Thom Yorke & Stanley Donwood – Kid A Mnesia | A Book of Radiohead Artwork (04.11.2021)

Whilst these records were being conceived, rehearsed, recorded and produced, Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made hundreds of images. These ranged from obsessive, insomniac scrawls in biro to six-foot-square painted canvases, from scissors-and-glue collages to immense digital landscapes. They utilised every medium they could find, from sticks and knives to the emerging digital technologies.

The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago – but so much remains the same.

KID A MNESIA is a 240 x 189mm hardback with a paper case cover printed in 5 colours on uncoated stock with debossing on the front and spine and a specially designed, peelable sticker. Inside, the endpapers are dyed black uncoated paper. 360 pages long and heavily illustrated throughout, the internal pages are printed in 5 colours on coated Italian paper with one 40-page section at the midpoint on heavy uncoated paper. A paper gatefold section ends the book folding out to reveal a spread of 3 images each side.

The book showcases more than 300 colour artworks. In addition, it features a dialogue between Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood about the creative process and a specially commissioned essay, Kid Alphabet, by Gareth Evans about Radiohead’s body of work.