Description

For Kid A, Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke picked up brushes for the first time. Their earlier Radiohead covers had been built from collage, photography and digital manipulation, but this time Donwood painted large canvases, spreading paint with knives and sticks and building texture with Artex, the plaster used on ceilings. Yorke then photographed the paintings and reworked them in Photoshop, so every image on the album is half painting and half computer.

The mood came from the news. Donwood was shaken by a photograph from the Kosovo war showing snow covered in the debris of battle: "I was upset by it in a way war had never upset me before." At the same time the pair were fixated on a Worldwatch Institute website about climate change, which led them to mountains. Donwood felt the jagged peaks had "some sort of cataclysmic power." A red swimming pool that recurs through the artwork came from Brought to Light, a 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, where it stands for looming danger.

They made many versions, taped them to the kitchen cupboards at the studio and left them overnight. The next morning, Donwood said, the choice "was obvious." The icy, digitally smeared mountains matched an album that swapped guitars for electronics, and Kid A, released on 2 October 2000, went to number one in the UK and the US. In 2021 Yorke and Donwood showed the Kid A artwork at Christie's in London.

Credit

Artwork by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke