He writes songs in a free-associative way. Because I found that level of analysis really…” He makes a sound like something deflating and seems to shrink into the sofa. By the time I’d finished English literature I didn’t want to read a book again for years. “English was a way to keep my parents happy, I guess,” Yorke says. There were quite a few musicians who I admired who went to art school.” The literature part of the joint degree was a compromise. “Art school seemed like the next best thing. “I wanted to do music but couldn’t read it,” he says. Originally from Essex, Donwood always wanted to do art. I can’t tell linear stories in lyrics… I’ll often either dream something or I have a strong image in my head They took it in turns to wield the paintbrush. Donwood would get the train from Brighton and cycle over on his fold-up bike. The paintings for The Smile’s A Light for Attracting Attention were done in Yorke’s garden shed at the Oxford home where he lives with his wife, the Italian actress Dajana Roncione. He also does Glastonbury festival’s official artwork. He has had solo shows, published books and worked with authors such as nature writer Robert Macfarlane. “We’re making wrapping paper for discs,” Donwood says pithily, unwilling to take the proper-art talk too far. So I could say to myself, ‘I don’t have to think of this as a valid piece of work.’” It was kind of a tasty cop‑out for it to be in the context of musical material. We get together in the context of making artwork for records and paraphernalia around it. I think Dan is,” Yorke says, using Donwood’s real name. Following an auction of the pair’s work at Christie’s in 2021, it marks the next step in their tentative emergence as an artworld entity. The exhibition is organised by the contemporary art gallery Tin Man Art. So I have an affinity for maps. They’re beautiful by accident.” (His father was a nuclear physicist.) “I got in a lot of trouble at art school for doing diagrams as paintings rather than natural scenes. “When I first started thinking about art as a kid, my father had lots of books about nuclear physics whose diagrams I always really liked,” the singer says. One of the inspirations was a cartographic exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Yorke’s home city.Īmnesiac, 2001 © Ruelleruelle/Alamy Stock Photo With their opalescent-blue river systems and psychedelic hills, the canvases are brighter and cheerier than the duo’s usual work. Due to be exhibited in a show called The Crow Flies, they depict fantastical bird’s eye topographies of imagined landscapes. They’re paintings made for last year’s debut album by Radiohead spin-off group The Smile. The fruits of the latest artistic collaboration between Donwood and Yorke are propped against the walls of the ground-floor gallery space at Cromwell Place in South Kensington. Like the feverishly illustrated booklet hidden in the CD case of 2000’s Kid A, nothing is as it seems.Ī detail from Besuch, 2022 © Julian Broad Blurry figures loom in a disorienting motorway landscape on the cover of 1997’s OK Computer. The 2003 album Hail to the Thief has a fold-up map showing city streets riddled with words such as “executioner” and “fear”. Childlike cartoons are repurposed to sinister ends, like the band’s logo of a toy bear bristling with teeth. The band’s visual identity is no less vividly disquieting. Themes of dread and breakdown recur in Radiohead’s songs, a sense of being lost in a technologically imbalanced world ruled by rapacious bullies. “I got accused of being a paranoid recluse and I don’t know where it came from.”Ī glance at his work with Yorke might explain. “I don’t think it was deliberate,” the latter says of his past elusiveness. In the 1990s, there was a wild theory that Donwood was really Yorke’s artistic alter ego, as if the singer had a double life as the Banksy of alternative rock – a notion that prompts a hearty burst of laughter from Yorke.
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