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ОглавлениеSTANLEY DONWOOD (1967– ) is a British artist and writer, known for his work with the band Radiohead. Since 1994 he has produced all artwork for the group in collaboration with lead singer Thom Yorke. He has also written the short story collections Slowly Downward: A Collection of Miserable Stories (2005), Household Worms (2011) and Humor (2014).
Derelict dance hall, Bath
March 2009
The first time I met Stanley Donwood he was not in his element. Hosting the simultaneous launch and closure of his record label, Six Inch Records,* at a trendy London bar he stood apart from his guests; nipping outside for furtive roll-ups whenever possible, eschewing the venue’s lava-lamp paint scheme and 8’ egg-shaped isolation booth latrines.
When he had to interact and address the crowd to introduce a band he stood onstage uneasily. A pregnant cough. A pause; another cough before breaking into a run-up of ‘Um … er … OI!’
The night wasn’t his idea, I suspected.
He’s not a man for the spotlight, Stanley.
He’s much more likely to be the man taking apart the spotlight with a spanner … or a hammer.
He has the air of a man in a spot of difficulty; a man who’d much prefer to be elsewhere, perhaps.
He’s not even really called Stanley, you know; not even that’s right.
‘I’ve got a rubbish pseudonym. “Stanley Donwood”!? Rubbish.’
I approached him at the trendy launch and introduced myself. Yes, I’m the chap with the airships, we establish, and he’s the chap with the bowler hat and the pseudonym; no, it wasn’t his idea.*
• • • • •
Stanley Donwood, whoever he might be, is responsible for Radiohead’s* aesthetic, artwork and labyrinthine websites. Millions of people have his work in their homes, hundreds of thousands would recognise the pointy-toothed bears that have become something of a trademark. He has accidentally become very popular and his work is in demand. He is adept in many media, constantly evolving and adapting. He exhibits all around the world. He has won awards.*
He’s not sure how he feels about any of this, preferring to keep a low profile and not give interviews … for a long time people assumed he was an alias of Radiohead’s singer, Thom Yorke; but he isn’t.
‘That’d be nice, though. I’d have better hair.’
Stanley’s studio is an old dance hall. Where once it thrummed to the tunes of the day, it now echoes, abandoned and cavernous. The floorboards creak, the windows are cracked and icy, ivy grows through the frames. The only light in the place shines feebly – up a flight of wooden stairs that groan – a small office with a workshop beyond.
He beckons me in and shuts the door, apologising for the extreme cold.
‘All studios are cold. It’s the law.’
Is it always so cold?
‘Yes.’
And you always work here?
‘At the moment, yeah. I paint in a barn in Oxfordshire as well but that’s a bit more rudimentary than this, it’s … well, it’s a barn. There’s a wood burning stove so when that’s going it’s quite nice but most of the time it’s like being outdoors.’
Do you work with other people? I mean, will members of the band chip in?
‘Oh yeah! For instance, with In Rainbows* I’d have whatever stage the artwork had got to cycling on all the computers around the studio and the band would say, “Oh I like that one and I like that one.” So, over time, I could say, “Right, so that’s where it’s going.” We’d all talk about it and come into a sort of creative consensus about what was working well.
It was evolving as the music was evolving … and no record label! We were all working towards a deadline which became more concrete as time went on because we’d got things to manufacture, we had to book the factories to press the records and all that kind of thing, and all anonymously.
If the next thing works in that sort of way, that would be great. I’m sure it won’t because they’re never the same.
Hail to the Thief,* the one before, that was me in my barn with huge paintings around the walls, working on several at the same time, and the nice thing with that one was that I’d got this rubbish CD boom-box thing in there with me and the band would come into the barn in the evening – which is across the way from their recording studio – with the latest whatever-they’d-done on CD and play it and, because the barn’s all wood and vaguely insulated with plywood, it just sounded really cool! So they would come over to have a beer and listen to what they’d done. Outside, away from the brilliant speakers, to hear it more as it was going to be heard.’
• • • • •
Stanley has a record player in one corner of the room. While we talk he plays a selection of well-thumbed punk and post-punk records – Bauhaus, Magazine and Sex Pistols. Cold as it might be, the studio is a den, stuffed with collected ephemera; test prints and clippings on the wall, an old piano, a screen printing table at the back with tins of ink and paint stacked behind; a painty carpet and a painty sink. Above a wide window overlooking a courtyard is written:
FIRE EXIT
BASH SIDE BITS OUT WITH HAMMER PULL WINDOW OUT AND BE VERY FUCKING CAREFUL
Stanley puts the kettle on and I unpack some of the Radiohead records I’ve brought along as reference.
