Gareth Evans: Hello, wherever and whenever you're watching this, a very warm welcome indeed to this very special conversation here at Christie's in London.
My name is Gareth Evans. I'm your host for this conversation. It's a real pleasure, as I said, to welcome you wherever you're watching this across the world—and, of course, across time, because you might be watching this in a different time frame, a different time zone.
We're thinking about time and place tonight. We're thinking about twenty years ago. We're thinking about the future. We're thinking about the deeper past. We're thinking about lots of things with my two very special guests here, who will be introduced very shortly.
Now, as I said, we're coming from Christie's. Christie's, founded in 1766, has been doing its thing for over 250 years now. Many, many firsts, of course, in that great lineage of auctions—and a first here tonight, during this week, as we see the online auction of First Open, within which many artworks by our guests here tonight are featured.
Please do take a look online, in all the ways you know how, to find details of that auction. It's just the beginning of an autumn of works across all media by my two wonderful guests.
We're in the heart of St James's here in London and, of course, in the heart of Christie's itself. St James's, the home of William Burroughs among many others—a location both counter-cultural and deeply cultural.
There were incredible scenes here early this morning when, completely by chance but very fortuitously, an office was discovered, secure and untouched from the mid-1990s. There was a moment of panic among the auction team: had they forgotten to auction a major installation in the recent contemporary art exhibition?
No, they hadn't. It was simply an office in the labyrinthine interior of Christie's that had been completely overlooked for nearly twenty-five years.
It did, however, yield one incredible piece of technology, which is in front of me now. This is a fax machine.
The younger members of our audience, of course, will have no idea what I'm talking about, but it's a form of communication technology first patented in 1843. It first functioned as an electronic telegraph in 1865—that's eleven years before the telephone was invented.
We'll be thinking very creatively, prompted by this wonderful machine—and by your own extraordinary questions—very shortly in conversation.
There are many people to thank for this undertaking here: Victoria, James, Indigo, Henry, Daniel and the whole extensive and hugely skilled technical team around and behind me. Of course, Julian and Brian, keeping everything going as they always do.
It's really a collaborative operation here tonight, and you—friends, fans, fellow travellers and clients—are all part of this journey, so I'm really glad you can be with us.
This, as I said, is part of the First Open week here at Christie's.
You have submitted your questions in advance and they'll be coming to me at regular intervals on the aforementioned fax machine. We can, of course, only deal with a handful of them, but many thanks indeed for sending them in. We'll only be touching the tip of the iceberg—and that is, by definition, an iceberg that is rapidly melting.
Now, in no short order, we'll introduce our guests. Just a reminder that by attending this event you've agreed not to record it in any way. You'll remain muted and anonymous—which is arguably a very good thing in the current climate—and we'll endeavour, as I said, to get through as many of your questions as possible.
So it remains only for me now to welcome our two very special guests: Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
Welcome.
Thom Yorke: Hello.
Gareth Evans: Welcome to you both. It's great to have you with us.
We're thinking around the six major canvases that are downstairs as we speak, and they're the prompt, if you like, for a series of questions and thoughts about the whole Kid A Mnesia project. I say "problem" because it really was a problem for you at the beginning, Thom, wasn't it? How to make an album like this after your previous experience.
Many of our audience will already have seen the wonderful short film you put together for Christie's, talking us through the years before these albums came out. You weren't in a great place, I think it's fair to say, but you found your way back—both to recording and to art—through your collaboration with Stanley.
Could you give us a flavour of that moment, that period, when you were thinking about what you were going to do next—and, perhaps more importantly, how you were going to do it?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
At the end of OK Computer, we'd finished touring and I was trapped in a sort of labyrinth of my own making, followed by this strange internal monologue where I criticised everything—absolutely everything—I did.
I'd been propelled into this weird state where people were projecting things onto me in a particular way, and I didn't really have the support mechanisms to deal with it. So I internalised a lot of it, and it kind of shut me down.
