EARLY IN 1999, Radiohead began to size up the task of what to do next after 1997’s acclaimed OK Computer. “We were deeply suspicious of any level of success that we’d earned,” Thom Yorke says now. “Trying to get away from wherever the fuck we had found ourselves to somewhere new.” Over the next two years, with 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac, the band leapt forward into a new universe beyond rock’s horizon — accompanied by a rich world of eerie, dreamlike imagery created by Yorke and visual artist Stanley Donwood. Now, they are looking back with a pair of art books, Kid A Mnesia and Fear Stalks the Land!, and a deluxe reissue of the two albums. “At the end of it, the music and the artwork ended up becoming something more transcendent,” Yorke says. “Trying to embrace some sort of future, even if it’s a nightmare.”
ICE AGE COMING Bottom left: “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,” Yorke says.
THROW IT IN THE FIRE The colors of this 2000 Donwood canvas (below) reflect the influence of a David Hockney museum show that the band took in the year before. “It was the first thing we did when we got to Paris, before we started recording,” Yorke says. “It completely blew our heads off.”
TREEFINGERS Donwood based this drawing of a bizarre tree on a dream he had. “At the time, I had very realistic dreams,” he says. (Adds Yorke: “We were grabbing anything that made any kind of sense, and dreams were central to that.”)
Kid A Mnesia: A Book of Radiohead Artwork
Canongate, $50
CLOUD CUCKOO LAND “It’s almost a dark fairyland,” Donwood says of the icy mountain range seen in this 2000 painting. “It was a very lonely, cold, and quiet place.”
The Minotaur of ancient mythology became a key motif for the Amnesiac artwork. “One of the problems I was having trying to write music — the words especially — was how I was relating to my voice,” Yorke says. “I felt like I had built myself this fucking maze and I couldn’t get out.”
LOST AT SEA
I’M NOT HERE Donwood based this large painting, which sold for £137,500 at a recent auction, on a newspaper photograph of a bombed-out scene in Yugoslavia. “It was just a square of snow,” he says. “But the snow had footprints, cigarettes, blood . . . a very up-close reality of war.”
PULK/PULL Yorke connects this drawing to a disturbing 1998 incident when he was “beaten up randomly” by a stranger in his hometown of Oxford, England.