of quality control because, I mean, with the way that I’ve worked with Radiohead and so on, there’s five of them and Nigel.’*
Six?
‘I would say 5 + 1 rather than 6.
With the artwork there is me and Thom, which is very different to 5 + 1. We’re 1 + 1, which, compared to 5 + 1 … what comes out of that is very different. I mean, obviously, we don’t go ahead with stuff if the other members of the band aren’t comfortable or happy with it.’
Has that ever happened?
‘No … although I’ve gone wrong a few times.
With In Rainbows I was going to do all this architectural stuff with the software that’s used to create optimum car parking spaces …’
The 2006 tour posters and merchandise were grey, I remember.
‘Yeah. “Any colour so long as it’s grey.” All the t-shirts were grey – it was possibly one of the most insulting things I could have done. Immediately afterwards we set up in Tottenham House, this decaying stately home near Marlborough, to work … and I’d been there for two days or something – had been obsessed by this book The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler* – was in this dreadful nihilistic state, preoccupied with car parks and all that sort of thing, thinking, “There. Bam. Right. This is how it’s going to be” … but they were playing the music and it was the most organic, spiritual, sexual, sensual, beautiful thing that I’d heard them do and I realised that what I was doing was completely wrong and that my head, my mind, my response, had gone awry.’
How did the In Rainbows artwork evolve then – the discbox and the ‘pay what you want’ aspect of the digital release?
‘They’d been thinking how to put the new record out. The idea of people paying what they wanted for it was a bit of a reaction to the way that people who like music are treated by the record industry – if you can imagine such a thing as this overarching authority: “The Music Industry”.
They treat people like, if not actual criminals, potential criminals. All this stuff – targeting people who download music for nothing, what happened to Napster.* It was a reaction to the way the industry assumes people are going to steal music and has created a legal and software mechanism to prevent that. So there was this idea, “Okay, let’s put the record on the internet and say you can pay what you want for it, pay what you think it’s worth – and some people won’t pay anything, some people will pay something,” which was a bit of a gamble, really. A huge gamble.
So the band and management said, “Okay, let’s do it for nothing,” and, to me, “Can you make us something that’s worth about forty quid?” and I thought, “That’s quite a fucking challenge!” (Laughs) “How can I make something that is essentially wrapping paper worth £40?” because, you know, I’d been doing this thing with EMI and they were principally releasing compact discs – horrible, clattery boxes which I hate and have, to my mind, really degraded what record packaging is.
When I was a kid growing up, I would buy records because I liked the sleeves and I would spend ages looking at the sleeves and poring over the sleeve-notes and the lyrics.’
You’d made unusual sleeves prior to the discbox, though: the Hail to the Thief foldout map and the Amnesiac book …
‘Yes, but they were always “Special Editions” and I had to really hassle the record company to do it. They really didn’t like doing it. The people that I dealt with first off were great but there would be people higher up who’d say, “Well, you know, can you reduce the number of pages?” It was always very hard to get it done.’
Without compromising the idea away.
‘Exactly. It was always a question of “How far can you push them?”
Kid A sounded to me like a message left on an answerphone that you received too late to do anything about, but Amnesiac was something else, it was something found when clearing a house, something in an attic, an old book in a drawer, a fragment – something left behind, the meaning of which had been lost.’
The Amnesiac book always struck me as fraught, as you say. Cross-hatching, layered detailing, out of focus, pixellated images – so much work in it, yet its meaning is a mystery; lost and unloved, like the toys in the attic.
‘I spent a long time in London working on it. Walking in London and reading books about London. I found this book called The House of Dr Dee by Peter Ackroyd* and he mentioned Piranesi,* who I’d never heard of, so I went out and found out a bit about Piranesi and I started copying Piranesi’s drawings with a biro because I wasn’t quite sure about copyright. Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Stuart Home … Michael Moorcock’s written some brilliant books about London. King of the City* is fantastic! (Begins turning the pages of the Amnesiac book) God, yes, and the bull …’
The Minotaur?
‘Mmm, Mithras, labyrinthine structures and the idea of a city being a maze or a prison – Piranesi’s imaginary prisons … I would get the train up to London for the day. I did it again and again, doing something that I’ve since found out Bill Drummond does, which is to write a name or a word across a city and then walk the letters … but I was trying to make a film as well and I did make a film in the end, to do with the bull. I think I went a bit mad, to be honest. I think I developed an obsession, looking back; but this idea of bulls … Smithfield Market and Smithfield Fair and its ancient past of bull running. I imagined that the cattle would be taken there, then they’d have this ritual thing where they would drive a bull down to the Thames and kill it and have some sort of horrible sacrifice thing; something to do with bridges and the little beaches you get on the Thames … and I made a film.
There was me – I wasn’t filming, I was directing – and there were three guys with cameras and an actor whose name I cannot remember … Graham? He was a proper actor and he was dressed as a City gent, you know – suit, overcoat, briefcase – and the idea was that he would come out of Farringdon tube station and walk through Smithfield and then down Giltspur Street – I’d mapped all this thing out and written a screenplay and everything!
He would be possessed by the spirit of the bull and become like the Minotaur almost, and descend into a type of madness. So we were filming him walking along, walking faster and faster and looking behind him and then, outside the Old Bailey, he stood against a wall, freaking out, and then start throwing his clothes off and chucking his briefcase!
‘We were filming all this on the hoof and because we just had little handy-cams people couldn’t tell that he was being filmed, you know?
We got down to the River Thames and the City of London Police came and stopped us. Apparently they’d been filming us with CCTV all the way down, filming us making a film – except they didn’t know we were making a film, they had no idea what was going on. Thankfully this was before all the terrorism stuff, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. The police wanted to confiscate all the cameras and I had to say, “Right, no. You’re not confiscating anything, we’ve stopped,” and then we just filmed the last bit where the Minotaur gent walks into the Thames. Just about managed to get away with it.
Then the film got made but I lost it! (Laughs)
It’s one of those things. No one’s ever seen it.
I guess all that became R&D for the Amnesiac book. Funny how all that condenses down into such a little anecdote.’
• • • • •
I want to ask you about the thing underneath Kid A.
(I