(2021/09/24) Christie's - Kid A Mnesia Interview - Radiohead [Thom Yorke, Stanley Donwood] (Video)

[Music] we specifically knew what we were doing we specifically knew that eventually everything that we were going to do was going to be this shape right other than that we had total freedom [Music] it's quite rare for uh for a band to be as as interested in their visual representation as interested in the art their companies is and to you know kind of commit to this guy who just says i'm gonna go big and i'm gonna paint with soot and knives he was the guy at art college you could actually paint they kicked me out when i met him first day i thought um he sat there with a book and you're totally aloof i thought i'm right i'm really going to hate this bloke i'm only going to end up working with him forever one of the two and then when we signed a record deal and i first had to deal with like the graphic designers and so on i'm like i can't i can't cope with this this is like a sort of manufacturing business and then he phoned up one time and said you want to have a go at doing a record cover and i thought yeah i'll have to go and we bought a computer and we set about doing the bends and that was it really we just carried on from there yeah the idea of of the record shop as as a democratic non-hierarchical art gallery where the art itself has no intrinsic value because it's just a printed piece of cardboard it's something i really really like after ok computer tour i was a bit ragged and i couldn't really do anything creatively and my partner rachel said to me that you should just go back to your art stop doing music for a while because it's kind of too loaded we had this barn to work in that the band had bought with all this success suddenly were in this big space and suddenly painting seemed like a really absolutely the right thing to do because everything we've done to that point had been on a tablet you know we had our apple mac set up and we had our posh scanner and but it was just really dry and i was like right we're not doing this anything anymore we're gonna use sticks and knives and we're gonna lose our sleeves to make marks and do great big massive pictures as big as we can fit in on the walls here i'll do my art crit sitting down oh yeah that's a good idea this is a painting that i did in response to certain distressing events in the form of yugoslavia the balkans had sort of fragmented people who looked like us people who wore clothes like us who watched telly had the same stuff they were dying and being killed and putting each other in concentration camps and dragging each other along and wrapped in barbed wire behind tanks it seeped in you know because you start off wanting to explore landscape started off wandering around cornwall yeah and the next thing you know there's snow colored landscapes there's blood everywhere i started using this white stuff ironically it's the sort of decorating medium that you use to conceal defects but of course when it's wet you can inscribe it and you can throw things at it and they'll stick you can throw soot at it throw gravel at it what was nice of seeing him like really get loose on canvas and and just letting rip and not caring yes it was really exciting otherwise things like that otherwise oh dear we're kind of like a bit crazy about keeping loads of sketchbooks i've got loads of them a lot of the ideas that then found their way into paintings originated was just you know a doodle or a scratch or an idea late at night or something we were finally free in a workspace that we built and set up ourselves to be exactly as we wanted and we had no deadline so everything was informing everything most of them were done in a mezzanine above where the recording studio was i dabbled there's bit there's i'm working on the artwork and what it will become while they're working on the music and what it will become i was just in this space where there was just music happening all the time i'd find it hard to look at these without hearing the the music it's kind of in them it's encoded so we take these paintings and use them as the basis for the work we wanted to do to give it this emotion that we were trying to express but then you could use the computer you could use the little thing and you could you could add in these these elements that were previously impossible they couldn't have been made we were into sampling we're into the idea like scanning blah blah blah building textures in real life and then pulling them into the computer and see what we could do them on every level which is why we had broken typewriter which is why we'd scrunch it up and put in someone's pocket and then flatten it out all this is assembled assembled assembled but at the same time it's all informed by this collage detritus kind of mentality everything about it it will be really great that people can actually see this work because it's it will be the first time this works being able to be seen for what it is this is us speaking and this is how we see stuff and i'm proud of this period because this period of work was when we found a kind of voice through the artwork and it just developed into something exciting and something wasn't just for a record cover it was something way beyond that [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Unofficial Radiohead Interview Public Library

Views: 323,255

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Id: 7GEXXnWusOg

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/alexandros87]

This is probably the most relaxed and at ease I've seen thom in an interview.

[u/Blinky-Bear]

I'm more heartfelt at the fact that Thom mentioned Rachel and that her influence is still strong with the band in some form.

[u/[deleted]]

Stanley looks like Colin Robinson from What We Do In The Shadows

[u/bob_loblaw_brah]

This needs to be a two hour docu

[u/xan-travels]

Thom: Oy, I painted an art, Stanley. Want to see it?

Stanley: This is quite good, Thom, but I must make some improvements [dumps gesso on the painting and starts scratching it]

Thom: What have you done!?

Stanley: Hey, I don't get on stage and mess about with guitar chords so mind your lane. Anyway, it's now the next album cover.

Thom: I can't see my work on it though.

Stanley: As I said, Timmy, mind your lane.

[u/krdskrm9]

I was not planning on buying anything in this Kid A Mnesia thing until I saw this. Now I have to buy the book and listen to my old CDs.

[u/EmperorLord3333333]

I love how they're playing my favorite song in the background

[u/therealponcedeleon]

Cool interview. It's not a meme though... or even a "______ is underrated" post...

[u/[deleted]]

cool!