‘Some Sort of Future, Even If It’s a Nightmare’: Thom Yorke on the Visual Secrets of ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’
Early in 1999, Radiohead began to size up the task of what to do next after 1997’s acclaimed OK Computer. “It’s quite difficult now to explain this, but we were deeply suspicious of any level of success that we’d earned,” Thom Yorke recalls. “We’d gone on this trajectory, and then suddenly there we were with this massive, ridiculous amount of expectation — but at the same time sort of frozen to the spot. As the flashbulbs erupted, we were just paralyzed.”
The sessions for what would become Radiohead’s fourth and fifth albums stretched on for more than a year of challenging work at studios in Paris, Copenhagen, and their hometown of Oxford, England. “We were trying to chase ourselves away and run as fast as we could in another direction,” Yorke adds. “Trying to get away from wherever the fuck we had found ourselves to somewhere new.”
As the creative tension mounted, Yorke took refuge in the visual imagery he was developing with Dan Rickwood, a.k.a. Stanley Donwood, an old friend from their days studying art together as undergrads at the University of Exeter. They’d created all the artwork for Radiohead since 1994; now they found themselves exploring new techniques in tandem with the advances the band was making in the recording studio.
“What it meant was embracing the artwork as artwork for the first time,” Yorke says. “When we did OK Computer, we were working with a scanner, and it didn’t make any mess. We could be in the corner and be polite, and we got something from that. But then suddenly we’re in our own space, and Dan could create a perfect studio with dust on the floor and rats and a nice little fireplace, and we could go skin up and listen to the music. There was an air of chaos suddenly, and that was really fun.”
By the end of the process, Radiohead had leapt into a new universe beyond rock’s horizon on 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac — accompanied by a rich world of eerie, dreamlike visual imagery that mixed painting, drawing, and digital design. Now, as they look back with a pair of art books (the hardcover catalog Kid A Mnesia and the chapbook-style Fear Stalks the Land!) and a deluxe reissue of the two albums, Yorke and Donwood hopped onto Zoom to talk about those heady, experimental days.
“When we went through the multitrack tapes of Kid A and Amnesiac, the music and the artwork ended up becoming something a little bit more transcendent,” Yorke says. “Trying to embrace some sort of future, even if it’s a nightmare. We were trying to scrape hope out of the dirt somehow.”
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Who’s in a Bunker
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings One of the earliest works in the series, this large 1999 painting was based on a newspaper photograph of a bombed-out apartment complex in Yugoslavia. “It was just a square of snow — this lovely thing that you have on Christmas cards. Snow always makes everything nice,” Donwood says. “But this patch of snow had footprints in it, crushed cigarettes, engine oil, blood, and it was just horrible. The snow had become a canvas for showing a very up-close and personal reality of war.”
Donwood used “a thick acrylic paste that they normally use to cover up holes and defects in walls” to create the white foreground of the seemingly abstract image, which was used as the cover of a special board-book edition of Kid A in 2000. The original canvas, titled “Residential Nemesis,” fetched £137,500 when it was included in a recent Christie’s auction (or approximately $187,000 in U.S. dollars).
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Ice Age Coming
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings This cartoon incorporates some ominous words that will be instantly familiar to Kid A fans — though they weren’t song lyrics yet when Yorke drew it. “There was some financial shock that happened, and I was trying to finish the lyrics to ‘Idioteque’ at the time, so it became part of the same thing,” he says. “It was a joke, obviously.”
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Treefingers
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings Donwood based this drawing of a tree stump on a dream he had. “At the time, I had very realistic dreams,” he says. “Things had shadows and the gravity worked and there was litter on the ground. Mostly, I tried to write down what happened when I woke up.”
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Throw It in the Fire
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings The rich colors of this 2000 Donwood canvas, titled “Get Out Before Saturday,” reflect the influence of a David Hockney show that the band took in the previous year at the Centre Pompidou. “It was the first thing we did when we got to Paris, before we started recording,” Yorke says. “It completely blew our heads off. All these deep maroons and purples and reds, all these weird colors, man. And the scale of it.”
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Packt Like Sardines
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings “I have a house in Cornwall, and that’s where I ran away to, basically, at the end of OK Computer,” Yorke explains of the inspiration behind this Photoshop rendering. “I ran away to escape this voice in my head that was just annihilating everything that happened. I discovered that going back to doing artwork and walking in these super-dramatic landscapes in the wintertime was a very good way of forgetting about all that stuff. If you pack yourself a flask and a couple of sandwiches and disappear into the moors for the day, you come back with a different spectrum on things.”
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Pulk/Pull
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings This Donwood drawing riffs on the handshake-greeting logo that he and Yorke created for OK Computer. Yorke connects the imagery to a disturbing 1998 incident in which he was “beaten up randomly, for no reason,” by a stranger in Oxford: “Someone recognized me and started calling me names, so I asked him to stop, and he took that as an opportunity to kick the shit out of me in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day in 1998. Everybody walked past, everybody ignored me, and that obviously had quite a profound effect on me.” (Decades later, he’s moved on: “I’ve got one of those faces,” Yorke adds with a wry laugh. “It attracts antagonism.”)
