Stanley Donwood on Talk Art

It opens with a great deal of small talk, about traffic on the Westway, sea swimming and Oxford being the furthest point in the country from the coast, and Thom Yorke tells of swimming in a river on Christmas Eve and losing the feeling in his feet for an hour and a half.

Russell Tovey and Robert Diament, who run the art podcast, treat the 30-year collaboration with Stanley Donwood as a time capsule, and they are more interested in Donwood's practice than in the music.

In the studio, Donwood says, he waits for Yorke to go off and twiddle synthesiser knobs, then sneaks back to paint over what Yorke has done. Asked whether that ever caused trouble, he says it did not, because they make marks in opposite ways and neither is precious about it.

Both admit, uncomfortably, that success has made them worse at stopping. The better it has gone, the more pathological about work they have become, and the more guilt attaches to not doing it.