Stanley Donwood on Talk Art

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood sit down with Russell Tovey and Robert Diament for the Talk Art podcast at the Standard in London, while their Kid A Mnesia paintings hang at Christie's. The show was meant for the V&A, then the Royal Albert Hall, where a tower of red shipping containers was stopped for looking like a giant advert for Radiohead. Lockdown sent it into 3D instead, as a free digital exhibition for computers and the PlayStation.

“Everything in Its Right Place” got nowhere for months until Yorke plugged in an old Prophet synthesiser. He saw the sound as a frosty red, and had no words until he had it. The title Kid A was just the name of a MIDI file that one of them had, and whoever had it doesn't know why it was called that. In the studio Donwood waited for Yorke to go off and twiddle knobs, then sneaked back and painted over what he had done. Nigel Godrich turned photographs of their huge canvases into 3D terrains with a flying camera, and the only way to save a picture was a screen grab at 72 dpi. The bear began as one of the stories Donwood told and drew for his small children when they woke at an absurdly early hour of the morning, in which the toys put away in the attic come downstairs and eat the grown-ups for talking about mortgages.

After OK Computer, Yorke says, he was properly catatonic, and once walked out of the NEC in Birmingham after soundcheck looking for a train home. Michael Stipe taught him to disengage, and a trick for making himself invisible, which they tried in a club in Stockholm. Donwood's best advice comes from his foundation year at 19, when a tutor piled up the whole term's work and set fire to it. “It was the best thing ever,” he says.