Radiohead on BBC Radio 6

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood come on the line to 6 Music to talk about two books, Kid A Mnesia and Fear Stalks the Land, and a free digital exhibition. The V&A asked for a retrospective; the two liked the idea but didn't want to do it. Yorke had long wanted to go back through the Kid A and Amnesiac artwork, because they went a bit mad for two years and much of it got lost. A big structure outside the museum would have brought part of the V&A down; they tried another site and ran into planning trouble with Westminster council, and then the pandemic came. They had been designing it in 3D anyway, so they built it virtually. Their first rule was no new work.

One of them picks a favourite room, which holds radio tracks Jonny Greenwood made one evening, tuning and re-tuning a radio and fitting it into the music, as on “The National Anthem”. They found them again going back through the multitracks. After OK Computer, Yorke says, people talked to him as if he were the hand of Jesus, and he was left with a voice that criticised everything he did musically. Artwork was a safe place, or nearly.

Donwood worked in a barn he had asked the band to leave exactly as it was, with a gravel floor, a broken wood burner, rodents who ate the paintings and a terrible CD player for burnt CDs of whatever the band were working on. The two knew each other at art college, and Donwood once turned up in Oxford fire breathing. The exhibition runs on PC, Mac and PlayStation 5 but not a phone, and it is free, Donwood says, “for reasons which we've forgotten”.