Whenever I tried to write something, whenever I sat in front of an instrument, I'd just freeze. There was this little voice in the way.
I remember sitting endlessly, endlessly playing the riff to "Everything in Its Right Place", almost trying to meditate my way out of it, and not being able to.
Eventually I stopped for a while.
We were in Cornwall a lot, and I spent a lot of time walking around, absorbing the landscape, being in the sea. I just started drawing and thinking visually—only visually. I stopped working on music for a while.
I started thinking, "Well... maybe that's not all I am. Maybe I can eke out another way of being creative."
For some reason, that helped. It eased the crisis very, very slowly.
The landscape itself became a new sort of vocabulary. Landscape is such a cliché in many ways, but it was simply what I had around me.
When Stanley came to see me, that's what we were doing—we were just wandering around.
We didn't really think anything of it.
Stanley Donwood: Mr. Stanley Donwood...
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Stanley Donwood: That's what we were doing.
We didn't really think anything of it until we went to Paris and saw that David Hockney exhibition.
Gareth Evans: Right.
Stanley Donwood: A lot of the things we'd been doing during the unexpectedly successful OK Computer period were very small. We had a graphics tablet about half the size of this fax machine to draw on.
It was all hand-to-eye coordination—no emotion—and everything became very intellectualised because of that.
The idea of working on these large canvases was to engage your whole body, all the memories and traumas held within your whole frame rather than just your brain.
The idea was to interpret everything through a much more visceral way of making marks.
It really was a way of breaking through—breaking out of a creative lock.
Thom Yorke: Yeah. Definitely.
Gareth Evans: And you were operating at a completely different scale. People can see the size of the canvases downstairs—or online—and it was something about the scale of the landscape itself that allowed you, Thom, to break out of that confined space.
It also opened the door to bringing all sorts of different media, textures and traces into the process.
How did the two of you actually begin working together? By then you'd known each other for around ten years, but what was the process at the start of this journey?
Stanley Donwood: I think a lot of it came from seeing that Hockney exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.
The band were trying to make music, but they didn't have a studio yet. We were in Paris, then Copenhagen—travelling around looking at art. Big art.
The Hockney exhibition was of the Grand Canyon. It was this enormous mosaic made up of square canvases. Each one was substantial on its own, but together it felt as though you were walking into the Grand Canyon.
It was extraordinary.
It almost gave us permission to think that landscape could become a language within what we were doing.
By coincidence we'd already started moving in that direction, simply as a way of breaking free, but suddenly we were looking at what Hockney had done and thinking, "Maybe this is legitimate. Maybe there's actually something in this."
Gareth Evans: The landscape idea is fascinating because the Hockney association might surprise some people. Yet what emerged from your work became something much more damaged, much more alienated—something we can already see traces of in the paintings downstairs.
Stanley, what's it like seeing these works on the wall again today?
Stanley Donwood: We were just talking about that a minute ago.
It's really strange.
I haven't really seen them. They've been in storage, they've been in the attic of my studio, they've been in various places. They had one brief exhibition in a museum in the Netherlands about ten years ago, but apart from that I haven't really seen them.
Last Friday, when we were installing the exhibition here, they put the music on.
I realised I hadn't heard Kid A and Amnesiac while looking at these paintings for twenty years.
It was an extraordinary feeling.
Almost as if the ground beneath me disappeared—and that ground consisted of twenty years' worth of accumulated memory.
It's a very difficult feeling to describe.
Gareth Evans: I think you've described it beautifully.
Thom, let's stay with that idea of music and image coming together...
Gareth Evans: Let's stay with that idea of the music and the image coming together.
When you finally had your own space, it was a split-level studio. The band was downstairs making music, while Stanley worked upstairs on the mezzanine. You were the conduit between the two levels.
Was there ever a brief? A mission statement? Something you said to Stanley—or developed together—about the direction of travel?
Thom Yorke: Maybe. I don't know.
It was already in the music, but there were also things that spoke to us along the way. We were bouncing ideas off one another all the time.
