Stanley Donwood says Radiohead's online vanishing began in the pub

Stanley Donwood says emptying Radiohead's website and social media a week before A Moon Shaped Pool came out was an idea from the pub. That was another of those ideas that you have down the pub that turned out to be really much more effective than we thought.³ It was a simple way to clear away everything that had gone before and stop for a bit, he told Eliza Williams of Creative Review. Nobody expected people to go so crazy. Headlines saying the band had erased themselves from the internet struck him as strange, since nobody can. He enjoyed the reaction all the same, and felt like a Bond villain pressing buttons in his lair, or rather the Mike Myers version.

The album's paintings started with a plan he and Thom Yorke could not build. They wanted to get away from narrative and figurative art and towards chance. I had this idea of a painting Dalek that instead of exterminating people would squirt paint…. But unfortunately our technical skills weren't up to the job of constructing a Dalek.³

They used the weather instead. Donwood took a stock of big canvases to La Fabrique, the old mill south of Avignon where the band recorded. The mill once made red dye for Napoleon's uniforms. His first scaled-up attempts failed until he cut the palette down to black and white.

The canvases went outside to the warm wind and the thunderstorms. The failures were painted over in white and begun again, and the rest were edited down to a body of work he is very pleased with; human agency, he says, was almost taken out of it. The experiments carried on in Oxfordshire over the winter, with completely different results.

The paintings were then photographed and cut up in Photoshop, and Donwood calls working on them with Yorke a competition to see who wins the painting. I do something, then he fucks it up, then I fuck up what he's done … and we keep doing that until we're happy with the result.³