A painting by Thom Yorke: Yours for a Song

The two old friends sitting side by side on a sofa in the basement of a London gallery are not, as once rumored, the same person. One is Thom Yorke, leader of Radiohead, one of the most important rock bands of the last 30 years. He has shoulder-length brown hair, a graying beard, and wears black Comme des Garçons clothing. In keeping with his reputation for nervous clumsiness, he looks down at his feet as he talks, then looks out the window, before finally making eye contact.

Next to him is the artist. Stanley Donwood. The couple met in the late 1980s when they were students of Fine Arts and English Literature at the University of Exeter. Donwood (a pseudonym: his real name is Dan Rickwood) has worked on Radiohead’s artwork since 1994. Bald and bespectacled, one ear adorned with pirate rings, he looks directly at me when he speaks.

In the 1990s, there was a wild theory that Donwood was actually Yorke’s artistic alter ego, as if the singer led a double life as the Banksy of alternative rock, a notion that elicits a laugh from Yorke. After all, I’m not that nervous. Meanwhile, Donwood seems taken aback. “I don’t think it was deliberate,” the latter says of his elusive past. “I was accused of being a paranoid recluse and I don’t know where he came from.”

A look at his work with Yorke might explain that. Themes of dread and collapse run recurring in Radiohead’s songs, a sense of being lost in a technologically unbalanced world ruled by rapacious thugs. The band’s visual identity is no less vividly haunting. Children’s cartoons are repurposed for sinister purposes, like the band’s logo of a toy bear bristling with teeth. The 2003 album Stop the thief it has a fold-out map showing the city streets riddled with words like “executioner” and “fear.” Blurry figures appear in a disorienting highway landscape on the 1997 cover OK computer. Like the feverishly illustrated booklet hidden in the 2000s CD case. child toNothing is what it seems.

The fruits of the latest artistic collaboration between Donwood and Yorke lean against the walls of the ground-floor gallery space at Cromwell Place in South Kensington. They are paintings made for last year’s debut album by Radiohead spin-off group The Smile. It will be exhibited in a show called The Crow Flies, represent fantastic bird’s-eye topographies of imagined landscapes. With their opalescent blue river systems and psychedelic hills, the canvases are brighter and more joyful than the duo’s usual work. One of the inspirations was a cartographic exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Yorke’s hometown.

“When I was a child I began to think about art, my father had many books on nuclear physics whose diagrams I always liked a lot,” says the singer. (His father of his was a nuclear physicist). “I got in a lot of trouble in art school for making diagrams like paintings instead of natural scenes. So I have an affinity for maps. They are beautiful by accident.”

The exhibition is organized by the contemporary art gallery. tin man art. Following an auction of the couple’s work at Christie’s in 2021, it marks the next step in their tentative emergence as an art-world entity. “I am not a commercial artist. I think Dan does,” says Yorke, using Donwood’s real name. “My work is elsewhere. We come together in the context of making artwork for records and the paraphernalia that surrounds it. I have always hidden behind that context. It was kind of a tasty escape to be in the context of the musical material. Then I could say to myself: ‘I don’t have to consider this as valid work’”.

“We’re making wrapping paper for records,” Donwood says tersely, not wanting to push the talk of proper art too far. He has held solo shows, published books, and worked with authors as the nature writer. robert macfarlane. He also performs the official art of the Glastonbury festival.

The Smile’s paintings A light to attract attention They were made in Yorke’s garden shed at the Oxford house where he lives with his wife, the Italian actress Dajana Roncione. Donwood would take the train from Brighton, arriving on his folding bike. They took turns wielding the brush.

“I tend towards neurotic perfectionism and I hate it,” says Donwood. “I fight it all the time, which is really hard when it’s just me.” Meanwhile, contrary to the tortured-artist caricature of him, Yorke has no such complexes. “It’s explosively expressive,” says Donwood. “Dan leads and I follow,” says the singer. “I’m kind of a disruptor.”

Both are 54 years old and were born three weeks apart in 1968. They remember the beginning of their friendship in Exeter. “I was a loudmouth,” Yorke recalls from his student days. “Electro, studious, diplomatic” is Donwood’s modest assessment of his own youthful character. Yorke admired the tailoring of the other’s jib: Donwood had a wardrobe of non-student suits and hats.

I can’t tell linear stories in the lyrics… I often dream about something or have a strong image in my head.

Originally from Essex, Donwood always wanted to pursue art. Yorke approached him from the side. “He wanted to make music but couldn’t read it,” he says. “Art school seemed like the best option. There were quite a few musicians that he admired who went to art school.” The literature part of the joint degree was a compromise. “I guess English was a way to keep my parents happy,” says Yorke. “It was very difficult for me. When I finished English Literature I didn’t want to read a book again for years. Because I really found that level of analysis…” He makes a sound as if something is deflating and seems to shrink into the sofa.

Write songs in a free associative way. “I can’t tell linear stories in the lyrics, that seems basically impossible to me… I often dream of something or, while working on a song, I have a strong image in my head that ends up in the lyrics. “She likes to include everyday phrases, a practice inspired by artist Barbara Kruger. “Perhaps the most obvious example is ‘Karma Police,’” she says, referring to the single from Radiohead’s masterpiece, OK computer, whose final chorus he recites in a conversational tone. “’Ugh, I was lost for a minute.’ I probably heard it on a TV show.”

When sung in her high, quavering voice, this unexceptional phrase packs with power. “It’s so ironic that for years people wrote about the way I wrote lyrics as if it was something very deep and sincere,” says Yorke. “It’s nothing, dammit. It’s like a collage. It’s just walking down the street and experiencing something and thinking, ‘What would it be like if I shoved that in your face?’”

The first Radiohead record Donwood worked on was my iron lung, released in 1994. This came as the vinyl era was coming to an end, to be replaced by CDs. “The record store was my introduction to art. I didn’t go to galleries,” says Donwood. His favorite album cover is a recondite choice, the Throbbing Gristle album. 20 greats of jazz funk. Yorke’s is the floppy-imitation cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday” single, which is said to be so expensive to make that money is lost on every copy sold.

Their working partnership took shape at a fertile time for crossovers between art and music. The intertwined rise of Britpop and Britart took place in the mid-1990s, a reboot of the London movement in which artists like Damien Hirst socialized with bands like Blur in private Soho members’ clubs. Both Yorke and Donwood seem distraught by the coincidence. “We were running away at high speed,” says Yorke. Radiohead stood aloof from Britpop and its youthful swagger. “There was a lot going on like that,” Yorke says tartly. “A lot of cocaine and a lot of sarcasm. Lots of ‘I’m so much smarter than you.’ For me in particular, an anxious and paranoid-prone person, this was just bullshit I couldn’t deal with. So I stayed away from everything.”

Another cross between art and music finds a different reaction. The KLF were the pop duo turned artistic anarchists who burned £1 million in a ceremony filmed in 1994. Donwood makes grateful noises while Yorke makes bowing gestures. “We would definitely pin the tail on that donkey,” he says.

This raises the question of his own attitude towards the art market. “I would put the line at a Russian oligarch,” says Yorke when asked if there is anyone he would rather not buy one of his paintings, which are priced at £10,000. “No, apparently I wouldn’t put a stop to a Russian oligarch,” he adds with amusement as the Tin Man Art gallery owner waves frantically from across the room.

By contrast, Donwood looks a little pained. “It’s good to sell them, but it’s also bad because these paintings are like your children,” he says. Yorke turns to him: “You realize you’re making a pretty good pitch now, don’t you?”

The raven flies: first part, from September 6 to 10; Second part, from December 6 to 10; both in tin man art gallery, Cromwell Place, London SW7