It wasn't like we'd start with an agenda. Well—we did start with an agenda, but always knowing we were going to jettison it.
That was the way we were recording. It was the way we were trying to get the band to do something different.
We'd begin with, "This is the idea..." but where we ended up was somewhere completely different.
Letting go of the desire to arrive anywhere specific—learning to enjoy the chaos, the process and the mistakes along the way—that became the whole point.
Then, every now and again, things would suddenly come into focus.
The first landscape paintings would begin to work. The first really good sounds would come out of the studio.
You'd have these little pockets of time where you'd think, "Oh... we're onto something."
Then there'd be another few months of, "Ahhh..."
Then another breakthrough.
Stanley Donwood: I remember we rented a sort of concrete cell in a warehouse to paint in. It really was like a cell.
At first we tried painting landscapes, but it simply didn't work.
The colours wouldn't come. The landscapes wouldn't settle.
Then something shifted.
I think it was because, at the time, I was deeply affected by the war in what had been Yugoslavia.
For the first time, the internet was bringing information to you almost as it happened. It all felt incredibly close to home.
The Berlin Wall had fallen. This kind of thing was supposed to belong to the past.
But it didn't.
It was all happening in winter, in this snowy, very European, very familiar landscape.
Except that beautiful snowy landscape was full of concentration camps, people wrapped in barbed wire, bodies being dragged behind tanks...
It was gruesome.
Thom Yorke: There was a violence that he'd put into what he was painting—and then hide again—which was really interesting.
Gareth Evans: We've actually had several questions about the whitewash material, which we'll come to shortly.
But Thom, this was also a return to making visual art for you.
How much time were you spending upstairs? How much downstairs?
Were the two practices feeding each other equally?
Thom Yorke: Honestly, it was just a constant relief.
I have the attention span of an insect, so as soon as I felt I didn't have anything useful to contribute downstairs, I could simply walk away and do something else.
If you ask the other guys in the band, they'd probably tell you that was good for them too, because I wasn't sitting there getting frustrated that things weren't moving quickly enough.
So the great benefit for me was that I could wander into the painting room, throw a few ideas around, then wander back out again.
Gareth Evans: But you were making marks on the canvases.
These were collaborative works.
Thom Yorke: ...and then running away.
Gareth Evans: And Stanley was painting over them?
Thom Yorke: To a certain degree...
Stanley Donwood: No, no, no, no, no...
Gareth Evans: (laughing) Well, there are some wonderful stories about that in the film.
Give us a sense of how a typical day actually worked.
Would you begin a canvas, Stanley, then Thom would arrive and add something? Would you step back, discuss it, critique it?
Stanley Donwood: I've just remembered something.
The reason the canvases are the size they are is because that's the absolute biggest size you could fit diagonally through the door of the mezzanine.
So they were huge canvases in a very small room.
Thom Yorke: Sometimes the best thing about going upstairs was simply sitting with the paintings.
It became another way of thinking about what was happening with the music.
I don't really think there was a "process".
I'd wander in, make comments, throw ideas into the air.
Nothing was fixed.
It was just another conversation.
And that conversation would continue downstairs in the studio.
Not in the sense of, "I've decided we should do this."
Stanley and I spend a lot of time talking around the things that interest us.
Those ideas simply get absorbed into whatever we're doing.
You could almost document every record we've made in exactly the same way.
The music and the artwork evolve together.
But it's never a matter of saying, "This symbolises that."
We can't work like that.
The music is multi-layered.
The artwork is multi-layered.
All the mistakes remain there.
If you could somehow X-ray an audio recording and see everything that had gone wrong during its making, it would all still be present.
The paintings are exactly the same.
There are layer upon layer upon layer.
Whole paintings have almost disappeared beneath whatever eventually became more relevant.
Stanley Donwood: Another important part of the conversation was our sketchbooks.
We'd literally swap sketchbooks.
That became another way of communicating without necessarily having to explain anything.
