'How we work? From the music, mostly, but concepts fly around, often things just move down river just finding their way.'
Thom Yorke is a musician, artist, composer and activist. He is best known as lead singer and songwriter of Radiohead: the group have won several Grammy and Ivor Novello Awards and have released critically acclaimed music. Radiohead’s work is widely regarded as some of the most celebrated and influential work of recent decades. The band have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and their work sits in the US Library of Congress.
Away from Radiohead, Yorke’s solo studio albums The Eraser, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes and Anima were met with widespread acclaim upon their release in 2006, 2014 and 2019 respectively. Yorke also worked with Godrich in collaboration with Red Hot Chilli Peppers bassist Flea, Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco, to perform and release new music, as part of the group Atoms for Peace, releasing their debut studio album, Amok in 2013.
Yorke has contributed music for film and theatre projects, including composing the soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the cult classic film Suspiria and music for the 2015 production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times.
In November 2021, as part of anniversary celebrations of the influential Radiohead albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), the albums were combined with a third disc of unreleased material in a triple album, KID A MNESIA. The release accompanied Yorke’s two-year long project with artistic collaborator Stanley Donwood and producer Nigel Godrich, to create the KID A MNESIA Exhibition, an interactive audio-visual experience with music and artwork drawn from the two albums. It was released free of charge by Epic Games in November 2021 for PlayStation 5, PC and Mac. Yorke, Donwood & Godrich worked alongside video/computer artist Sean Evans, theatre set designer Christine Jones and game developers [name the machine] and Arbitrarily Good Productions.
In the same month, Yorke & Donwood also released two books, KID A MNESIA and Fear Stalks The Land. The former celebrates the process and artwork created for Kid A and Amnesiac; the latter compiles notes, lyrics and sketches from that period.
Yorke and Donwood first met in the 1980s at Exeter University and have been collaborating creatively ever since, with Donwood producing cover art for all of Radiohead's albums since The Bends in 1996. In 2022, an exhibition of their drawings from 1999-2001 (during the creation of Kid A and Amnesiac) - 'TEST SPECIMENS' - garnered acclaim, following a major Christie's sale. Since 2021, while working on cover art for The Smile's A Light for Attracting Attention (2022), they enhanced their practice by painting together, side by side at the canvas, for the first time, as showcased in 2023 exhibitions 'The Crow Flies: part one' and 'part two'.
EXHIBITIONS
'The Crow Flies: part two', TIN MAN ART, London (2023)
'The Crow Flies: part one', TIN MAN ART, London (2023)
TEST SPECIMENS, TIN MAN ART, London (2022)
'How to Disappear Completely', Christie's, London (2021)
COLLECTIONS
The Bonnefanten Musuem, Maastricht, Netherlands