He returns with tea as I place the My Iron Lung EP* on the table.
‘Oh God! (Turning it over in his hands) I can’t remember this at all! This was the first thing though … we had all this footage Thom had shot on tour and we ran it through his telly and took photographs of it. I liked the men standing around for their meeting – they were Osaka businessmen, I think. Lots of legs, yes … we didn’t really know what we were doing.’ (Laughs)
You don’t generally do interviews, do you?
‘Not loads, no. I prefer to do them over email really ’cos I feel rather inarticulate when I’m speaking – lots of “ers” and “ums” and “hmmms”. Whenever I’ve done it, talked to someone for an interview, I always feel like such a twat afterwards. I think, “Why did I say that? I should have said something else.”’
Bill Drummond told me he wasn’t happy being called an artist for a long time. Was that an issue for you?
‘I don’t mind saying I’m an artist now. I used to say I was “sort of an artist” but as you go on you meet people, grown-ups, adults, and they say, “What do you do?” and you can’t really get away with that so I just say, “I’m an artist” and it covers everything.
“Commercial Artist” I quite like. That’s what graphic designers used to be called; artists for hire. I don’t mind being for hire! (Laughs)
In a different world I’d be painting pub signs; doing something useful. I want to be, you know, a bit useful, because I’m a Jack-of-all-trades, master of absolutely none.
I’d love to be actually good at something, you know? Do one thing. That would be great!’
Richard Lawrence is very good at one thing.
‘Richard is, yes, and I think this is why I get on so well with him – because he says, “I’m a technician. I’m not an artist.”’
He does! Your relationship seems very complementary in that he’s the practical print mechanic, able to make your ideas about lino, text and printing happen pretty quickly.
‘He really can, yeah. I wouldn’t be able to work those bloody machines, they terrify me!
When I went to art college, the first people that I connected with were the technicians. There was a guy called Tony who was the print technician and we got on straight away; he was a real local boy from Devon and while all the tutors were talking about stuff from their sixties educations which had nothing to do with what I was about, he was someone who actually knew what he was doing and how to do it – that was much more interesting to me.’
Were you working as a ‘sort of artist’ before you began work with Radiohead?
‘Not “working”, no. I was officially a job seeker – £39.70 a week. That was alright for a while. I was a clandestine artist – not a spray-can artist, I didn’t have the means. I had a paint pot and a brush.’
Then you got the call.
‘Yeah, “Do you want to have a go at doing a record sleeve?” and I said, “Yeah!?” I didn’t know how to do it. I know how to do it now because I’ve done it lots of times. I’ve learnt on the job, as they say …’
I want to ask you about the bears; they’re your bears, they were on the Six Inch Record sleeves, but they’re Radiohead Bears to most people.*
‘I’ve been working with them for ages. I’ll use my stuff in their stuff. It’s hard to separate; I mean, it doesn’t separate – I do their artwork. Their artwork is my artwork.
The bears began when my eldest daughter was quite little, about one, one and a half – they wake up devilishly early in the morning and you’re in this weird state, it’s dark and there’s nothing to do but make a cup of tea. I used to draw stories and tell them at the same time. I was telling a story to do with toys, abandoned toys … it’s really bad when I think about it, luckily she couldn’t understand …’
Was it a bit dark?
‘It was a bit dark, yes – all the toys that are discarded by adults, sitting in this attic, got really fed up and so these cute teddy bears came down and ate the grown-ups … scary bears who’d started off nice and then became (bares teeth and howls) “Grawww!!!”
And that was it, it was just a drawing that was in a sketchbook and then I drew a load of them marching down a dark alley and then I started using them with Radiohead – the website first and then on a t-shirt and then it turned into all sorts of things.’