Thom Yorke: Which is why we were so pleased to see the Sanyo SFX-33.
We actually communicated quite a lot through fax machines.
Gareth Evans: It's a particularly fine model, I think.
And it's performing very well so far.
Let's tempt fate as little as possible because we've still got a great many questions arriving on these pages.
Thom, I'd like to return to something you mentioned.
These images aren't illustrations of the songs.
Likewise, the lyrics don't tell the stories of the paintings.
But how did you begin thinking about the sequence of the albums?
Today they feel inevitable, but of course they weren't.
Did you have a visual sense of the journey while you were assembling them?
Thom Yorke: That's interesting.
Basically, I was pathologically—in my case especially—in denial about the very idea of deadlines.
So we worked for... what? A year and a half?
Stanley Donwood: Two years.
Thom Yorke: Two years.
I kept arriving with new ideas all the time.
I'd throw things out and say, "No, no, let's try this instead."
Which eventually became rather difficult to manage.
Eventually we had to declare a deadline.
That was difficult because we had far too much material.
But once we got past the pain of everyone having different opinions, something exciting happened.
We realised that the only reason it had been so painful was because we didn't yet understand what we had.
They were just songs.
No big deal.
But once you began placing them into a particular order, a very strong visual sense started emerging.
At least it did for me.
I was amazed by how deeply the visual side had taken root.
You're constantly working without confidence.
You're trying things out.
You don't really know where you're going.
Then one day you arrange everything together...
...and suddenly you see what you've been trying to do all along.
You've never had a map.
Then, all at once, there's a map.
Gareth Evans: Often it's that third thing—the thing that wasn't planned.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
It's also the most terrifying part of the whole process.
It really is.
Gareth Evans: Stanley, that's interesting from the opposite perspective, because throughout this process you were hearing the music gradually take shape while you were making the paintings.
As the albums moved towards their final sequence—as they were assembled, almost like a rough cut becoming a final cut in filmmaking—did that change what you were doing visually? Could you almost hear the images?
Stanley Donwood: It's a long time ago now, and I find it difficult to remember the exact sequence of events.
What seemed to happen was that the two processes developed in tandem.
The music gradually emerged as a coherent body of work, and around the same time the visual work did too.
We've got six paintings downstairs, but really they were intended as raw material.
Alongside those, we produced an enormous amount of digital work—an immense number of drawings.
I suppose that's what happens when you have a studio where everybody can work together for as long as they like, without anyone breathing down their neck.
There were well over a thousand pieces of work.
Sometimes it wasn't even a finished song. It could simply be a sound that suddenly opened something up and made you think, "Ah... something's happening here."
Gareth Evans: In terms of feeding one another creatively—and feeding off the wider worlds of culture, history and politics—were there particular books, films or artists that you were sharing with one another?
Or had you created a shared creative space that generated enough momentum on its own?
Thom Yorke: There were a lot of newspapers.
Lots of newspapers.
And the nascent internet.
There was all this counter-cultural material emerging online that simply hadn't been easily accessible before.
The sort of thing you'd previously have had to search for in obscure research books could suddenly be found online in seconds.
So almost every day we'd be clipping articles, photographs, headlines and phrases from newspapers.
Those fragments became part of the process.
There were lines you'd use...
Stanley Donwood: ...and we'd make cut-ups from the newspapers.
The whole point of having a communal workspace outside the band was that people naturally brought in different things every day.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
We had a central area where we'd listen to records.
The whole idea was to create the habit of sharing ideas—not necessarily ideas about the specific thing we were working on at that exact moment.
Gareth Evans: Thank you for mentioning cut-ups, because in my introduction I referred to William Burroughs, who lived just down the road here in St James's during the 1970s.
There's a sense of a parallel journey there: trying to channel the messages of the present moment into something larger and more enduring.
While you were working in that shared space and developing ideas across music and visual art simultaneously, how were you thinking about the internet itself?