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Standing in the Shadows
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings The Minotaur of ancient Greek mythology became a key motif for the Amnesiac artwork. “One of the problems I was having trying to write music — trying to write the words especially — was how I was relating to my voice,” Yorke says. “I felt like I had built myself this fucking maze, this series of moves that endlessly repeat, and I couldn’t get out.”
Donwood was the one who took up the myth first, growing out of an interest in 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons. “The Minotaur is this tragic figure,” he says. “It’s obviously a monster that kills and eats people, but at the same time, it’s that perennial teenage lament: ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’”
He and Yorke ended up developing two parallel versions of the Minotaur to explore this nuance. “You have this joke Minotaur that’s crying, like a cartoon, but then you had this one, which was much closer to the kind of stuff that if you smoked way too much fucking weed, you’d see it in the distance,” Yorke explains. “The pure white fear of this thing coming up behind you, saying, ‘You used to be all right, what happened?’ This voice staring you down, endlessly repeating that you’re going to endlessly repeat your mistakes. You are who you are and you’re trapped in your own maze, et cetera.”
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Fast Track
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings “It’s like a shopping list of neuroses,” Donwood says of this cartoon, which combines several of their fixations of this period. “More a thing for a psychotherapist or perhaps a psychiatrist than me.” Among the totems on display are the Grim Reaper, a dead body with a briefcase, and several genetically modified teddy bears, one of them bearing the word “SPIN.” (Yorke explains this as a caustic reference to U.K. politics: “We had this phrase, ‘Spin With a Grin,’ which was used to describe the way the Labour Party in 1997, ’98, ’99 was turning everything that was happening into this big shiny positive achievement, when clearly it wasn’t.”)
“It’s not to be taken very seriously,” Yorke adds.
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Never Look Back
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings This is one of Yorke’s favorite images from this period. It began with him and producer Nigel Godrich using the digital editing software LightWave to distort a photograph, before he and Donwood worked on it further to create a textured collage. “Taking a picture of a November the 5th bonfire night and fragmenting it,” Yorke recalls. “I was obsessed with the idea of blowing shit up, going as far as you can go into something, so whatever it is, it’s unrecognizable.”
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Try the Best You Can
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings Abstract mountain landscapes became another repeated theme. “If you simply put a line through the middle of a composition, and you delineate between the sky and the land, you can immediately start to imply a lot of weird stories,” Yorke says.
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Come Back
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings “One of my forms of therapy was going into this very ancient wood near my house, and sitting there amongst the trees,” Yorke says. “Sometimes I’d draw them, or sometimes I’d nod off to sleep and wake up. I think this is a bit of a half awake, half asleep thing.”
The repeated scribbles of “come back” echo the lyrics of Kid A’s “In Limbo.” “It’s this idea of being lost, not knowing if you can come back from wherever you are,” he adds. “You come back from such a weird period of your life and start to put new roots down and start to find some balance and start to move on. It’s just a doodle, but it always meant quite a lot to me, that one.”
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Cloud-Cuckoo Land
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings “It was almost a dark fairyland,” Donwood says of the landscape imagined in images like this 2001 painting, which features a blank patch of canvas as its sky. “A fantastic landscape populated by fantastic beasts of one sort or another — mostly quite menacing creatures or pitiful creatures. It was a very lonely, cold, and quiet place, apart from the punctuations of terrible war.”
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Someone Listening In
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings Another image from a dream. “We were grabbing anything that made any kind of sense, and dreams were central to that,” Yorke says. “Your dreams produce their own language. If you can learn it, at least slightly, you have a different perspective on the world around you.”
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True Love Waits
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings The Kid A Mnesia triple-album includes a disc of outtakes from the 1999-2000 sessions. One of the most fascinating is a track that pairs the plaintive vocal of fan-favorite ballad “True Love Waits” with the harsh industrial backdrop of Amnesiac’s “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors.”
“We felt like ‘True Love Waits’ was this wholesome acoustic thing, and then suddenly putting this quite fierce thing… We weren’t sure if it was the right thing, so it fell by the wayside. But now when I hear it, it’s shocking. I really love it,” Yorke says. “Honestly, imagine being us. 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.’”
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Kid A
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood/XL Recordings “We had a deadline, at last, looming,” Donwood says. “After months and months, we finally had to come up with a cover and a title for this record.” The image they chose for Kid A features “all of the little motifs that we were trying to do, geometry, mountains, volcanoes, fire and ice.” (In their archives, it has the file name “THIS MIGHT BE A COVER.”)
Adds Yorke, “The cover’s always the scariest bit.”
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Kid A Mnesia
Image Credit: XL Recordings Donwood and Yorke spent the last two years putting together the books and a related immersive online exhibition — about as long as Radiohead spent making Kid A and Amnesiac in the first place. “We’ve gone through a whole journey backwards. Literally being sucked backwards through a hedge, that’s how it feels,” Yorke says. “Very odd, getting to know these people again, whoever the hell they were…. I’m glad we did it, but I never, ever, ever want to see it anymore ever again, ever.”
He continues: “When you go back and look at [these images] now, they’re utterly fucking mental. Utterly deranged. So I’m super-proud of that whole thing. Sorry, did I say I was proud of something?”
“No, we’re from England,” Donwood interjects. “We don’t do pride.”