Radiohead on BBC Radio 4

A short report on Radio 4's breakfast programme about the books Kid A Mnesia and Fear Stalks the Land and the free online exhibition at kid-amnesia.com, with Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood.

They went slightly mad making those records, one of them says, and the work got lost; putting it together now was a way to make sense of it. Going back to it was like looking at the work of “a weirdly badly designed clone of yourself”, everything a little shaky and not very well drawn. They did not want another guitar record, and success bought them a lack of deadlines to make packaging into art. The first idea was a virtual gallery to walk through, until they saw the software let them break every rule and build the space however they liked. It is called an exhibition because they did not want to call it a game, and there are no tokens to pick up. It starts in a forest made from the sketchbooks, moves through a vortex and ends in a pyramid of praying creatures, which one of them likens to the circular hell of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. The hope is that it feels like “some sort of weird bad trip”.