Thom, the band were very early adopters. You clearly understood its creative potential long before most people did.
Stanley, you were also deeply involved with the early web as a creative medium.
What did it represent to you then—and how do you feel about it now?
Stanley Donwood: At that point, the internet was still a young and innocent creature.
It seemed capable of almost anything.
It was wonderful because you could write your own HTML code very easily.
I'm certainly not a programmer, but I wrote the first four or five versions of Radiohead.com myself.
There were all sorts of ridiculous things you could do.
You could make pictures move.
You could announce things that weren't true and people would believe them.
We suddenly discovered that half a million people were visiting the site every month.
That completely blew our minds.
We were using the website in exactly the same way we used our sketchbooks.
We simply kept putting things onto it.
We didn't edit very much.
We'd upload something...
...then upload something else on top of it.
Very much like the paintings, and very much like the way the band made music.
It grew by accumulation rather than planning.
Gareth Evans: Not through a master plan.
Stanley Donwood: Exactly.
Thom Yorke: Which brings us to your question about now.
Back then we suddenly found ourselves with all these people visiting the site and looking at what was really just an extension of our sketchbooks.
We weren't censoring ourselves.
We weren't frightened of saying the wrong thing.
Nothing really mattered.
Stanley Donwood: It was like a diary.
Sometimes very personal.
Sometimes angry.
Sometimes abusive.
Sometimes completely surreal.
Thom Yorke: Lots of half-formed lyric ideas.
Random thoughts.
Whatever.
There wasn't this voice saying, "I'd better not write that..."
That simply didn't exist.
It was too early for that.
Personally, I think that's always been my problem with where we've ended up.
I understand that the internet is a community, and it's wonderful that people can communicate.
But at the same time there's an atmosphere of oppression about it now.
Particularly if you're an artist.
Back then it was still a niche thing.
When we started, there were only so many people online.
You had your little community and that was enough.
Stanley Donwood: Facebook didn't even exist until 2005.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
We weren't worried about being liked.
There wasn't even such a thing as "liking".
The internet has become something completely different over the last twenty years.
Twenty years is a long time.
And somehow... not that long at all.
Gareth Evans: That's an interesting thought, because earlier you mentioned layers—layers of paint, layers of sound, layers of internet history.
Each one preserves traces of a particular moment while also accumulating everything that comes afterwards.
Today we often think of the internet itself as a labyrinth.
One of the most memorable characters within the Kid A world is the Minotaur.
Could each of you talk a little about where the Minotaur came from?
Stanley Donwood: The Minotaur is one of those enduring mythical figures.
The monster in the darkness.
The creature beneath the earth.
It's something almost everybody instinctively understands.
That very primal fear.
The crying Minotaur came about because I'd been to Tokyo for the first time.
I'd spent ages wandering around toy shops.
My children were still very young.
There were all these extraordinary Japanese characters—Hello Kitty and things like that.
Gradually I realised that the Minotaur is actually us.
The prison is the one we've built for ourselves.
So the crying Minotaur became this tragic little cartoon version of ourselves.
[Music]
Gareth Evans: Thom, did that resonate with you?
Thom Yorke: At first I honestly wondered what on earth Stanley was doing.
He just kept drawing this Minotaur over and over again.
Stanley Donwood: (laughs)
Thom Yorke: But eventually I realised that introducing characters like that into the paintings created a really interesting counterpoint to the landscapes.
The characters weren't us.
They weren't the band.
They weren't portraits of anybody.
They were something else.
[Music]
Think about a song like "You and Whose Army?".
There's clearly a character speaking.
Someone saying, "Come on... come on..."
But they're really an archetype.
Everything sits right on the edge of cliché.
Almost taking the piss out of itself—but never quite crossing that line.
That was exactly how the Minotaur worked for me.
And, of course, the idea of someone trapped inside their own thoughts...
That was exactly where I was at the time.
Gareth Evans: Exactly.
It's an enduring mythological figure, but one that became a powerful way of thinking through this entire period of your shared creative life.
