Radiohead on Christie's

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood talk to Christie's about the Kid A and Amnesiac paintings. Donwood was the one at art college who could actually paint, and on the first day Yorke decided he would either hate him or end up working with him forever. When the record deal brought graphic designers, Yorke couldn't face it; then, as one of them tells it, came a phone call about having a go at a record cover, and the two of them bought a computer and set about the sleeve for The Bends.

After the OK Computer tour Yorke was ragged and couldn't work, and his partner Rachel told him to stop making music for a while and go back to his art. The band had bought a barn with the money from their success, and after years of a Mac and a posh scanner Yorke and Donwood used sticks and knives and their sleeves to paint pictures as big as the walls would take.

Donwood walks through a painting made in response to the war in Yugoslavia, where people who looked like them and watched the same telly were killing one another. It began as Cornwall landscapes and ended in snow and blood. The white is a decorator's filler meant to hide defects, and when it is wet you can throw soot and gravel at it and they stick. Most of the work was done on a mezzanine above the studio, with music going all the time. “I'd find it hard to look at these without hearing the music.”