Stanley Donwood on Bristol Ideas

Stanley Donwood talks through slides of his work with an interviewer who knows him well, in front of an audience at Waterstones for the Bristol Festival of Ideas. The Smile's first record has just come out. With the artwork deadline three months before release closing in, he asked Thom Yorke for the lyrics and drew a little diagram for every noun and verb in them, about 30 in all. They became rubber stamps, like the tree that marks a forest on an Ordnance Survey map, and the maps he took from medieval Arabic charts on vellum in the Bodleian.

The Hail to the Thief cover was going to be topiary. He was taken at the time with the idea of the land and the sky in carnal congress, joined the National Trust to scout the gardens, and explained it all on a balcony at the Chateau Marmont, looking down on the lights of the Sunset Strip. There was a silence. Kid A got its name the night every possible cover and title was taped up round the studio kitchen and the band came down in the morning to choose.

He and Yorke paint side by side. Donwood, a self-confessed neat Virgo, finishes something carefully, Yorke comes through and wrecks it, and Donwood rescues it. The scary bears began as a bedtime story for his children, then three and one, about toys shut in a box in the attic who grow big teeth and come downstairs to eat the grown-ups, who are talking about mortgages and double glazing.

He asks the room for a book of international pylon design, because the pylons are different in every country. He is 53, and Catacombs of Terror, written in a month as a joke, is still his only novel.