Around the time of Amnesiac* I remember you put out a very scribbly poster of bears flying through a city and people looking up concernedly …
‘That’s Thom’s drawing. He drew that; that was weird that one. At that time there was a lot of faxing back and forth “Phish, pheee, phew”; he’d send a fax, I’d draw on it and send it back, but that particular drawing of the flying bears, I’d done one at the same time – we did them on the same night, it was really weird – without telephoning or anything like that. We were both having some sort of mental flood or storm or something. I remember it intensely; drawing like mad with a biro, almost going through the paper with it. I think I scanned and faxed it to Thom and he scanned what he’d done and sent it back and they’d both been done at the same time and they were pretty much of the same level of biro intensity … that happens quite a lot with us, we work together a lot and do this thing of swapping where I’ll do something and then say, “You do something” and he’ll do something and say, “Now you do something”, so we’ll pass it backwards and forwards. We’ve painted large canvases where one person will do something until the point where you think, “I’m finished” and then the other person would go along and “Shhhhhhh” do something to it. We’ll basically fight over the ownership of the canvas until one or other of us owns it – which is a hard thing to do but, you know, you’ll get to a point where you think, “Right, that’s mine now, I’ve got it.” It’s like fencing but with a piece of artwork.
We’ve done it remotely with fax machines and lately with emailing.’
Do similar battles happen with the band musically, do you think?
‘I really don’t know. I hear them making music and some of the stuff for Kid A.* (Laughs) … I mean, Kid A is apparently quite dark but earlier versions of it were really dark – much more upsetting really … they got rid of some of the bits, some sections and sounds which were just too much but I … I’m a sloganeer, I’m into sorta like “BAM BAM BAM!!!” but they’re into a more musical art thing, something that will last and something that will work in different situations, so certain things they did, I said, “That’s brilliant! You’ve got to keep that!” but they decided, “No, it won’t work in time. It works now but it won’t work in a year’s time …”
I don’t have the same level of quality control because, I mean, with the way that I’ve worked with Radiohead and so on, there’s five of them and Nigel.’*
Six?
‘I would say 5 + 1 rather than 6.
With the artwork there is me and Thom, which is very different to 5 + 1. We’re 1 + 1, which, compared to 5 + 1 … what comes out of that is very different. I mean, obviously, we don’t go ahead with stuff if the other members of the band aren’t comfortable or happy with it.’
Has that ever happened?
‘No … although I’ve gone wrong a few times.
With In Rainbows I was going to do all this architectural stuff with the software that’s used to create optimum car parking spaces …’
The 2006 tour posters and merchandise were grey, I remember.
‘Yeah. “Any colour so long as it’s grey.” All the t-shirts were grey – it was possibly one of the most insulting things I could have done. Immediately afterwards we set up in Tottenham House, this decaying stately home near Marlborough, to work … and I’d been there for two days or something – had been obsessed by this book The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler* – was in this dreadful nihilistic state, preoccupied with car parks and all that sort of thing, thinking, “There. Bam. Right. This is how it’s going to be” … but they were playing the music and it was the most organic, spiritual, sexual, sensual, beautiful thing that I’d heard them do and I realised that what I was doing was completely wrong and that my head, my mind, my response, had gone awry.’
How did the In Rainbows artwork evolve then – the discbox and the ‘pay what you want’ aspect of the digital release?
‘They’d been thinking how to put the new record out. The idea of people paying what they wanted for it was a bit of a reaction to the way that people who like music are treated by the record industry – if you can imagine such a thing as this overarching authority: “The Music Industry”.
They treat people like, if not actual criminals, potential criminals. All this stuff – targeting people who download music for nothing, what happened to Napster.* It was a reaction to the way the industry assumes people are going to steal music and has created a legal and software mechanism to prevent that. So there was this idea, “Okay, let’s put the record on the internet and say you can pay what you want for it, pay what you think it’s worth – and some people won’t pay anything, some people will pay something,” which was a bit of a gamble, really. A huge gamble.
So the band and management said, “Okay, let’s do it for nothing,” and, to me, “Can you make us something that’s worth about forty quid?” and I thought, “That’s quite a fucking challenge!” (Laughs) “How can I make something that is essentially wrapping paper worth £40?” because, you know, I’d been doing this thing with EMI and they were principally releasing compact discs – horrible, clattery boxes which I hate and have, to my mind, really degraded what record packaging is.
When I was a kid growing up, I would buy records because I liked the sleeves and I would spend ages looking at the sleeves and poring over the sleeve-notes and the lyrics.’
