Radiohead on Christie's

Stanley Donwood could actually paint when he and Thom Yorke met at art college, and Yorke decided within a day that he would either hate him or end up working with him for the rest of his life. Their first sleeve together was The Bends, made on a newly bought computer, and it carried on from there.

After the OK Computer tour Yorke could not work, and it was his partner who suggested he go back to art instead of forcing music. The band had bought a barn with the money the record made, and having that space changed the method completely. The Apple Mac and the posh scanner gave way to sticks, knives and sleeves used as brushes, on canvases as big as the walls allowed.

Donwood traces the imagery to the break-up of the Balkans. People who looked like them and lived like them were being killed, and it seeped into work that had started out as landscape. The white he began using is the filler decorators use to hide defects, and it turns out to hold anything thrown at it.

He painted on a mezzanine above the room where the music was being made, and says he cannot look at these pictures without hearing it.