Gareth Evans: That leads naturally to another question.
The Minotaur myth is, in one sense, about process and endings. The story eventually reaches a conclusion.
For each of you, what's the balance between the process itself and the finished work?
Do you enjoy one more than the other?
Or would you happily continue working forever without ever declaring something complete?
Thom Yorke: I hate the beginning of the process.
It's absolutely terrifying.
Musically, artistically—everything about it.
The part I really enjoy is when the music begins to reveal itself.
For me, as the songwriter, the words are such an enormous structural element.
I've never found writing lyrics easy.
Never.
So I use everything else around them to try and help me get there.
Once the words finally appear, everything else seems to gravitate towards them.
But finding those words...
...that's like wandering around in a dark maze.
You keep wandering until, eventually, you hear a little voice that says, "Use this."
Then suddenly the light pours in.
You have this incredible moment.
And then...
...you have to finish it.
Once it's finished, it doesn't feel like yours anymore.
That happens every single time.
It becomes transparent.
You can't really hear it anymore.
You can listen to it, but it doesn't speak to you.
It becomes blank.
Then maybe you're on a tour bus somewhere and a kid is standing outside holding the record sleeve, telling you what the songs have meant to them.
Someone gives it back to you.
That's when it becomes alive again.
Or you're on stage.
Or, as we've done over the last couple of years, you spend months going back through twenty years' worth of sketchbooks and paintings until they begin speaking to you again.
But there's always this strange negative space after you've finished something.
Everything goes silent.
Nothing seems to mean anything anymore.
Gareth Evans: Stanley, is it the same for you?
Stanley Donwood: Pretty much exactly what he said.
A blank canvas is a horrible thing.
A half-finished painting is even worse.
A painting that's about three-quarters finished...
...that's when it comes closest to getting a boot through it.
Or a knife through it.
Then something tiny changes.
It's never a dramatic change.
But suddenly the whole thing becomes different.
Then you have a really good time...
...for a very short time.
Then you've almost finished it.
And you have to start another one.
It's horrible.
Thom Yorke: (laughs) Yeah.
Gareth Evans: You're working across different media, but if I reduce it rather crudely to a triangle—sound, words and image—they're constantly informing one another.
I'm glad you mentioned the lyrics, Thom.
Once the words finally click into place, everything else seems to follow.
And, Stanley, there are words embedded in many of the paintings as well.
Stanley Donwood: We've always worked very closely with text and image.
We both studied Fine Art and English.
And Thom's a very good writer.
We've always shared text with one another.
It's like an invisible framework beneath everything.
Thom Yorke: We were both fascinated by artists like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin.
That combination of image and text creates a third thing.
Stanley Donwood: Exactly.
Thom could hand me a page of lyrics and I'd literally cut them up.
I'd rearrange them.
Sometimes I'd scratch them directly into wet acrylic with a knife.
Thom Yorke: Lyrics are almost slogans anyway.
Once language becomes graphic, something changes.
Gareth Evans: It's a wonderful artistic tradition, and hearing the two of you describe it alongside the music is incredibly illuminating.
Thank you.
Earlier we were talking about the internet and how early you recognised its creative possibilities.
In a similar way, your work also seems remarkably prescient regarding ecological collapse.
Looking back now, we can see environmental anxiety running throughout these paintings, the wider body of artwork and many of the lyrics.
How conscious were you of those concerns during the late 1990s?
And how did they influence the visual language—the whites, the reds and the blues that dominate these paintings?
Stanley Donwood: I find the whole subject overwhelmingly depressing.
One of the books we're publishing with Canongate contains lots of notes, sketches and fragments from that period.
Among them is a newspaper clipping about melting glaciers.
It lists the amount of ice that had already disappeared around the world.
That article dates from 1991.
At the time we treated it almost as a historical document.
Now it's more than twenty years later...
[The fax machine rings.]
Gareth Evans: Ah...
It's not the telephone.
It's the fax machine.
