Radiohead relaunch their website with new Stanley Donwood art

Radiohead's website has been rebuilt, and radiohead.com now puts visitors through a personality test. The questions come after a Christmas opening screen, a page of links to the band's many earlier sites and what the site calls an enormous ziggurat in hyperspace: do they have trouble getting up in the morning, are they friendly and open, are they thin?

The answers lead to a screen of single words, set out like magnetic poetry on a fridge door. Each word opens pages of new artwork by Stanley Donwood, with doodles, scraps of lyrics and poetry, and a “Threat Level” meter. Xfm calls it even more confusing than the band's earlier sites. The message board and the W.A.S.T.E. shop, the band's mail-order, work as before.

On 4 March the old site gave way to a stopgap design, and by early April the front page was a holding page headed “Temporary Restraining Order”, with a photograph of people gathered round a pump organ and buttons back to the old pages. It said the site was being remade to the visions of “Mssrs Donwood & Tchock” (Tchock is Thom Yorke's name for his artwork). Much swearing and untangling of code is occuring in the potting shed.²

The new site went up this week, with the band in Japan for the last Hail to the Thief dates, which began in Osaka on 14 April. Donwood had promised it on 2 March, in the same message in which he explained the delftware cover of Com Lag. We are mixing a big rusty cauldron full of strange ingredients.³