Category: Radiohead

Stanley Donwood is the semi-official sixth member of Radiohead. Having designed all artwork from The Bends onwards, he has created one of music’s most distinctive band images. Now he’s screen-printing old favourites and new classics, and selling them through his website. Here he tells GQ exclusively why.
How did you first get involved with the band?
“I have lied about this so many time that the truth, if there ever was one, has become impossibly sedimented in the strata of my deceit.” (Donwood met lead singer Thom Yorke at the University of Exeter)
Who or what inspires you?
“The first pictures that I ever saw were by John Constable, on biscuit tins and as jigsaw box lids. When in the Eighties I saw Peter Kennard’s versions of these paintings, with ‘The Haywain’ as an image of a missile launcher, I knew that I could be an artist. Or something.”
What’s your favourite Radiohead artwork?
“Kid A. The artwork for this record was almost impossible to do. I wanted to make artwork that looked, from a distance, like jewellery thrown onto mud, but close up revealed itself as the most ghastly shit that people can ever do to each other. I was fascinated by the horror in the Balkans at the time. At the same time, this was a continuation of the work on OK Computer, and it continues on Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief. So they’re all inextricably linked.”
Are you, for sound bite purposes, “the Terry Gilliam of Radiohead”?
“While it’s really complimentary to be compared to someone such as Terry Gilliam, I don’t honestly think it’s appropriate. God, I’d love to make something as good as Brazil. Here’s the riposte: a sound bite is a statement designed to preclude the possibility of intelligent thought.”
Do the band have input with your work?
“Oh, man, I’m terrible at working on my own. There’s no frame of reference, no one to tell you if what you’re doing is good or fucking terrible. I once spent two months working on this idea that combined topiary with porn. I joined the National Trust and everything, just so I could cycle to all these gardens that had famous topiary in them and photograph it. I wanted to make pictures that had phallic topiary fucking vulva-shaped clouds. Quite tastefully, I might add. Anyway, there I was, taking photos and really getting into it… until Thom told me that it might not be…. quite the thing… for the new record. Honestly, topiary and photography… what was I thinking?”
So why the new venture?
“I hadn’t screen-printed for about 15 years and I thought I’d better start with something I knew. And I imagined that a few people might like proper versions of pictures only ever seen as the 12x12cm images in jewel cases.”
Prints, in limited editions of 288, 288 pounds each, and of 144, 144 pounds each, www.slowlydownward.com

Another flash animation of a Radiohead song. This time it’s “I Will”.
Also, check out “Sexual High”. If you’re in to Radiohead (why else would you be here?) and Marvin Gaye, you might like this mash-up of “Sexual Healing” and “High and Dry”. (thanks to biz and aeon)

Yes, it’s been quite slow in the Radiohead news department and we apologize for the infrequent updates. Here’s some news about Nigel from contactmusic.com:
Sir Paul McCartney battled with maverick producer Nigel Godrich over his new solo album, because the former Radiohead mogul refused to refrain from criticising him.
McCartney appeared at the London Live 8 gig on Saturday fresh from the studio where he and Godrich have been working on CHAOS AND CREATION IN THE BACKYARD – the former Beatle’s first studio release in four years.
Godrich was recommended by former Beatles producer Sir George Martine – and the singer has found his no-nonsense attitude refreshing.
The pop legend says, “People get a little sycophantic around me, but Nigel was the opposite.
“He’d dismiss my rough demos out of hand if he didn’t like them. He was quite cheeky. He took me out of my comfort zone and really tested me. There were awkward moments but we never came to blows.”

Spin magazine named Radiohead’s “OK Computer” the top album of the past 20 years, praising a futuristic sound that manages to feel alive “even when its words are spoken by a robot.”
The British band’s album edged out Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and Nirvana’s “Nevermind” on a list in Spin’s 20th anniversary issue, currently on newsstands.
“Between Thom Yorke’s orange-alert worldview and the band’s meld of epic guitar rock and electronic glitch, (‘OK Computer’) not only forecast a decade of music but uncannily predicted our global culture of communal distress,” reads the editorial note on what separated the 1997 disc from the other 99 ranked albums.
Sandwiched between Radiohead’s straight-ahead rock disc “The Bends” and the more experimental, electronic “Kid A,” “OK Computer” was the album that propelled Radiohead to worldwide, stadium-sized popularity. Though it never went higher than No. 21 on the Billboard charts, it won critical raves and a Grammy for best alternative music performance.
Spin’s Chuck Klosterman says the album “manages to sound how the future will feel. … It’s a mechanical album that always feels alive, even when its words are spoken by a robot.”
Years earlier, Spin ranked Nirvana’s “Nevermind” the greatest album of the nineties. In the time since, however, editor-in-chief Sia Michel and others simply found they were reaching for “OK Computer” more than the slightly less relevant “Nevermind.”
“Whereas when Nirvana came out, everybody was talking about negation and slackers and everything like that — seven years later, it was the dot-com boom and 22-year-olds were making $80,000 on Web sites,” Michel recently told The Associated Press.
Also in the top 10, in order, are Pavement’s “Slanted and Enchanted,” The Smiths’ “The Queen is Dead,” Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising,” Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” and N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton.”
Read more at CNN…

From Pitchfork: Bands like Radiohead can leak little droplets of information about coming albums over the course of a year. Tantalizing us with what’s in store, teasing us with cryptic quotes, and generally getting us all riled up, so that when the album finally drops, all of those droplets have whet our appetites such that we must have the album.
Well, Thommy Boy has given NME.com a few golden nuggets of info about the band’s seventh album, which is not due until next spring at the earliest. Yorke feels that the recording process this time around finds the band shifting gears, much like they did in the post-OK Computer sessions that eventually led to Kid A and Amnesiac.
“It’s going well,” Yorke said of the work so far. “It’s a bit like Kid A– we’re going through a period of change. But that’s good. We’ll get there.”
That’s it; that’s all Yorke said about the album. But that’s all he has to say. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the album will sound like Kid A, but that it will be a big step forward for the band.
Read the rest….
(thanks to idioten)

Radiohead, one of the UK’s most popular and political rock bands, have turned down a request to play at Live 8.
Singer Thom Yorke has campaigned on some of the same global issues as Live 8, such as the reform of trade laws.
But a band spokesman said they could not play because the band were too “spread out” and guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s wife had just given birth.
Yorke and Greenwood did appear on the Band Aid 20 single. The Live 8 concerts take place in five cities on 2 July.
The London leg of the event in Hyde Park will feature Madonna, U2, REM, Coldplay, Robbie Williams, Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney.
Fans have until midnight on Sunday to enter a text message competition to win one of 72,500 pairs of tickets.
Radiohead spokesman Murray Chalmers said: “They were asked but they can’t do it.
“Jonny is out of action because he and his wife have just had a baby and the rest of the band are spread out all over the place at that time.”
The spokesman added he did not know whether the band endorsed Live 8 and its aims.
From the BBC.