Stanley Donwood

2010-09-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

wednesday, september 15

Take Cover: Radiohead Artist Stanley Donwood

We chat with the man behind some of the most iconic sleeves of the last 15 years.

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

For this very special edition of Take Cover, we spoke with Stanley Donwood, the man responsible for all of Radiohead's album covers from The Bends on, along with most of the band's artwork. From the bare, bleak OK Computer cover to the vibrant shots of color that spray over In Rainbows, Donwood has helped to capture all the alienation and intensity of one of the most celebrated bands of all time. Plus: Without him, there would be no Radiohead Bear.

Donwood is currently displaying his first U.S. gallery show at San Francisco's FIFTY24SFthrough October 27. The show is called Over Normal and features some of the same bright, oil-based colors and billboard-advertisement concepts behind his subversive Hail to the Thiefsleeve. It finds Donwood turning words commonly found in spam e-mails and repurposing them as mutated and modern pieces of consumer art. Over Normal also features a vocoder-assisted, spam-based audio element called the Overnormalizer, created with John Matthias.

Click on to see some pieces from the show and read our interview with Donwood about his work with Radiohead and how his art has evolved over the years:

Hail to the Thief cover; "Forgot Was Sorry" from Over Normal gallery show

Pitchfork: Why did you revisit some of the themes and colors you used on Hail to the Thiefin Over Normal?

Stanley Donwood: The colors just look great because they're taken from signs of desire to be noticed at high speed. They are very pleasing colors-- but the frantic-ness and intensity of them is slightly disturbing as well.

Advertising is designed to be seductive and attractive and, in a lot of ways, it's very beautiful. But there's something unsettling about being continually sold something. I liked taking the elements of roadside advertising out of context because it removes the imperative and just goes to the essence of it-- the pure heart of advertising.

Pitchfork: I remember first seeing the Hail to the Thief artwork and thinking it felt ominous.

SD: That word occurred to me this morning when I watched the sea fog of San Francisco descend from the sky, obscuring the city minute by minute. It was very beautiful but also ominous, like a shroud, and I really love it when you get that strange combination of feelings that play against each other.

It's also ominous because all these colors that I've used are derived from the petrol-chemical industry. They're only possible because of the fractioning of hydrocarbons. That's how they get the pigments. None of it is natural. It essentially comes from black sludge. We've created this incredibly vibrant society, but we're going to have to deal with the consequences sooner or later

Pitchfork: Looking through your Radiohead covers over the years-- comparing the pale OK Computer with the vibrant In Rainbows-- it seems like you may have become more comfortable accentuating the more beautiful aspects of technology and alienation.

SD: Or I've become more jaded and weary. We were doing that OK Computer stuff back in 1996 and I was in my mid-20s and much more distressed by everything and maybe more hopeful that something could be done about it. Now it's just more hopeless, so I'm trying to be slightly happier with myself. No one really wants to be miserable all the time.

Growing up and living in England, I'm surrounded by grey skies and sarcasm, so when I came to America, my first impressions were bright, hopeful, cheerful. In America, the colors sing, they don't just glower at you. The West Coast especially is fantastic. It seems like you can do whatever you want here, which is not the case where we come from.

Pitchfork: So is that British mindset behind the gloomier palette of something like OK Computer?

SD: Well, I remember we were trying to make something the color of bleached bone. We had a rule that if we made a mistake we had to scribble over it-- we couldn't do the Apple-Z thing; we couldn't undo. It was done on an early Apple Mac. But I got very fed up with using just computers, because you're so restricted; you got a little mouse, a little light pen that you move about and you click and click and click. I wanted to use other things. I used paint a lot. For In Rainbows, I used hypodermic needles, syringes, ink, and molten wax. Especially after Kid Aand Amnesiac, which were very dour and gloomy, I wanted some brightness.

Pitchfork: Do you do work with a computer now?

SD: Yeah, but I enjoy making prints and things that are manual better. Computers don't seem real to me because there's a sheet of glass between you and whatever is happening. You never really get to touch anything that you're doing unless you print it out. I don't really enjoy making artwork on a computer because it doesn't seem like I've done anything.

"Desire Enlargement" from Over Normal gallery show
Pitchfork: It's funny, you're subverting advertising with Over Normal, but obviously a lot of your logos for Radiohead are really iconic and work well as ads.
SD: I grew up in the 80s and that was the first time advertising was considered seriously as anything resembling an art form. I was very influenced by that, but at the same time really resenting it and really hating commercialization.
Pitchfork: When you see something you've done on a t-shirt or a poster now are you still conflicted about it?
SD: Yeah, a bit. I come from a generation in England that considered making money or trying to promote yourself to be morally suspect. I love going somewhere like Japan where you can't understand a word of the advertising-- you just see it for its aesthetic beauty, without feeling that you're being sold something.
Pitchfork: Would you ever consider doing an actual ad for a company?
SD: It depends who they were or what it was. I wouldn't be crazy about it unless I had to pay a huge tax bill or one of my kids broke their leg or something.
Pitchfork: Have you been approached?
SD: Not really, no. I don't think they can find me. And I wouldn't go out looking for it.
Over Normal trailer:

Posted by Ryan Dombal on September 15, 2010 at 8 a.m.

http://pitchfork.com/news/40032-take-cover-radiohead-artist-stanley-donwood/

Juxtapoz-Part 1

2010-09-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

Sep 01

2010

A Stanley Donwood Interview, Part 1

Posted by Evan Pricco in Untagged

I sat down with Stanley Donwood this past week to expand upon our first interview we did in 2007, when we had never met and the entire piece was done via email. Now, as Stanley is in San Francisco for his Over Normal exhibition at FIFTY24SF Gallery, we took a drive around the city, ended up in Haight-Ashbury, and found out that Stanley was far more influenced as a child with the Summer of Love than I could ever have concluded on my own. Of course, Radiohead album cover art and band identity and Summer of Love imagery don't really have a lot in common from what I can detail.

