Fear Stalks the Land!: A Commonplace Book

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Me in the 90s: ooo, I do enjoy a bit of clever boy indie music - yes please Pablo Honey… oh, The Bends is just so fragile and beautiful, they totally get me… ahhh, but OK Computer is very clever, with levels that a lot of us probably don’t fully understand… *moans along to Paranoid Android for the 105th time that month TY Always him. I’ve been digging through this stuff going: ‘These people need help,’ but at the same time being really proud Thom Yorke SD I was a real evangelist for the internet in the beginning; I thought it was going to be amazing. I thought it was going to be like Gutenberg’s movable type; it was going to revolutionise the world, and it did, only in a way that I didn’t foresee. It’s become the worst thing that you could imagine. If, however, you fit neither of those categories and are rather someone who likes to observe the artistic/songwriting process, this may also be worth your time.

Additionally, on theNovember 4theve of “Kid A Mnesia”’s release, Canongate will releasetwo art books byThom Yorke and Stanley Donwoodcatalogingthevisual works created duringthe Kid A / Amnesiac era: SD It felt like if a method was developing, that was a bad thing. If you’re doing things by a method you just end up with the same result in different iterations. We were trying to destroy methods, to destroy habit. Basically, really perversely trying to make things as difficult as we could all the time. TY I’d be going off on one in all directions, flailing around, experimenting with lots of different things, not even worrying whether it was going to be lyrics or not. And Stan was doing the same; Stan had also been writing short stories, and that was influencing me as well. It spiralled. But we’re also desperate for something real and true that speaks to us. People have been reading more. They’ve been watching films more. I feel that there’s going to be a massive reaction. Kid A and Amnesiac are, if nothing else, a celebration of what is possible when a bunch of people get together and forget about everything except trying to create work that speaks to them at that moment, in a sort of frenzied, last-days-on-Earth kind of way. I don’t know why we thought it was the last days on Earth, but I guess we did; it was the millennium, whatever. But that kind of madness is important. That’s certainly how I’ve seen it, digging through this stuff, going: “Who are these people? They need help,” but at the same time being really proud of that room of people doing it.Out of the first world war, and out of all the positivism of the industrial revolution, there was this disillusionment in the 1920s, right? You had this terrible Spanish flu, millions of people dying … and at some point it lifts. It all lifts, and then you get the roaring 20s. You get this explosion in music and art and film. What’s really interesting is that we’re witnessing on one side a determination by certain states, like Britain, to engage us in some horrific kind of doublethink. Being told how wonderful everything is when literally thousands of people are dying every day. Being told by the government how well they’re doing. That’s what we’re ingesting. TY We wanted to build a studio, and it wasn’t ready, so we went on this very strange trip to Paris, and we went to this exhibition …

SD There was a lot of jingoistic triumphalism in popular culture. We felt there was a shift in awareness – maybe that was the fairly rapid disillusionment with Tony Blair Thom Yorke SD We would start on two canvases next to each other, and after a certain amount of time, swap over and start working on the other one. And basically keep doing that until someone had … “won” the painting. Fear Stalks the Land!: A Commonplace BookPromotional eBooks Fear Stalks the Land!: A Commonplace Book

Summary

Another book that probably more rightly deserves a three-and-a-half star rating than four, but we round up here. Radiohead has announced the forthcoming release of “Kid A Mnesia,” a multiple format triple-album release marking the 21st anniversary of the group’s influential “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” albums, due November 5 via XL Recordings. TY On and on and on he went. And it really formed part of what was happening. The minotaur cursed to repeat its mistakes in a maze. We had this whole plan worked out for this ziggurat, where people could log on, and build a room in the ziggurat themselves, and leave messages for other people …

TY It was called the Byzantine Ziggurat. But we didn’t want anyone’s data, therefore it was never going to work. The creatures in the Amnesiac artwork felt like the abstracted, semi-comical voices that battled us as we tried to work Thom Yorke It's a coming of age for Kid A & Amnesiac and it's joined by a new album, Kid Amnesiae, a memory palace of half-remembered, half-forgotten sessions & unreleased material. Target 80s Landscape, by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. Additional computer rendering by Nigel Godrich. We finally applied our training. The only thing I would have said to me then – to all of us, but especially me – is, that voice in your head that’s telling you to torch the tapes and walk away, that everything you’re doing is shit? You need to give that guy a firm talking to. You think he’s helping you out, but he isn’t. TY We felt that there was a sort of uncomfortable shift in awareness going on. Maybe that was the fairly rapid disillusionment with Tony Blair: all the Cool Britannia nonsense, and all the artwork – the kind of thing that was called “ Brit art”, and the YBA phenomenon that preceded that period … it just didn’t speak to us. 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. 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.

SD Just creating a world in which you can tell a story. I felt like I was just full of stuff that I wanted to get out: all these ideas, all these interpretations of current affairs, politics, history. But it felt like you couldn’t do it in isolation: you had to build some sort of structure that it would make sense in, otherwise you’d just be a loony on a bus. publishing alongside a full-colour book of artwork, Kid A Mnesia. A must-have for all Radiohead fans.