You’d made unusual sleeves prior to the discbox, though: the Hail to the Thief foldout map and the Amnesiac book …
‘Yes, but they were always “Special Editions” and I had to really hassle the record company to do it. They really didn’t like doing it. The people that I dealt with first off were great but there would be people higher up who’d say, “Well, you know, can you reduce the number of pages?” It was always very hard to get it done.’
Without compromising the idea away.
‘Exactly. It was always a question of “How far can you push them?”
Kid A sounded to me like a message left on an answerphone that you received too late to do anything about, but Amnesiac was something else, it was something found when clearing a house, something in an attic, an old book in a drawer, a fragment – something left behind, the meaning of which had been lost.’
The Amnesiac book always struck me as fraught, as you say. Cross-hatching, layered detailing, out of focus, pixellated images – so much work in it, yet its meaning is a mystery; lost and unloved, like the toys in the attic.
‘I spent a long time in London working on it. Walking in London and reading books about London. I found this book called The House of Dr Dee by Peter Ackroyd* and he mentioned Piranesi,* who I’d never heard of, so I went out and found out a bit about Piranesi and I started copying Piranesi’s drawings with a biro because I wasn’t quite sure about copyright. Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Stuart Home … Michael Moorcock’s written some brilliant books about London. King of the City* is fantastic! (Begins turning the pages of the Amnesiac book) God, yes, and the bull …’
The Minotaur?
‘Mmm, Mithras, labyrinthine structures and the idea of a city being a maze or a prison – Piranesi’s imaginary prisons … I would get the train up to London for the day. I did it again and again, doing something that I’ve since found out Bill Drummond does, which is to write a name or a word across a city and then walk the letters … but I was trying to make a film as well and I did make a film in the end, to do with the bull. I think I went a bit mad, to be honest. I think I developed an obsession, looking back; but this idea of bulls … Smithfield Market and Smithfield Fair and its ancient past of bull running. I imagined that the cattle would be taken there, then they’d have this ritual thing where they would drive a bull down to the Thames and kill it and have some sort of horrible sacrifice thing; something to do with bridges and the little beaches you get on the Thames … and I made a film.
There was me – I wasn’t filming, I was directing – and there were three guys with cameras and an actor whose name I cannot remember … Graham? He was a proper actor and he was dressed as a City gent, you know – suit, overcoat, briefcase – and the idea was that he would come out of Farringdon tube station and walk through Smithfield and then down Giltspur Street – I’d mapped all this thing out and written a screenplay and everything!
He would be possessed by the spirit of the bull and become like the Minotaur almost, and descend into a type of madness. So we were filming him walking along, walking faster and faster and looking behind him and then, outside the Old Bailey, he stood against a wall, freaking out, and then start throwing his clothes off and chucking his briefcase!
‘We were filming all this on the hoof and because we just had little handy-cams people couldn’t tell that he was being filmed, you know?
We got down to the River Thames and the City of London Police came and stopped us. Apparently they’d been filming us with CCTV all the way down, filming us making a film – except they didn’t know we were making a film, they had no idea what was going on. Thankfully this was before all the terrorism stuff, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. The police wanted to confiscate all the cameras and I had to say, “Right, no. You’re not confiscating anything, we’ve stopped,” and then we just filmed the last bit where the Minotaur gent walks into the Thames. Just about managed to get away with it.
Then the film got made but I lost it! (Laughs)
It’s one of those things. No one’s ever seen it.
I guess all that became R&D for the Amnesiac book. Funny how all that condenses down into such a little anecdote.’
• • • • •
I want to ask you about the thing underneath Kid A.
(I take the Kid A CD from my bag and begin to take apart the case)
‘Oh, the thing underneath!?’*
Yes, the hidden thing underneath!
‘That was the record after OK Computer, yes* – I hate jewel cases, as I’ve said, and I took one to bits and was looking at it and I realised there was this tiny gap and thought, “You could put something in there …”
They had to hand-pack them, apparently – it couldn’t be done by a machine. So I think that annoyed the record label … again.
That was really tough, that record; really tough for everyone. It was forced out, really.’
You took a lot of people with you, though, with Kid A and what followed.
‘Not a purposeful thing.’
What do you remember of that time?
‘The time? Um, I kind of … I don’t really remember it in the same way I remember childhood or something. I think it was over the course of about two years but In Rainbows was about two years and that was bliss compared to that.
I was not very happy, I don’t think.