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Aug 30

2010

A Few Preview Photos of Stanley Donwood's "Over Normal" @ FIFTY24SF Gallery

Posted by Evan Pricco in Untagged

We took a few minutes out of our Sunday to visit UK-resident, Stanley Donwood, as he and John Matthias prepared for both a visual gallery experience (ie, paintings and prints by Mr Donwood) and sonic experience (ie, sound by Donwood and Mattias) in the FIFTY24SF Gallery. I didn't want to intrude too much, so I just snapped a quick few pictures and didn't ask about Radiohead.

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Aug 13

2010

A Mark Ryden book signing at SFMoMA

Posted by Evan Pricco in Untagged

Made my way down to Mark Ryden's book signing for "The Snow Yak Show" at the SFMoMA last night. It was a madhouse! In a good way. People came from far and wide to see Mr Ryden and get a little something signed, whether it be book, sketchbook, or magazine. And, not sure if Ryden staged it, but their was so hardcore conceptual fans who came out dressed up and in performance art mode. It really added to the ambiance.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/Evan+Pricco/26531-a-stanley-donwood-interview-part-1

Juxtapoz-Part 2

2010-09-05T20:29:00.002-07:00

Sep 02

2010

A Stanley Donwood Interview, Part 2

Posted by: Evan Pricco on Sep 02, 2010

Tagged in: Untagged

In the second part of my discussion with Stanley Donwood in conjunction with his exhibition opening at FIFTY24SF Gallery tonight, it becomes quite clear that I’m fascinated by England, and Stanley is fascinated by California, both for the same/opposite reasons. We talk about the after effects of 1960’s counter-culture movements, the anti-history of the USA, and the maze that is London.

Evan Pricco: What do you think about San Francisco? How does it compare to Los Angeles, which you have been to before? Is it different to you?

Yes. Very.

But that is the interesting part about California; it’s like a mini country. San Francisco is very California, and LA is very much still California.

Yeah, but so is Death Valley. Its like Scotland to England, where LA is London and SF is Edinburgh, right? But yeah, it’s very different. I love Victorian architecture and the ornate-ness to it, the pointless decoration. Really brilliant, and its everywhere here, and all made of wood. This is architecture that was supposed to be carved from stone and here they have done it, but out of wood! Its like making models, and all the homes are different and they are not meant to go together. The small gaps between the houses, its almost like why don’t you ask your neighbor if you could borrow a wall, because it is nearly like your wall is there wall. But no, there is that gap that nobody can get through except for a mouse.

But San Francisco is great. The trees are great, the trams are great, and the bikes are great. That whole fix-ey thing is great. But the coolest thing I saw today was a guy going down Fillmore on a skateboard wearing a suit and hat. It was possibly the coolest thing I had seen all year.

That is kind of San Francisco in a nutshell. Its interesting to me, growing up here, growing in Northern California, is that when I step back and look at art and culture in California, its always going back to counter-culture: underground comics, skateboarding, Haight Ashbury, all the Silicon Valley tech movements that have shattered the norm, drugs, music, its all based on that idea of “experimentation.” And Hollywood has glorified it for better or for worse. But then you look at San Francisco as the place that was founded during the Gold Rush, and this whole “I’m going to strike it rich by moving across the country to mine for gold, and I’m staying in SF for awhile on my way.” That concept was a bit counter-culture and a bit mad at the time. So you have all these very absurd but very individualistic creative energies that basically founded the place. There was no blueprint, it was just absurd, but it worked.

Right, going out to find gold, what are the chances of that? But there is that a chance.

I learned today that Google was founded here by Stanford students, and that Stanford was founded by a railroad baron, Leland Stanford and it’s home to the right wing think tank, the Hoover Institution. I picked up this map today done by the SF-writer, Rebecca Solnit, and she made this map called the “Right Wing of the Dove.” It’s the Bay Area as the conservative military brain trust, and it goes from the north where there is the Bohemian Grove, then to Travis Air Force Base, Chevron, Bechtel, Wal-Mart, Stanford, Hoover Institute, Robotex, Lockheed Martin, and it goes on… but its astonishing, a recommended read.

They don’t sell that image to you about the liberal Bay Area at the airport, and its very much an interesting point that Glenn Beck, or Bill O’Reilly would chastise the Bay Area for being this liberal bastion while this is very much a powerful conservative industrial complex here. I think conservatives here love that buzzing distraction from the talking heads.

And we were in the Haight Ashbury today and in my mind I’m thinking, “This was where you could show up in Golden Gate Park and take your clothes off if you wanted to, years ago, and how far is that away from Bechtel?” But it’s actually only about two miles away in this small geographical area of the world.

Did you know that Radiohead was the first band to play in Golden Gate Park at night? It was for the Outside Lands Festival in 2009.

Wow, I didn’t know that. Ever? Wow.

That’s a bit far from the spirit of Bechtel as well, 60,000 people singing “Fake Plastic Trees” together in the Park that was the capital of the counter-culture movement in this country.

(Laughs). Its funny how that counter-culture thing has turned out. All the hippies have grown up and made a little money, and now the counter-culture is coming from a completely different direction.

I don’t even know where the counter-culture is anymore. I want to know, but I couldn’t tell you.

Its disparate now, isn’t it? There isn’t that sort of “one kind of youth movement” at the moment. There isn’t one kind of adult culture at the moment, either. But you can tell who’s who, can’t you? You can walk around San Francisco and you can sort of see people who are on your side. I had that happen to me today, where some guy just sort of nodded at me on the street as in some sort of confirmation. I felt like a regular.

I think you could live here, just meeting you for a few days it seems like you are enjoying it.

There is a lot I like about it here, but there are a lot of things I like about Barcelona, Amsterdam… but its that sort of English gloom, gray depression that makes me say, “Ah, I could live here, I love it here… but wait, it’s too great! I’m having too much fun! I need to go back to England where its really shit.”

How come you don’t live in London?

Because there you can’t get out. You can’t see the countryside. It’s too flat. I grew up in Essex County and it was very flat, and very close to London. Funny enough, though, London is my favorite city in the world. In a fucked up way, though.

