![]() ![]() When I did eventually start thinking about music and we started getting together again, landscape had freed me up, and I know Stan was into that stuff as well.” ![]() So landscape became an extremely important part of what was going on, because it loosened me up. Stop completely for a while.’ So I was wandering around just drawing anything I could see. “Thom Yorke: It coincided with the fact that I’d a had a complete creative block, and Rachel, my partner at the time, had said, ‘Stop trying to make music. “Stanley Donwood: I thought it would be really funny if we painted just in shades of blue and purple.” “And that’s what kicked the whole thing off: let’s make these massive landscapes, these epic things” “Stanley Donwood: David Hockney in the Pompidou. “Thom Yorke: But why were we so obsessed, for example, with drawing the trees and all that sort of stuff? Part of it was that I had made the decision to sort of spend a lot of time in Cornwall, and Stan and I were travelling around a lot together in the landscape. and then 9/11 happened and you had to go and promote the record in America” We’d made all this artwork that depicted fires, nuclear explosions over America and the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center. “Stanley Donwood: There was a lot of disappointment about integrity, or lack thereof, pertaining to Tony Blair. “It was a strange new phenomenon to behold, and one now taken for granted: an obsession with how one looks rather than what one does.” The phrase ‘spin with a grin’ was flying around at the time, because of the aggressive and self-serving PR tone coming out of the New Labour government.” “What we were listening to, what we were reading, was the total opposite of that. “Thom Yorke: We felt that there was a sort of uncomfortable shift in awareness going on.” “Stanley Donwood: There was a lot of jingoistic triumphalism in popular culture” So it was impossible to even start work, for a long time. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy – but that’s where we were at. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. Rather than immersing ourselves in this con-gratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. And at the same time everybody involved felt like we’d been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. “We wanted to be completely independent in every aspect of the production element of everything we were doing. “THOM YORKE: At that time we had this dream of a workshop space: an open space for lots of ideas” “And the changes that have happened to society, culture and our understanding of history are also huge” It was before 9/11, before the War on Terror, before the conjoining of the police and the military – all of the social changes that have led towards the position we now find ourselves in” I can’t believe the innocent world we lived in when we were making this work. “STANLEY DONWOOD: Twenty years seem to have passed like nothing, but it really is a long time.
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