Radiohead on Radio Juxtapoz

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood talk to Doug Gillen and Evan Pricco for Radio Juxtapoz, the art magazine's podcast, as Kid A Mnesia comes out. The V&A approached them after the OK Computer reissue and asked for a retrospective of everything, and Yorke asked whether they would consider Kid A and Amnesiac instead. Yorke drew a red stack of shipping containers for the V&A's courtyard, but the courtyard had been paid for by the Sacklers, whose name is tied to the opioid crisis, so the optics were poor; then the pandemic came, and the exhibition went virtual.

Digging out the work meant meeting their old selves, people they barely recognised. Going into the Kid A sessions, Yorke had rehearsed no music and had no lyrics, so strips of cut-up words covered the floor wherever they worked. Donwood scooped them up when they left and kept them in a shoebox for 20 years, and Yorke still has the top hat they drew them from.

It started with brass neck. Yorke asked EMI for four grand to do the artwork with a mate, they bought a Mac, gave up on the printer and spent a month using every filter in Photoshop. For Kid A the landscapes came out of a David Hockney show of Grand Canyon paintings in Paris, orange straight from the tube, and a Copenhagen museum full of trees with little fingers.

The record Yorke worried about most was The Eraser. Donwood was staying at Yorke's place in Cornwall when a flood tore through the village, with a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle's woodcut waves to hand, and they watched from higher ground. It went into the lyrics and the pictures, and Yorke chose King Canute, holding back the tide, for the end.