I’m really into the history of a place, and the first thing I do when I’m in a place like San Francisco is say, “How did all this stuff get here, and what was here before?” And a lot of American history has been erased, a lot of the Native American culture and history destroyed. But in London you get a full history of things. People have been writing about it for 1,000 years. When I wander through London, I feel like I’m drifting through the autumn leaves of the past.

London is probably dying as a city, it probably won’t last another 100 years in terms of economic and political influence. The influence is waning. So I walk through this faded city, and everywhere I go, every name of a street means something, there is a story. And you can picture very clearly how everything in London looked 100 years ago, 200, 500… its all there. It’s all written about. That is why I love London.

And that is what all the artwork I did for the Radiohead album Amnesiac is all about: London as an imaginary prison, a place where you can walk around and you are the Minotaur of London, we are all the monsters, we are all half human half beast. We are trapped in this maze of this past.

So Amnesiac was a London album?

For me it was. The work I did on Amnesiac was done by me taking the train to London, getting lost and taking notes.

And that was sort of what the album was about, wasn’t it? Like finding all these historical documents in someone’s attic from a hundred years ago. Nothing sounds like it goes together, but there is this voice that links it all together, verifying that its from the same culture. That’s an amazingly underrated album.

We wanted it to be a like a book. And someone made these pages in a book and it went into drawer in a desk and was forgotten about in the attic. And the attic was then forgotten. And visually and musically the album is about finding the book and opening the pages. And that is why I wanted to make that physical book with the album that we did.

I love that the research for the album was about London.

Yeah, I kept the receipts from the train pass and used it as a business expense. ‘What have you been doing today?’ Well, I went to London and got lost…

Part 3 coming soon…

http://www.juxtapoz.com/Evan+Pricco/26583-a-stanley-donwood-interview-part-2

Juxtapoz-Part 3

2010-09-05T20:29:00.001-07:00

Sep 03

2010

A Stanley Donwood Interview, Part 3

Posted by: Evan Pricco on Sep 03, 2010

Tagged in: Untagged

The last of the 3-part interview with Stanley Donwood, we start to discuss more the specific functions and process behind the Radiohead artwork, collaboration, and that its okay to have your friends make you cry.

The entire “Over Normal” exhibition at FIFTY24SF in San Francisco is on view until October 27, 2010.

Evan Pricco: Was there anything that stood out in your travels to London for the Amnesiacwork?

There was a piece of graffiti on the train when you go into London from where I live, a long piece that had been there many years, and it was painted with a brush, old school style, and it said “Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere.” No one knew who it was, but how many commuters must have seen this? And it was there for years, years and years, and then the building it was on was knocked down.

But a new building was constructed, and somebody went and painted it again… “Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere.” It doesn’t really mean anything but it sort of hints that there is another possibility, another way of looking at the world. And just about the time I started doing all these trips into London, someone, some graffiti artist, I think it was probably their tag, did a beautiful piece that was over the top of this bit that just said the word “Myth’” in huge letters in wild style graffiti. And that was like “Yeah! That was the dream, but it’s a myth.” The streets began to talk to me in this way. And I began reading them in this very personal, slightly mental slightly kind of crazy way . . .

I wonder everyday when I see graffiti, because I know a few graffiti artists and occasionally I know their intention, I know what they are doing, but wonder if another person that has no idea about who writes their name and historical lineages looks at graffiti and thinks “oh that’s cool,” or, “oh I get that, I get what they are doing.”

Yeah, that is one of the few moral things that I have taught my children: graffiti is a good thing. It’s not vandalism, it’s art. People kind of have a gut reaction, or gut response that graffiti is bad, but that isn’ttheir response, they are not saying that, some fucking fascist has told them. What was that fucking zero tolerance bullshit, Rudy Giuliani’s Broken Window theory? Some wanker in some right winged university came up with this idea that from a broken window, you get urban decay. From graffiti you get urban decay. Zero tolerance, so you can have huge advertisements saying buy these underpants, or buy these shoes, or buy this car, and that’s visual pollution as far as I’m concerned. But you can’t just write your name? What’s wrong with that, with saying I live here? People have been carving stuff in walls for a long time.

How much do you collaborate on the Radiohead album artwork with Thom Yorke? (Editor’s note: for those of you under a rock, he is the lead singer of Radiohead)

A lot. We kind of talk rubbish together. It depends on the circumstances. For some records we worked together much more closely than others. That’s all depends on how much time we’ve got and how the music is going, because, obviously, the music tends to come first.

Do they ever call you and ask how does this sound and you say this sounds like shit…

Occasionally I will shout “That’s fucking brilliant.” Only positive comments. If I’ve een silent for a while then they might get a bit worried…. Ha ha! But no… I’m pretty much tone deaf when it comes to that so I don’t really know much about music.

In terms of artwork, we collaborate. We do quite a lot of paintings, and we have a number of them on the wall and we kind of move them around because Thom has a very immediate response to paintings when we are doing them. I’m this kind of “ne ne ne ne ne” person… I don’t know anything about if the star signs are kind of real or anything, but I am a Virgo, born September 11,1968, just after they did that kind of hippie thing. I’m always trying to neaten things up and that sort of thing. And that in a way is quite good. It’s a great collaboration because if it was just me. it would be quite finicky.

So you like the collaboration?

Yeah. We have a painting or we have some artwork on the computer and then Thom comes along and basically fucks it up, makes a real mess and I’m like “Okay I’m going to fuck it up even more”… and then he’s like “You fucked up what I’ve done.” Basically it goes like that, and we just keep fucking up each others stuff until we are happy.

I re-read the interview we did in Juxtapoz in 2007 today, and looked back on our email exchanges, and intentionally did it in email form because we wanted to almost make it as informal as humanly possible. And it read really well. One thing that you said that became really interesting a few months later was you telling me you were about to go burn some wax. And you were doing became that artwork for In Rainbows. I have the special edition box set and its really beautiful, stunning work, especially looking at it in that large format. Where did the wax idea come from?

