The Banksy video for Thom Yorke's “The Hollow Earth” was a stunt

The Banksy video for Thom Yorke's “The Hollow Earth”, run by many music sites since the weekend as the song's official film, was a stunt by the man who made it, the experimental film-maker Raymond Salvatore Harmon. He cut Banksy stencils (Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald, his rats) into a very fast montage over time-lapse footage of London streets, and a press release sent it out as the video for the song.

“The Hollow Earth” is the other side of Yorke's 12-inch “FeelingPulledApartbyHorses”, on sale from W.A.S.T.E., the band's mail-order shop, since Monday. Yorke wrote about the song on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, on 3 September. The Hollow Earth is a bass menace that was born out of the Eraser period but needed a little more time.⁴

The Quietus had doubted the film from the start, reporting on Sunday that a director had made it off his own bat. Beats Per Minute, which ran it as a Yorke and Banksy collaboration, has added a note saying it is unofficial.

An email from betaculture.org, published by Drowned In Sound today, said Yorke denied any link with the video and that someone speaking for him had asked YouTube to take it down. It said Harmon had fooled the media on purpose, to show how little news sites check the press releases they print, and called the whole thing art terrorism³. beta:sound, the net label linked from betaculture.org, turns out to be run by Harmon himself.