Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood publish their Kid A Mnesia art book

Canongate published Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood's Kid A Mnesia: A Book of Radiohead Artwork on 11 November. The 364-page hardback, at £30, holds more than 300 colour pictures the two made during Kid A and Amnesiac, from biro drawings to six-foot canvases, with a conversation between them running through it. Its black-and-white companion, Fear Stalks the Land! A Commonplace Book, is already out. Both go with the Kid A Mnesia reissue that came out on 5 November.

In the extract the Guardian ran on 4 November, the two remember planning the Byzantine Ziggurat, an online building where people could log on, build a room of their own and leave messages for each other, each held to a set number of characters. We basically invented Twitter before Twitter, and failed to make any money from it.¹ Yorke puts the failure down to the one thing they refused to collect. But we didn't want anyone's data, therefore it was never going to work.¹

Yorke says that after OK Computer he crashed mentally, and so did Donwood. They felt a fierce anger and suspicion towards all the congratulation, which he now calls out of proportion and deeply unhealthy. He had a complete creative block, and Rachel, his partner at the time, told him to stop trying to make music for a while. He walked about drawing what he saw.

With their studio not ready, the band went to Paris, where a David Hockney exhibition at the Centre Pompidou set off the idea of huge painted landscapes. Yorke and Donwood then painted on the Cornish moors in bitter cold, in a stone circle with big canvases and, at Donwood's suggestion, only blues and purples. An elderly couple stopped to ask what they were doing, looked at the paintings and walked off without a word. The two would start canvases side by side and swap until one of them had won the painting, and Yorke says it was always Donwood.

It was the first time, Yorke tells Rolling Stone, that they treated the artwork as art. OK Computer had been made tidily on a scanner; for Kid A, Donwood had a studio with dust on the floor, rats and a fireplace. The file that became the Kid A cover, picked against a looming deadline, is named THIS MIGHT BE A COVER in their archive.

Putting together the books and the online exhibition has taken the pair two years, about as long as the band took to make the two albums, and Yorke likens it to being dragged backwards through a hedge. Going through the multitrack tapes, they found a “True Love Waits” sung over the backing of “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”, dropped at the time because they were unsure of it. It is on Kid Amnesiae, the reissue's third disc, and Yorke now loves it. You do something like that, and you don't even fucking remember you've done it, and then you find it 20 years later and go, 'That's good.'⁴