We were in a ruined stately home, I don’t know what the equivalent to that is in America, but it looked like Buckingham Palace only slightly smaller. But it was completely derelict and for reasons that probably escape me, we were all there recording what would become In Rainbows. The place was so fucked we couldn’t stay in it. So the band was staying in a load of caravans outside and I was staying in a teepee on the grounds of this stately site.

How do you guys not get bothered when you do something like that?

Bothered by ghosts?

I guess those, too, but I mean bothered by superfans?

Well this is in the middle of nowhere…

I know but still… Radiohead doesn’t have fans that show up at the store when they are trying to record? Like psycho fans?

No, it’s pretty quiet. How would anybody know that 2 miles off this tiny rotted track is a decayed home in the middle of one of the biggest forest in England where a totally fucked stately home where some musicians are trying to record an album?

In America, when you guys recorded earlier this year in LA, it was all over the blogosphere and people found out about it.

That was a bit of a problem. But that is LA, what else is there to do? People go on tours to see where famous people live and that’s just fucking beyond belief… who gives a fuck where people live?

So we were there for a long time at this decaying home, more than a month, and had no problems. I lived in a teepee until the end of October. It got kind of cold but I had a little fire in there.

The wax?

At the time I was very interested in the idea that the end of the world is near and the suburban experiment, exemplified by California, interestingly enough, was a massive mistake and we’ve poured all of our resources into a petrol based economy and it’s got no future. We are going to run out of this stuff, it’s getting more expensive all the time, and basically in nutshell, we are all going to die.

Anyway, I’ve read all these books about this, and I was kind of like, alright, okay, I’m going to do the artwork for the next Radiohead record. I’m going to do all of these drawings of these massive kind of empty dead shopping malls, surrounded by car parts, surrounded by endless housing that goes on and on and on. And so I was doing all these architectural drawings of houses and stuff…

All of that work ended up in the Juxtapoz feature …

Right. I was doing all of this and I realized quite soon that the way the music was going was way more organic, more sensual and sexual, and not rigid or architectural at all. I was doing all these drawings and the illumination in this rather decrepit, once stately grandeur room that I was in had these big church candles on the mantle piece of the fireplace. I kind of pushed this old school desk up against where I was working on the drawing board and wax had fallen and gutted out and ran all over the architectural drawing. And my first instinct was “Fuck! Fucking I don’t believe it!” Then I looked at it, and the way it kind of sat, and the way that wax dries, obviously it starts off transparent and it dries opaque. And the spattering of the oils and the wax that had soaked into the paper, and I was like… “ooooh, that’s quite interesting what’s happened there.”

I went through to the next decrepit room, and once the wax was dry, scanned it and it turned out really nice. Because there was some marks I’ve made from rubbing something out with an eraser on the thing and kind of inverted it and fucked around with the thing in Photoshop with the wax. And was like, again, “Ooooooh, this is very interesting.”

At the same time I was drawing with hypodermic needles, you know syringes. I had a friend who was a doctor and I got a load of hypodermic needles and was drawing with them. If you draw with a syringe, the point of the needle is quite far from your hand, and you have to keep a gentle continual pressure with your thumb on the plunger on the hypodermic to push the ink out just a little bit. You draw, and the needle is so sharp it scratches the paper, so you have to draw in this slightly spasmodic way, but you get this lovely effect when you’re drawing. Its sort of the drawings you get when someone who had been tortured or something, and when I was drawing, I got these occasional spurts and splatters when you can’t quite control it, from the tiny little air bubbles. And you get all these accidental splatters, tiny little splatters, so I was trying to draw this endless field patterns with this, and it’s a difficult thing to do. And that mixed with the wax and then played with in Photoshop became a very interesting. The nicest ones I used for the record.

Did you come up with all the color palettes for In Rainbows?

That was something Thom found from this weird account on some meteorological website. We were looking at all these meteorological websites that had satellite pictures of ice blocks at the poles. We had all these images, and one of them was a screen grab that Thom grabbed and it just had some meteorological data and it was written in those colors. They were absolutely beautiful. I got the screen grab and converted it to CMYK and got the CMYK values off each one and used those colors. And that font is one of the fonts used for US highway signage.

It’s a great font. I’ve always like it because it seems so direct. Not to go too far into it, but what’s your favorite song from that album?

“Videotape.” It makes me cry every time I see them play it live. I’m reduced to a blubbery wreck. It’s fantastic. If I died I’d want that played when I was dead. It’s the most awful, saddest song I’ve ever heard in my life.

We were doing the production of the record, and we were sitting in the studio in London and Nigel Godrich (producer) played it and we both just cried sitting there on the sofa. I couldn’t help myself.

What’s with you Radiohead guys and crying? I’ve read stories of Thom crying.

(Editor’s note: Crying is fine, Radiohead members crying is fine, maybe even this editor has cried to a particular song before…)

I found it very embarrassing that my friend could make me cry by singing. Its not like he kicked me in the head or something. I think it was “Exit Music” that used to do that to me as well.

You are invested in the music…

I didn’t like that sort of music when I first started working with them.

But they were just young kids!

I know. I was into that kind of techno music, that acid house, ecstasy kind of thing. Rock music… why would I listen to rock music? They play it with real instruments… we’ve got machines that can do that now! And so you know, but I liked a couple of things on The Bends, and I like a lot of things on OK Computer, and I liked almost all of Kid A, if not all of it. And I’ve gotten more and more into their music… well maybe they are just making better music now . . .

http://www.juxtapoz.com/Evan+Pricco/26634-a-stanley-donwood-interview-part-3

London Views: Gold Series

2007-12-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

2007-October 08 | The Scotsman

2007-11-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

'It's the most over the top thing that I've ever done'
DAVID SMYTH

ALL the talk in the music business in recent days has been of Radiohead's "honesty box" policy for Wednesday's release of their In Rainbows album, and the question of how much you should choose to pay to download new music by one of the world's most important bands.

But perhaps that's missing the point. The group's spokesman reports that, so far, not only are fans choosing to fork out a reasonable sum for the download, but the majority are choosing instead to order the "Discbox" - a £40 version not released until 3 December, which features the album as a download, CD and two 12-inch vinyl records, with eight extra tracks and a lovingly compiled lyrics book full of new artwork by Stanley Donwood.

