Radiohead on Q on CBC

Tom Power talks to Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood on CBC's Q about Kid A Mnesia, the book of their artwork for Kid A and Amnesiac, and the digital exhibition that grew out of it. Yorke gazed at the sleeve of R.E.M.'s Murmur for years wondering what it was, until Michael Stipe explained at a photography show that it was a plant that grows wild outside Athens. Donwood's were the Dead Kennedys, with Winston Smith's collages, and Crass, with Gee Vaucher's. He remembers Yorke at Exeter as mouthy, arguing with a photography tutor on the first day; Yorke remembers Donwood's excellent second-hand suit, earrings, ginger hair and flat cap. For My Iron Lung they pointed a video camera at things and took stills from it, and did everything people do when they first get Photoshop.

Between 1997 and 1999, Yorke says, being a songwriter meant guitars and choruses, Britpop or grunge, and he could not identify with what people heard in Radiohead, so drawing and painting became the way to free himself. He had expected success to let the sunlight in, and it confused him instead. Under the artwork, they find, was anger at New Labour taking whole debates off the agenda, though politics was one strand among many, because “the world of politics is a dry, dreadful desert”. Online the exhibition could ignore physics, and Donwood wanted it dirty, as if it had been built 20 years ago and left. Yorke's former self needed telling that the impostor syndrome would pass. Donwood thinks he and his would come to blows.