Shall we answer it?
Hello?
Oh...
It's doing that thing where it appears to be faxing directly into your ear.
Press "Start."
Stanley Donwood: This reminds me...
Do you remember, in the short film?
"Replace battery."
Thom Yorke: (laughing) "Replace battery."
Gareth Evans: Fortunately, dear viewers, we do have a backup.
You may have noticed the index-card box sitting behind me.
That was also discovered in the mysterious forgotten office I mentioned earlier.
So, happily, I have here a series of handwritten index cards.
We'll continue in the traditional analogue fashion.
Technology, after all, can only be relied upon so far.
Perhaps paper is the future after all.
The Rare Manuscripts Department here at Christie's would certainly approve.
These cards may not be rare yet...
...but perhaps they will be one day.
Let's continue.
Following that discussion about climate change, here's another question.
After spending so many years immersed in a project like this, how do you find the energy to begin something completely new?
You continue to work together.
The band continues.
Something always seems to begin stirring again.
How does that happen?
Thom Yorke: There's always somewhere else to go.
Although, to be honest...
...we've been frozen in place by Kid A Mnesia.
It's as though someone fired a ray gun at us from space.
We'd quite like to move the fuck on now.
(laughs)
It's been strangely paralysing.
There were so many different strands to bring together that, for a while, I felt less like an artist and more like a bank clerk shuffling paperwork around all day.
I'm glad we did it.
I think we found something we needed to find.
But I'd also quite like it to go away now.
Gareth Evans: Well, in November it will finally belong to everyone else.
There'll be the album reissues, the Canongate publications, the exhibition catalogue with your extended conversation, and of course Fear Stalks the Land!, bringing together the texts and visual material from this period.
There'll also be the immersive digital exhibition.
While revisiting all this material, were you ever tempted to update it?
Not creatively rewrite it, necessarily, but edit or adjust it with the benefit of hindsight?
Thom Yorke: What was interesting was that once we started digging through everything again...
...the material itself began telling us what to do.
That surprised me.
There were ideas we'd never been able to realise at the time.
Now we finally could.
The virtual exhibition was a perfect example.
It was almost as though everything had been waiting inside a time capsule for twenty years before it was ready.
Gareth Evans: As we explored the archive again, it almost felt as though the work itself was telling you what it wanted to become.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
There were ideas buried in there that we'd never been able to realise at the time, but now we could follow them through.
The virtual exhibition grew out of that. It was almost as though we'd sealed everything inside a time capsule twenty years ago, and now it had opened itself again.
Stanley Donwood: Right from the beginning we agreed there would be no new work.
No repainting.
No adapting.
We weren't going to alter anything.
What was strange was that we'd produced all of this work back then without really knowing what it was for.
In the end, contractually, we were expected to deliver an album.
Gareth Evans: Or two.
Stanley Donwood: Yes—eventually two.
At the time, the compact disc was still the dominant format.
I hated it.
A horrible little rattling plastic box with another piece of plastic inside it.
Thom Yorke: The funny thing was that we'd absorbed this mentality from making OK Computer.
The record company kept saying, "We need artwork for this advert... we need something for this shop window... we need another image for this..."
So eventually we just thought, "Fine. Let's make loads of stuff."
We hardly even looked at most of it.
Every shop window got something different.
Every advert got something different.
We'd think, "Let's use that for the cover... let's use this for the advert... let's print an outrageously offensive cartoon in the NME..."
There was simply an enormous amount of material.
Gareth Evans: Which has proved rather useful now.
Stanley Donwood: Yes.
Now that we've made the digital exhibition, produced the books and hung the paintings downstairs, you suddenly realise...
"Ah. So that's what all this was for."
Thom Yorke: We genuinely didn't know.
Stanley Donwood: If you keep everything, you never quite know what it might become later.
Gareth Evans: Earlier on, though, you almost threw a lot of it away.
Thom Yorke: I did.
I had this nagging feeling that we ought to go back to it.