If the download could be a steal, this is a serious financial commitment. So is it worth it?

"It depends how rich you are!" I'm told by Donwood, who has designed every Radiohead release since their 1994 single My Iron Lung. "If you're on the dole, of course it's a hell of a lot of money. But it costs about that much to go to a Premier League football match, and this project has taken an incredible amount of work. It's been a long journey over ten months, with the artwork evolving as the music has evolved. And it weighs about half a kilo."

The artist has become a "sixth member" of the band, hearing new songs as they are created and adapting his visuals accordingly.

For In Rainbows he's been trying a photographic etching technique, putting prints into acid baths with random results. He keeps the finer details close to his chest, and the band refuse to show off the box properly until the release date, but a small picture at www.inrainbows.com has multicoloured blocky text contrasting with scratchy grey abstractions. "The finished product is quite a lush thing. It's the most over-the-top project I've done with [Radiohead]."

It's an odd position for a major band to be in, where their music could be perceived to be of little monetary value while the artwork costs a bundle. But for Radiohead, Donwood's apocalyptic visuals have long formed a vital part of a complete package. They perfectly complement the songs, from the weeping cartoon minotaur of their Amnesiac album to the grim painted street plans of Hail to the Thief, plastered with words such as "snakes", "poor souls" and "venture capitalism". An impressive new book of his Radiohead-related work, Dead Children Playing shows his progression from the pharmaceutical logos of their greatest album, OK Computer, to the linocut cityscapes of The Eraser, last year's solo album by frontman Thom Yorke.

He studied fine art with Yorke at Exeter, and says they share a similar bleak worldview: "We shout at the same bits of the news."

His close involvement is paying off. Unlike bands such as Hard-Fi, who have claimed that artwork is irrelevant in this iPod age, Radiohead and Donwood's success with their latest innovation shows that, if it looks great as well as sounding great, music can still be very valuable indeed.

• Dead Children Playing is published by Verso on 22 October. In Rainbows can be downloaded from www.radiohead.com from 10 October.

http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1603372007

Juxtapoz, cover

2007-08-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, index

2007-08-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 114

2007-08-01T01:46:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 115

2007-08-01T01:38:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 116

2007-08-01T01:15:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 117

2007-07-31T21:12:00.001-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 118

2007-07-31T17:59:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 119

2007-07-31T17:13:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 120

2007-07-31T16:46:00.001-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 121

2007-07-31T15:43:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 122

2007-07-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 123

2007-07-31T15:06:00.001-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 124

2007-07-31T15:01:00.001-07:00

Juxtapoz, p. 125

2007-07-31T13:28:00.000-07:00

THE CULTIVATION OF CULTURE

2007-04-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

Hello Mr. Donwood! Its an honor and a privilege to be speaking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time out to do this interview. I am not worthy.

Q: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background? Fine art and graphic? How did the relationship between you and Radiohead develop?

I was born in Essex, a typical English county north of London, and I became a typical representative of that bleak region. Essex is essentially a flat land that slopes almost imperceptibly into the grey waters of the North Sea, and the people of the county can frequently be seen standing on our crumbling sea defences, staring silently out at the mudflats. It is not a place that the Tourist Board mention often in their paens to the variegated beauty of Britain.

When I was quite little I vaguely remember drawing pictures of flat horizons, drawn again and again on layer after layer of tissue paper, and then glued together. These ended up looking like a sort of foggy nothingness. And I drew huge housing estates on lengths of discarded computer printout paper. Later, I managed to bluff my way through art college mainly by staying out of the way of the tutors. I didn't much care for art, but it was definitely preferable to most of the other options available to a teenager from Essex. I think any graphic sensibility I might have dates from an afternoon when I ate a quantity of liberty cap mushrooms and had a sort of vision.

I first met Radiohead when they weren't called Radiohead and they were sharing a small house in Oxford. I was hitch-hiking around England with a mate called Jim, and we were busking a fire-breathing show. We had a plan to support the band at a pub they were playing in, the Jericho Tavern, but the landlord prevented us. He was worried about the fire risk, which was a pretty reasonable concern. Firebreathing is a terrible way to make a living really; you risk getting pleurisy, setting fire to your clothes, and your breath smells like an oil refinery. I'm glad I gave that up. Anyway, some time later (years? I don't remember) Thom phoned up and asked if I wanted to try making a record cover for a single, which was called My Iron Lung. It took months to do it, because I didn't really know what I was doing, at least as far as the technology went. Since then I've got quite a lot better. At least, I like to think so.

Over the years that have passed I've worked rather closely with the band; and I've seen the recording process and how it works in different locations. Place seems to have a profound effect on how songs are filtered. Recently we've been working in a derelict stately home in Wiltshire; I'll be listening closely to see if that place has any perceptible effect on the recording.

I listen to a record a lot whilst it's being made and I'm making the artwork that will accompany it. It's hard to make art in silence. Well, it is for me, anyway, and the music has a pronounced influence on how the images end up, the sort of energy used to create them, composition and so on. My hope when making artwork for a record is to create something that weirdly enhances the music, something that affects the way you hear it. I stress the word 'hope' in this case.

Q: Influences? Social? Political? What are your biggest influences? What inspires your art?

This is such a hard question that I've made a cup of tea to help concentrate my thoughts, and to possibly help me recover memories buried under the sludge of my lifestyle. I was greatly influenced by the Left wing in Britain in the 1980s. Leftwingers are pretty much like liberals in the US; you know, pro-choice, antiracist, antisexist, environmentally concerned, dismissive of money, openminded... A lot of the socialist-leaning spectrum of politics appealed greatly, and most of it still does. Although it has all got extremely complicated of late. I became aware of politics at about the same time that a vindictive harridan named Mrs Thatcher began her rule over these islands, and resistance to her and her ilk (and political successors) became a vital task.

