Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood and the Bristol filmmaker Mat Consume on Tangent Calling, the podcast of Tangent Books, recorded in November 2020 while Donald Trump had yet to concede. The first five minutes, about meeting at raves in Plymouth with flashing “brain machines”, were lost, so it picks up on LSD at 20 quid a time. The two once painted a mural on a school chimney from the children's own drawings, and Donwood remembers his spiky orange hair before it fell out at about 23. With no tours he should have been in Porto, with a derelict palacete and a budget of 100,000 euros, and a talk in front of 1,200 people he was glad to lose.

Slowly Downward began around 1995 as nightmares he wrote down so they wouldn't recur, cut to almost headlines, because dreams are all middle with no beginning or end. Household Worms was more about trying to earn money and get on with people. Publishers are sharks circling an author in the sea, he says, and Tangent are the dolphins. When the internet arrived he was a digital evangelist who saw it as Caxton's movable type again, before it was co-opted by the usual suspects. Catacombs of Terror! copied the pulp method, cover first and then 60,000 words in a month, on a five-pound bet he never collected. Broadmead the Movie, 45 minutes of static shots of Bristol's post-war shopping centre with not one shop in them, began as the most boring film ever for a Festival of Apathy, until a soundtrack recorded in one take in a church turned it into something else. He paints to Frank Sinatra mixed with Sleaford Mods, and cured himself of dreaming years ago.