Before that, I just wanted to delete the whole lot.
Gareth Evans: Fortunately you didn't.
As we move towards the close, I'd like to ask about another medium.
Several people have asked about the Kid A Blips, which you created with Shynola.
Without giving anything away about the forthcoming digital exhibition, did making those short animations influence how you now think about moving image?
Thom Yorke: I don't really know.
At the time it was simply a response to the situation we found ourselves in.
We didn't analyse it very much.
Chris Bran and Shynola were working with us as well.
Everyone wanted television adverts, music videos, promotional films...
MTV wanted material.
The standard advert then was thirty seconds of an album cover while a song played underneath.
We looked at that and thought, "No fucking way."
If somebody wanted thirty seconds from us, we'd use those thirty seconds to do something interesting instead.
Most of the work Chris and Shynola produced came from us simply handing over everything we'd made and saying, "Here you are. See what happens if this starts moving."
They'd be sleeping on the sofa while we all sat around drinking beer.
"Try that."
"Put another one in."
"What happens if you move this?"
It wasn't some grand, carefully planned process.
Stanley Donwood: (laughing) I always imagined it was much more sophisticated than that.
Gareth Evans: If this art career ever goes wrong, Stanley, you've clearly got a future directing animation.
Looking back over nearly thirty years, have you recognised any pattern in how ideas develop?
Does each new project begin in a similar way?
Or is every beginning completely different?
Thom Yorke: I'd like to think every beginning is different.
You eventually run out of tricks.
All those surprise album releases, mysterious teasers and strange publicity stunts...
We've done all that.
How strange can Radiohead be this time?
Maybe the strangest thing would be not trying to be strange.
A few years ago we put everything we'd ever done online in the Radiohead Public Library.
Hopefully that means we don't need to keep inventing internet projects forever.
There's enough there already.
Gareth Evans: As we come to the end, I'd like to broaden the discussion one last time.
You spoke earlier about almost hearing images and seeing music.
Is that genuinely part of the way the two of you work together?
Thom Yorke: It doesn't feel as grand as that.
It's more like cheating.
If I can persuade the music to do some of the artwork for me, then I don't have to work quite so hard.
I'm fundamentally lazy.
Gareth Evans: Yet each body of work still stands independently.
The paintings exist on their own.
The texts exist on their own.
The music exists on its own.
Thom Yorke: It's always a struggle.
It always has been.
Whether it's finding the missing phrase in a lyric, discovering the right shape for a composition or solving a painting, it's always difficult.
You wait for those moments when everything suddenly fits together and you think, "Ah... there it is."
Those moments are rare.
Most of the time you're simply scratching away.
Trying things.
Searching.
If you can allow yourself to become absorbed in that process, eventually something happens.
Then perhaps a kind of synaesthesia appears.
This speaks to that.
That responds to this.
Everything begins connecting.
But that's the exception.
Most of the time it's just...
...a blank, empty howling.
I imagine that's true for everyone.
You're simply trying, over and over again, to make something work.
Luck is usually against you.
Gareth Evans: I think that's a perfect place to finish.
We're all enormously grateful for those moments when the howling resolves itself into music...
...and when images emerge from the white noise.
It's been an extraordinary journey over many years, and it clearly continues.
In November there will be the album reissues, the Canongate books, Fear Stalks the Land!, the exhibition catalogue and the immersive digital exhibition.
Please do visit the Christie's website for details of the auction, which closes on 19 October.
You can also visit Stanley's own website and, of course, the Radiohead website.
It's been a genuine pleasure speaking with you both.
Thank you to everyone at Christie's and to the wonderful technical team who have made this event possible.
And thank you to everyone watching around the world.
We're sorry we couldn't answer all of your questions, but we're grateful for every one of them.
Wherever—and whenever—you've joined us from, have a safe journey through the rest of your day, your evening or your night.
Please join me in thanking Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
Stanley Donwood: Thank you.
Thom Yorke: Thanks very much.