I became aware of Peter Kennard's work for CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, before I knew anything at all about art or artists. He took the photomantage techniques pioneered by John Heartfield in the 1930s and 40s and updated them for the 1980s. He 'appropriated' John Constable's famous painting of The Haywain, which is this bucolic 18th century oil painting of a hay cart crossing a river, and stuck cruise misiles in it. Fucking brilliant. It'll be on the web somewhere.

A bit later on I discovered the work of Gee Vaucher, who did all the artwork and graphics for an Anarchist band called Crass. She used mostly just black and white, and the results are spectacular. More recently she's done a grand print of the Statue of Liberty, but with Liberty's face in her hands.

But like most people, I try not to be too 'influenced' by anything in particular or any one person or idea. I suppose that I go through phases of enthusiasm or engagement, each of which passes fairly quickly. In the last few years I've been influenced and inspired by Giovanni Piranesi, Japanese packaging, Hieronymous Bosch, A - Z street maps, Samuel Palmer, chromatography, Edward Munch, directional signage, Iain Sinclair, grafitti tags, Paula Rego, pylons, Peter Ackroyd, Scandinavian printmaking, Edward Hopper, Los Angeles advertising, and so on and on and on.

Q: I love the mixture of digital and analog methods to some of your work. For example, the Kid A album cover - Can you give us a short synopsis and process of that work?

That was painted, originally, on big canvases, 170cm square. It was the first Radiohead artwork project that was done off-computer. The whole of OK Computer and all the singles that went with it were all done with an aging beige PowerPC and a stupid fucking mouse. I pretty much hate computers. Anyway, all these paintings were made, and obviously a CD is really small, so I had to find someone who could take high quality photos of the paintings so I could scan them and squeeze them into a computer. There's a whole load of writing about the circumstances behind the paintings on my website, if anyone's interested. There was a 3D program around at the time that allowed you to take a high-contrast version of a section of a painting, transform it into a bumpmap and then drape the full colour version of the painting onto it, and then 'fly' a camera through the canyons that the painting was turned into. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out a way of getting the results off the computer except for taking a screengrab, which explains why so much of the imagery is pixellated. I like that, on occasion. The packaging for Kid A turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Before I started on the project I took a CD jewel case apart and I realised that there was a gap between the CD tray and the back panel, so I thought that I'd design a second booklet to go in that 'secret' space. The booklet for the usual space, ie., inside the front panel was composed of multiple foldouts, bits of tracing paper and hidden images of devils. It was very hard to design, and apparently a complete bastard to manufacture.

Q: Dr. Tchock? Tell us a bit about this fellow...ha. If I'm correct, that is Thom Yorke's alias. Tell us a bit about collaborating with him in a fine art setting. He is a musical genius. How does that correlate into your collaborations?

Thom Yorke's alias? Yes, I've heard that too. Stanley Donwood is one of his other names, according to some people, so perhaps you're interviewing him. The best way that I can put it is that Dr Tchock isn't Dr Tchock and Stanley Donwood isn't Stanley Donwood. The reasons why we have adopted these pseudonyms has nothing to do with being on the wrong side of the law, being on the run, or attempting to avoid paying tax.

Working with the Doktor is okay. What happens is, I do some artwork and then he fucks it up. But then I fuck up what he's done. Then he fucks up what I've just done even worse. So I try to completely fuck up what he's done. In the end we sort of agree to disagree. Over the last year or so I've realised that I am a perfectionist whose natural inclination is to make things neat. I detest this tendency within myself. I have also noticed that Dr Tchock has tendency to smash things up, throw them around the room and then regret his rashness. I think that together we ameliorate the worst in each other.

Q: If you are at liberty to say, are you going to be working on the cover for Radiohead's new album? If so, any hints you can give us as to the direction of the piece? Digital mixture like KID A or straight fine art like HAIL TO THE THIEF?

I have no idea what the cover will look like yet, but I'm using wax, hypodermic syringes, ink, copper plate, needles of various sorts, bitumen, nitric acid, and paint.

Q: Whats in store for the future?

Oh boy. Assuming that we don't find ourselves in some variety of terminally dreadful war, with aggrieved nations all over the planet loosing off nuclear warheads at each other, I imagine that a combination of rapidly accelerating climatic change coupled with the unavoidably awful consequences of the end of our hallucinated hydrocarbon-based economy will trigger off massive human migrations, water shortages, crop failures, infrastructure collapse and death on a truly apocalyptic scale. It's not an uplifting message for your readers, I agree. Happy new year.

Thanks so much for your time Stanley! Appreciate it so much. Keep inspiring us!

I'll try.

INTERVIEW BY: NIGEL DENNIS / ELECTRICHEAT.ORG

theroyalmagazine

Interview with Stanley Donwood

2007-04-27T20:55:00.000-07:00

//Ekin Sanaç//
An exciting time of the year for the Radioheads... It’s not just for the ears, it’s also for the eyes. Thom Yorke released his first album that he recorded without the rest of the gang and it’s called “The Eraser”. Stanley Donwood answers Bant on the story behind the artwork of the album.

* Although I wouldn’t have guessed for it goes perfectly well with the content, according to what I read on the website, this work was not initially made for the cover art of “The Eraser”. How did they end up together? How do you connect “London Views” to “The Eraser”?

I didn’t connect the two; that was Thom. I just sort of encouraged the connection.

* Has there been a researching process for the “London Views” work, for it is a panoramic view of the city?

A kind of accidental research I suppose; more an agglomeration of disparate pieces of information that coagulated to form the eventual artwork. I realised the other night that I’ve actually been going on about this artwork for literally years; boring my friends at the pub and definitely boring my girlfriend. Originally I was going to make medieval-style pictures of modern cities being destroyed, using vellum, tempera paint, gold leaf and so on. But somehow I forgot about that and concentrated on the single colour woodcut style.
For the actual process of carving the picture, I used a London A-Z map and Google images. I was actually in London, but I didn’t want to pollute the purity of a more imagined scene by going and doing that en plein-air stuff.

