. “It’s quite difficult now to explain this, but we were deeply suspicious of any level of success that we’d earned,” Thom Yorke recalls. ![]() Early in 1999, Radiohead began to size up the task of what to do next after 1997’s acclaimed OK Computer.
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