OK Computer had been so successful, everything a band could want – number one record, good reviews, lots of sales, blahdy blah … I think they were worried about turning into U2 or something. You know, doing another OK Computer and turning into a huge, Simple Minds-esque stadium rock band – the weight of success hung extremely heavy.’
For you as well? Did you feel that?
‘Um, no. No, because I was even more anonymous then than I am now but … (thinks for a minute) I really can’t remember it too well – it was just fucking hard.
(Brightening) I’m very proud of it. In fact, it’s difficult to choose my favourite but I think, because it was such hard work, I think that was a really good one – and I really liked the music as well, that was when I really connected with them, musically, although that started with OK Computer.’
What was it about OK Computer?
‘I remember Thom screaming in an outhouse … they were recording out in this stately home, the first stately home of many, and he was screaming in a shed in the middle of nowhere with a mic and a line running all the way from that little shed, all the way into this impromptu recording studio; I thought, “That’s it.”’
Do you work with a sense of ‘I need to make an album cover’?
‘No, I don’t really. With all the albums I’ve done, the cover has been the very last thing – usually, almost a snap decision. The cover for Hail to the Thief was a big painting, a metre and a half square, and it was hanging up in the studio and it was not even going to be a part of the record artwork. It was the first one I did in that style and size and, because it hadn’t got words from the record on it, it was sort of outside of it all.
We were just sitting down and saying, “Which one should we put on the cover?”
“Why don’t we use that one?”
And suddenly it was obvious that it was the cover. The same with Kid A. The night before we had to decide I did loads and loads of printouts and stuck them round the kitchen with tape. There were loads of different titles as well. Loads of different titles. And we had them all up. Stuck onto all the cupboards in the kitchen. “Okay, there’s a cover in the kitchen somewhere, you’ve gotta find it.” (Laughs)
And luckily they chose that one and, I mean, this is my memory, but I think partly the title was because it looked so brilliant in that typeface – BD Plakatbau.
We had other titles with different typefaces.’
You seem to strive to avoid a recognisable style with your work.
‘Yes, I wouldn’t want to do the same thing twice anyway. I think that would be boring.
Someone like Vaughan Oliver, who did all the sleeves for 4AD* – Cocteau Twins, Pixies – and they were all different but they were all his, and I’ve always wanted to work in a way where you couldn’t tell it was the same person doing it.
I had a fantastic compliment with In Rainbows when someone said, “Oh, did you do that?” Which was great! It’s so totally unlike what I’ve done before; all abstract … and lovely in its way. Pretty. I became very interested in velocity – ink and velocity, paint and velocity and what happens when you throw or squirt pigment at a surface. I was squirting stuff out of needles and I found them quite frightening to use, needles, they’re very spiky … and this was a direct response to the music after that strict architectural drawing, and what happened was that I was working in this decaying stately home and I knocked over a candle and it poured a load of molten wax onto a piece of paper and I was really taken with this, and it was at the same time I was working with these needles so I began to work with these ideas of spurting and dripping and melting which seemed to fit very much, for me, with what the music was. I found that record an extremely sexual record, very sensual.’
They’d been threatening it for years.
‘Exactly. (Deadpan) It’s the long-awaited happy album.’
It was pretty chipper.
‘Yeah! Molten wax, squirting stuff out of needles, spattering …’
It’s all there, for goodness sake! It’s all there!
‘There it is!’ (Laughter)
So is the new thing always the most exciting thing?
‘Yes. To do the same thing you’ve done before … why would you do it again?
There’s no point in repeating yourself. I mean, in a way, what I’ve been doing recently with Hartmann the Anarchist* is repeating myself. I’ve done that, but I haven’t illustrated a book before and I love a bit of lino, I do. I love the physicality of carving it out, but I don’t want to do the same artwork I’ve done before … it’s easy to draw the same picture you’ve drawn before.
If I tried to draw an OK Computer-style picture now it would be really easy; and I could do it better than before, you know, “better” in inverted commas but … it’s horrible to look back on stuff. It gets easier after a while, when it becomes history.’
The recent past isn’t any good?
‘No. There’s a difference between memory and history, isn’t there – the difference between, “Oh yeah, I was just doing that a little while ago, I remember that … oh God!” and when it becomes history and you can look at it in a more even way. I can look back at most of my stuff when it’s got into its history phase and quite like it. It’s alright … but maybe that’s to do with working in this periodic way with capsules and projects because of the Radiohead thing. “Here’s the record – Phoosh!” It’s clearly delineated between one record and the next.’