* I suppose the floodings that took place in Cornwall in 2004 are one of the stories that ended up in the album cover art. Have you actually experienced any natural disasters yourself? What are some other stimulations and trulife stories that have been effective on “London Views”?

No, I’ve been lucky. The floods in Cornwall are the closest I’ve ever been to a real disaster.

* Are we free to assume that “cnut” is a delibarate misspelling of the word “cunt”?

No way. Cnut is an alternate spelling of Canute (also Kanute) who was a Saxon king of England from 1017 until 1035. There is a legend about him which states that his advisors were so convinced that he was a divine being that he could control the tides. To show his humanity and humility, Cnut went down to the beach, ordered his throne to be taken there, sat in it, and commanded thje tide to cease its advance. It didn’t.
I suppose I’m vaguely making a point about global warming/sea level rise.

* Are there any secret, hidden things in the booklet of “The Eraser” ?

No, there aren’t, unless they exist in the differing opinions of the people who see it. This is, I realise, quite unusual for me, as I often find myself layering hidden meanings into artwork. I intended this project to be more ‘tabloid-like’ – really bold, very graphic, almost like a shout rather than a whisper.

* You mention that only 8 copies of the original piece has been made as the technique is fascinatingly hard. Are they all sold out by now?

No, they aren’t. I think that they’re quite expensive. But if you’re feeling wealthy...

* About global warming threat, Noam Chomsky said that there is still hope to win over it, but unfortunately there is no time... How are we supposed to go on as if there is nothing, knowing that the Apocalypse is soon?

I have absolutely no idea. It does seem quite hopeless, but perhaps that’s just my own 37 year old pessimism. Human existence does seem to be a largely savage endevour, briefly punctuated with short periods of happiness. I think that I’m quite depressed though, so you shouldn’t listen to me.

* To you, what are the most inconvenient things about London today? Which place in London is the most peaceful place to you?

The most inconvenient thing is the internal combustion engine. The most peaceful place is by the pond in Temple, just off Fleet Street.

* Have you sensed anything interesting among the band members, some chemistry that is different from the previous albums? Or any “worth telling” stories?

There isn’t a Radiohead Official Secrets Act, but there might as well be. If something was ‘worth telling’, then I couldn’t possibly tell you it.

* Any tips about the cover of the upcoming album from Radiohead?

Ha ha. I think it would be unwise for me to be too definite because I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. The first occurences will probably be on the front few pages of www.radiohead.com, and keep an eye on how we are living in the last days of our hallucinated economy...

* Do you have favorite websites? What is the opening page of your personal computer?

I am so unbelievably dull that the opening page on my computer is my email page. My favourite websites are, maybe; www.schnews.co.uk, and http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm, and http://www.project-ctrl-alt-del.com/
These aren’t really ‘favourite’ websites, just some that I return to. I do a bit of research using the internet, and I’m quite curious about how something so new has so radically redifined our ideas about communication, academic study, activism, and, er, shopping.

* What are some of the tunes that are playing constantly on your music player nowadays?

I haven’t got a music player. I have accidentally totalled my record player during a fit of techno-rage. The last thing I played on it was ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ by Ian Dury.

*What has been your favorite song on “The Eraser”?

Skip Divided. I think it sounds dirty.

--bantergi

Donwood Dresses Up Thom Yorke Solo Album

2007-04-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

June 15, 2006, 2:20 PM ET

Katie Hasty, N.Y.
Artist Stanley Donwood was fascinated by the floods in Cornwall, England, two years ago, inspiring part of his recent exhibition, "London Views." His woodcuts and general interest in the catastrophes of London also seemed to jive with Thom Yorke's upcoming solo release, "The Eraser." And it's his piece "Cnut" that will ultimately grace the cover of the album, due July 11 via XL.

"As often happens, the concurrent work that we were doing -- Thom with the music, and me with the artwork -- seemed to intertwine," Donwood tells Billboard.com. "We realized that the 'London' stuff would fit perfectly with 'The Eraser,' which in a lot of ways seems a very English record. There was something about this immense torrent washing everything away and the futile figure holding back the wave (or failing to) that worked with the record, especially as we had both seen the flood, just when Thom was starting on the music that would eventually become 'The Eraser.'"

"The Eraser" is packaged as one large foldout card of art, in which the CD will be slipped. "The packaging was a bit of a f***er, because the picture at actual size is about 12 feet long," Donwood admits. "We both wanted to avoid using plastic, apart from the CD itself of course."

Donwood (whose real name is Dan Rickwood -- "I like to separate the person I am at home -- washing up, vacuuming, picking up the kids from school and so on -- from whoever Stanley Donwood is," he says) has been friends with Yorke since their days at the University of Exeter. The pair won the best album packaging Grammy for Radiohead's 2001 album, "Amnesiac."

"[The Grammys] didn't really work out well," Donwood says. "A lot of the things that happened on that visit to Los Angeles were utterly alien to me and quite frightening. I smoked too much evil Californian weed and got the heebie jeebies. I was too paranoid to go to the after party and I had an unpleasant run-in with some over-zealous post-Sept. 11 security guards."

Artwork from his various projects is available through Donwood's Web site, which also features some of his writings. But despite his Radiohead association, Donwood says he's never dabbled in music of his own.

"I can't read music, can't tell a guitar from a bass and haven't ever tried to play anything. It's a sort of blind spot in my life," he laments. "I mean, I suppose being a musician is vaguely equivalent to being an artist or a writer -- but much better. Music is more immediate than [visual] art or writing because it has a visceral reach and can alter your mood much more comprehensively and immediately."

As one would expect, Donwood has been given a sneak peak into some new Radiohead material, much like audience earlier this week at the band's New York shows.

"All [the songs] are good! There are a couple of songs -- 'Down Is the New Up' and 'Videotape' -- that are so beautiful. I just pray they don't f*ck them up in the studio. But as I said, I know nothing about music, so really I should keep my gob shut," he jokes. "I think the new work demonstrates a kind of freedom or release. The long-awaited happy album from Radiohead it is not, but I think there's an amount of dark humor in it. Or not."

