Stanley Donwood talks to GQ about Kid A and his new screen prints

Stanley Donwood's favourite of his Radiohead covers is Kid A, and he tells GQ in its August issue that it was almost impossible to make. He wanted it to look like jewellery thrown on mud from a distance, and to show something horrific close up; he was preoccupied at the time with the war in the Balkans. He sees it as a continuation of OK Computer, carried on through Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief.

The magazine calls him the semi-official sixth member of Radiohead. He has designed all of the band's artwork from The Bends onwards, and he is now screen-printing old designs and new ones and selling them through his website, in editions of 288 at £288 each and of 144 at £144 each.

Asked how he came to work with the band, Donwood declines to give a straight answer, saying he has told so many versions that the truth is lost. GQ notes that he met Thom Yorke at the University of Exeter.

He traces his wish to be an artist to John Constable paintings seen on biscuit tins and jigsaw boxes as a child, and then to Peter Kennard's reworkings of them in the 1980s, which turned “The Hay Wain” into an image of a missile launcher. He turns down a comparison with Terry Gilliam, while admitting he would love to make something as good as Brazil.

On the band's part in his work, he says he struggles alone, and tells of spending two months photographing topiary gardens for an idea that Yorke eventually told him might not suit the new record.

The prints came from wanting to screen-print again after about 15 years away, starting with pictures he knew.

I imagined that a few people might like proper versions of pictures only ever seen as the 12x12cm images in jewel cases.

Stanley Donwood¹