Do you think you’d work like that if you didn’t work with the band?
‘No idea. I’ve been working with them since I was twenty … four? And I’m forty now … but, you know, I’ll still wake up at night and think, “I should be doing this” or “I should be doing that” or “What can I do to make that better?” I don’t like it. I’d rather not have that happen.
I always feel envious of people who have a job and when they get home they don’t think about their job any more, but maybe that doesn’t exist. I always felt envious when I was cycling back from college, seeing people in their cars driving back to their homes on a housing estate somewhere – driving their car which looks the same as everyone else’s car, parking it in front of a house that looks like everyone else’s house but somehow they know it’s theirs … they’d park their car and they’d open the door and they’d close the door of their car, “Ker-chumph”, and open the door of their house, “Kru-ch-ch”, and in they’d go in and that would be it … but I’ve always sort of known that …’
Not for you?
‘Well, it’s not been possible for me to be able to hate my job! (Laughs) That’s the thing; people hate their jobs. I don’t hate my job, I quite like it. I hate it sometimes but it could be worse, oh yes!’
• • • • •
It’s late now and the dance hall beyond the office is dark. We take a break from talking for the tape and I go off to find the toilet. My Dictaphone records cars passing and the creaking of the building and Stanley pottering about with tea and wine. It records the moment he accidentally spills wine over my notebook and then, to compensate, closes it to leave a Tyrian butterfly over my notes. After a long procession of echoey footsteps I re-enter the room, unaware of the mishap. Stanley doesn’t mention the turn of events and I don’t discover it until I get home.
• • • • •
Old Bond Street, Bath
Saturday 12 March 2011
I bump into Stanley in a stationers and he invites me to the pub. He is working on something big, he says, biggest thing he’s ever done. The project’s tentacles spread worldwide … but he can’t tell me anything about it. It’s all set up and in place, though. Ready to go at the press of a button.
Yes, it’s to do with the band.
It’ll all kick off soon, yes.
He’ll explain more in a bit when he’s allowed.
We drink up and he cycles off.
Brick Lane, London
Monday 28 March 2011
So, The King of Limbs,* a Radiohead album, has been put out into the world digitally with a ‘newspaper album’ to follow, whatever that is. Very mysterious.
The artwork features colourful paintings of trees fronting dark woods beyond, strange multi-limbed creatures and lurking, vaguely glimpsed monsters.
I’m in Brick Lane, in a long queue of people that snakes back several hundred metres from a Rough Trade record shop.
Stanley has made a concomitant newspaper that is to be given away at noon today around the world, apparently. All the noons.
Information is somewhat scarce yet here we all are in the queue, and there’s a buzz; something’s up.
A strange website has appeared with directions to this place and a warning reminiscent of the fire escape instructions above Stanley’s studio window:
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
This newspaper IS NOT the newspaper that accompanies the Newspaper Album version of The King of Limbs.
This event WILL NOT be repeated. This event IS NOT a live performance by Radiohead.
I am here to experience the physical, tactile event of being given a newspaper and leafing through it to see what I can see … I imagine Stanley will be still cycling around Devon or somewhere and the last I heard the band were in LA so it’s a bit odd to turn the corner and find him and Thom Yorke dressed up as barrow boys in flat caps and braces, proffering copies of The Universal Sigh* newspaper.
‘Socialist Worker!’
‘Sooo-cialist Worker!?’
‘Socialist Worker, sir?’
• • • • •
Derelict dance hall, Bath
July 2011
The last time I saw you was just before the Socialist Worker debacle.
‘Oh yes … I was a bit scared because I didn’t know where it was happening. I got to Liverpool Street and then walked round and round the queue. I felt like a hyena circling a herd of wildebeest. It was a good day!
It was the most orderly and polite London mob I’ve ever experienced.
There was quite a lot of fuss and I was very pleased because we had this big meeting before we began with all the record company people who were to act like this big distribution network for the paper, and the publicity plan was to give out a newspaper in sixty-one cities around the world, simultaneously, for free, that mentioned neither the band nor the title of the album once. They took a little persuading but I think it worked. It got into every real newspaper. It was sufficiently stupid to even catch the eye of the Sun:
‘“Read all about it,” says Yorke, miserablist.