--billboard

Stanley Donwood interview with GQ

2007-04-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

July 25, 2005
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."

Stanley Donwood: Radiohead's Artist Interview

2007-04-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

You can't judge a book by its cover but a good cover will leave a lasting impression, especially when you are talking about album covers. Abby Road anyone? Through the years an artform has emerged tied in with rock and a few artists' work have become synonymous with the bands they create the artwork for. Mention the name Derek Riggs and Iron Maiden fans will immediately know who you are talking about, the same goes for Stanley Donwood, the man that has given Radiohead a visual signature as distinct as their music. antiMUSIC was fortunate enough to conduct an email interview with Stanley recently to discuss his work for Radiohead, his writings and his new storefront where fans can buy high quality screens of some of his favorite works. We asked Stanley to give us the inside story on each piece of art and we got back an interview that demonstrates the quick wit behind the man that has created the unforgettable Radiohead art. (Several additions have been added to the storefront since we originally sent the interview to Stanley so not all of the pieces are covered here)

antiMUSIC: What first inspired you to become an artist?

Stanley: 'Artist' was just the most convenient way to describe myself on application forms for unemployment benefit. I'm not really sure if it describes what I spend my time doing. Obviously, on the forms I couldn't write 'loafer', 'lazy sod' or 'dole scum' or they would have refused my application. Looking back on the earlier years of my existence, I suppose it was wax crayons that inspired my decision to draw pictures.

antiMUSIC: How did you hook up with Radiohead?

Stanley: I think that my obsession with nuclear apocalypse, Ebola pandemics, global cataclysm and Radiohead's particular brand of unsettling melody have gone together quite well. How this came about I can no longer accurately recall, as I have children and bringing them up has rotted my brain.

antiMUSIC: What has been your personal favorite piece of art you've done for Radiohead (and also your favorite outside of Radiohead)?

Stanley: That is too hard a question for me. I've been pretty happy, on the whole, with all of the Radiohead work that I've done. Though maybe the long landscapes in the Kid A booklet could be a favourite. My personal non-Radiohead piece was a now-lost image which was composed of the advertising strapline, logo and blurb for a Ford car called the Probe. I replaced the picture of the car with a photo of a big erect cock. It was very popular, but the magazine that had commissioned the picture refused to print it.

antiMUSIC: You have a very distinct style that Radiohead fans have come to love. How much of the actual art is inspired by the music and how much by your personal vision?

Stanley: I don't know. When I've been listening to the music for a long time I can't work out where I end and they begin. So to speak.

antiMUSIC: The exciting news for fans of your work and the reason we're doing this interview is you recently opened up your online site to include a store front where fans can purchase prints of your work. Can you tell us how the store front came about?

Stanley: I've had a site called slowlydownward.com for ages, which has a lot of my written work on it; as I say, I used to make screenprints and I really like the process of printing and how the finished prints look. I've got so many pictures that no-one has seen, or only as a little CD-sized image, and I wanted to make fucking great pictures that people can put on their walls. It's a way of getting pictures out in they way they should be seen; not as 4-colour litho on cheap paper, but as real pieces of artwork that have a much greater visual impact.

antiMUSIC: Before we talk about the individual pieces can you fill the readers in a little bit about the prints you are selling. As far as size, material etc?

Stanley: The big ones are 970mm x 640mm, the smaller ones are half that. They're printed on the nicest paper I could find; 270gm archival-quality. Some of them are ten or eleven-colour prints; some are two-colour, some are five or six… and I'm doing some extremely limited runs - editions of ten prints - on black paper with silver inks.

antiMUSIC: Will you be adding more pieces as time goes on?

Stanley: Yep. I just can't get enough of the toxic solvents that are needed to clean the screens.

antiMUSIC: You've also published a few books. Can you tell us a little bit about those projects?

Stanley: The first one was called 'Slowly Downward', and it was originally published by a bloke I met in the pub. There were only 200 copies, printed on hemp paper using a half-defunct printing machine called a Risograph. That book is made up of about fifty very short stories, and it's just been republished by some other people who I didn't meet in the pub. The next book was written as a result of a bet, and it's called 'Catacombs of Terror!', and it's really bad. But it was meant to be bad, so that's okay. I read some real trash while I was researching how to do it; the idea was to write a pulp-style detective novel in one month…

I'm putting a new book together, or at least I'm intending to. It's going to be called 'Household Worms'. Don't know who'll publish that though.

antiMUSIC: If you will be so kind to fill us in a little bit about art you are offering prints of on your site at the moment. Maybe a little bit about their inspiration, the environment in which they were created etc?

.....

Alarm & Escape
- These were put together recently from ingredients I used for the OK Computer project. They're sort of warnings; the graphic language is stolen from traffic signs, exit notices and so on. The 'against demons' hex on 'Alarm' is adapted from an old hobo sign that American tramps used to use. It used to get painted on the sides of barns and so on, about a hundred years ago.

Happy Family
- This was the cover for Radiohead's Karm Police single, again from OK Computer. The main image is of a father leading his family into a home-made nuclear fallout shelter, from a laughable pamphlet the UK Government put out in the 1980s, trying to persuade us that a nuclear holocaust wasn't such a big deal.

Such a Pretty House
- Oh, and such a pretty garden. This was the cover for No Surprises, and pretty much sums up how I feel about suburban living. Car-dependant, short-sighted, narrow-minded, deceitful and ultimately doomed.

Operation Phantom Fury
- "…thousands of residenhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifts fled into the desert, leaving a ghost town, as American warplanes, helicopters and tanks pounded houses that the US military said had been occupied by enemy fighters…"

antiMUSIC: Do you think there is enough appreciation for art in this day and age?

Stanley: Same as ever. I don't suppose there's any less appreciation for graffiti artists than there was for whoever painted cave walls thousands of years ago. I kind of dislike it when people over-analyze art or writing. It's okay when they do it at college or whatever, but it gets a bit annoying when you overhear people talking shite in galleries.

antiMUSIC: What's next for Stanley Donwood?

Stanley: Could be anything. Avian flu, traffic accident.

--antimusic