Stanley Donwood

Gareth Evans hosts Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood at Christie's in London in the week the Kid A and Amnesiac paintings were shown and sold there. The questions, sent in beforehand, are meant to arrive on a fax machine Evans says turned up that morning in a forgotten office; it later fails and Evans moves to index cards.

Yorke describes the end of OK Computer, freezing at every instrument and playing the riff of “Everything in Its Right Place” over and over to meditate his way out, until he stopped and drew the Cornish landscape instead. A Hockney show of the Grand Canyon in Paris told them landscape could be a language. Donwood's landscapes wouldn't settle until the war in what had been Yugoslavia, followed online, got into them, and Yorke watched him paint violence in and then hide it. With the attention span of an insect, Yorke says, he could walk up to the mezzanine, bounce an idea and walk out, which suited the band downstairs too. The canvases are the size they are because that was the biggest that would go diagonally through the mezzanine door.

The crying Minotaur came from Tokyo toy shops; to Donwood the monster is us, and the prison the one we build round ourselves. One of them wrote the code for the first four or five versions of radiohead.com, a sketchbook on the web from before Facebook, when nobody was worried about being liked. When the record company wanted standard TV adverts, they made the Kid A blips instead. A three-quarters finished painting, Donwood says, is the closest one comes to getting a boot through it. After two years going back through the archive for Kid A Mnesia, Yorke would like it all to go away now.