Stanley Donwood

The talent behind Radiohead’s iconic artwork reveals in his own words and for the first time the creative process that has driven his career and earned him a cult reputation. A restless and prolific figure, Stanley Donwood is widely regarded as one of the most important visual artists of his generation. His influential work for Radiohead spans many practices and ever-evolving aesthetics over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installations to print-making. Here, for the very first time, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, chapters are each dedicated to a major work – be it an album cover, promotional piece or a personal project – presented as a step-by-step working case study, from speculative ideas and sketches right through to Photoshop experiments and the finished piece. Accompanying narratives by Donwood explain the inspirations and stories behind his creative process and what it is like to work with the band, told with his typical razor-sharp humour and generosity of spirit. Featuring a treasury of archive material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood’s creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. There Will Be No Quiet is essential reading, and viewing, for fans of the band and anyone interested in the explosive mix of artistic accident, musical ingenuity and creative originality.

'Properly, seriously good. Humoric structure . . . oneiric texture, with pitch-black basalt fins jutting through.' Robert Macfarlane'Apocalyptic, darkly funny and spooky.' DazedWelcome to Stanley Donwood's fictional universe: a landscape of dark streets and high-rise concrete, creeping shadows and shifting perspectives; its citizens forever caught between boredom and paranoia, alive to the threat of menacing machines and Aliens from Outer Space. Here disappearances (people, things) are everyday. Relationships are unstable. Nature has turned unnatural. Unsettling dreams segue into waking nightmares.In Humor, Stanley Donwood reveals himself as a contemporary master of the micro-narrative, riffing on the four humors of the human body - sanguine, phlegm, choler and melancholy - to rummage beneath the veneer of sanity that passes for civilised society. Apocalyptic, funny and hallucinogenic in their intensity, these stories present a series of brief, haunting episodes in a world drained of meaning, sense and consequence.

In which the writings of the authors Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood are gathered together.This commonplace book includes faxes, notes, fledgling lyrics, sketches, lists of all kinds and scribblings towards nirvana, as were sent between the two authors during the period 1999 to 2000 during the creation of the Radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac.This is a document of the creative process and a mirror to the fears, portents and fantasies invoked by the world as its citizens faced a brave new millennium.

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.

Eerie, unsettling and hauntingly beautiful - a new collaboration from the bestselling creators of Holloway'Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb - it is an aftertime song. It is dark, ever so dark, nimble and lethal. It is a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age. Ness is something else, and feels like it always has been' Max Porter, author of LannySomewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a ritual with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him.Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving towards the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.What happens when land comes to life? What would it take for land to need to come to life? Using word and image, Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood have together made a minor modern myth. Part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play, in Ness their skills combine to dazzling, troubling effect.

'Bad Island is an extraordinary, unsettling document: a silent species-history in eighty frames, a mute future archive. I can imagine it discovered in the remnants of a civilisation; a set of runes found amid the ruins. Stark in its lines and dark in its vision, Bad Island reads you more than you read it' Robert Macfarlane'I've read lots of Stanley's stuff and it's always good and I am in no way biased' Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead From cult graphic designer and long-time Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood comes a starkly beautiful graphic novel about the end of the world.A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and things do not go well for the island. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke, choking the undergrowth and the creatures who once moved through it. This is not a happy story and it will not have a happy ending.Working in his distinctive, monochromatic lino-cut style, Stanley Donwood carves out a mesmerizing, stark parable on environmentalism and the history of humankind.

In Holloway, "a perfect miniature prose-poem" (William Dalrymple), Macfarlane, artist Stanley Donwood, and writer Dan Richards travel to Dorset, near the south coast of England, to explore a famed "hollowed way"--a path used by walkers and riders for so many centuries that it has become worn far down into the soft golden bedrock of the region.In Ness, "a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age" (Max Porter), Macfarlane and Donwood create a modern myth about Orford Ness, the ten-mile-long shingle spit that lies off the coast of East Anglia, which the British government used for decades to conduct secret weapons tests.

A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and man appears, with clubs, with spears, with crueler weapons still--and things do not go well for the wilderness. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke choke the undergrowth and the creatures that once moved through it. This is not a happy story, and it will not have a happy ending.Working in his distinctive, monochromatic linocut style, Stanley Donwood achieves with his art what words cannot convey, carving out a mesmerizing, stark parable of environmental disaster and the end of civilization.

In this "irresistible mash-up of noir and gothic horror" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), a man fights to clear his name from a crime he hasn't committed yet.Private investigator Martin Valpolicella receives a tip that he will soon be framed for a future murder of his former lover, set to take place in the catacombs buried beneath the city of Bath, England. But can he save the girl, and himself? Catacombs of Terror is a drug-fueled escapade about a dark world hidden beneath our own, and how one man can save himself from its dangers.

Stanley Donwood and the enigmatic Dr Tchock are the elusive duo responsible for Radiohead's artwork. Containing paintings they have produced in the last decade, this book alsocontains a cornucopia of never-before-seen artwork. Featuring the apocalyptic scenes of the OK Computer album, the startling, sinister shadow of memory cast onto the present in the Kid A paintings, and theoverwhelming information overload of Hail to the Thief's landscapes of conflict, Dead Children Playing presents some of the most iconic artwork of our time.

Stanley Donwood says of a selection of stories contained in Household Worms that were inspired by drinking red wine alone at night: 'These were written to avoid staring for too long at a night-filled window that only reflected my own sorry-for-itself face. Perhaps I should try writing with white wine too. A lighter tone may emerge. Champagne would probably get me writing jokes for crackers. Never mind, never mind.' Donwood is best known as an artist, but this collection confirms his prowess as an equally talented writer of prose.