‘“Professional Gloom-monger Thom Yorke was today spotted in London’s Brick Lane handing out an incomprehensible art project …”
‘And then I went home and then I had a cup of tea and thought, “That was alright! I can begin to forget all about it.” Which I almost have.
It was fun though. We both wore flat caps and everything.’
Was The King of Limbs newspaper album designed around the same time as the Universal Sigh?
‘No, that was from the year before; September or something, and it went through lots of redesigns. Imagine setting up a newspaper and publishing the first issue, all that tweaking, changing … because there were going to be loads of sections and a little A5 magazine; lots of different sections, one black, white and red like an old-fashioned tabloid …’
We spoke about these things obliquely before, I suppose, down the pub.
‘Yeah, though it’s weird; when I was doing all the King of Limbs stuff it was all I was thinking about, but now it’s quite hard to recall … but I just thought it was really nice how the newspaper album turned out and the prints were quite rough, with mistakes and holes punched – so valueless, you know? So ephemeral. If you want to keep it nice you’ve got quite a job on your hands.’
Keeping it out of the sunshine … because it’s on the way out already.
‘Exactly. Self-destructing record packaging. I won’t get a Grammy for that one, I’ll tell you now. (Laughs) They won’t appreciate such irreverence, the Grammers.’
I see you’re cutting some wavy lino in the other room.
‘Yeah, meteors or fireballs, Vorticist waves; it’s taken a long time … it’s not just waves, you know! They’re the easy bit, they’re like a little treat for me after doing all the buildings. I did the downtown financial district and all these modernist blocks and they’re really boring to do, but the nicer stuff takes a long time so it’s a bit of a trade-off really.’
Is this for Atoms For Peace?*
‘Yes. I hope so. It is at the moment.’
A lot of your Radiohead work seems cloak and dagger. You’re wrapped up in these projects but can’t discuss them.
‘Yeah, I know, it is weird – very internal, all of us very locked in. I didn’t over-listen to this record either. I mean, I listened to it, obviously, I couldn’t avoid hearing it a lot, but I wanted to try and keep it as something I could enjoy later rather than being sick to death of it – because I usually get really enthusiastic and listen to it intensely, which is great for the year or so it takes to do the artwork but after that … no.
I’ve recently just about been able to listen to OK Computer. I really over-listened to that.’
How does that situation arise? Do you put it on?
‘In shops? It makes me slightly uncomfortable for some reason when I hear Radiohead music in shops. I don’t know why. I don’t know … because in my head it’s still quite a secretive thing and then you think, “Oh no! Everybody knows!”’
Where does this bunker mentality come from, do you think? I mean, other bands are able to embrace it.
‘I know! Able to “Live The Dream!” We’re congenitally unable to live the dream. That’s it. That’s what everybody wants to do, don’t they?
I don’t know what the secrecy thing is about really … perhaps it gets out of hand.’
It’s a bit late now, perhaps, on album number fifteen.
‘Is it!?’
Not really, no. (Laughter)
‘No, it’s about eight or something … I’m supposed to be getting the lino stuff finished because that’s supposed to be being exhibited around the time the Atoms For Peace record comes out.’
Can you tell me that? Surely that’s supposed to be shrouded in subterfuge.
‘I can’t live the dream!’
A while ago you mentioned painting a series of portraits in oil. What became of them?
‘They ended up being the trees for King of Limbs! I was going to paint naturalistic portraits of the band because I looked at Gerhard Richter’s paintings and they were really good and I thought, “I’ll do that,” but, of course, I’m not Gerhard Richter; I couldn’t do that. It was not possible. Where he managed to get all these great blurred effects in oil paint, mine turned into mud, it was awful; very depressing for about three months … and then I started painting trees in oils in Oxford … and it all came about because of the way cathedrals used to be all different colours inside. Apparently all the vaults and tracery used to be painted really bright colours before the Puritans came along and painted over them white. All Northern European ecclesiastical architecture is based on the forest – being in glades, being in a sacred grove – they would paint their cathedrals in the brightest colours they’d got, absolutely beautiful. Going into a cathedral would have been like entering into an illuminated manuscript forest and I just thought, if all the trees of the forest were all different colours, how beautiful it would be … and that’s how King of Limbs came to be.
There you are, a rare moment of articulacy! You should put it in a special box with red arrows pointing to it.’
