The Independent du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 81

mm THE INDEPENDENT THURSDAY 14 JUNE 2007 mwm THURSDAY 14 JUNE 2007 THE INDEPENDENT 13 i 0 All T) 0 I Jr VVH mmSm- 'When I'm working I've got Radiohead on a loop in the studio all the time. I absorb things from the music and "then iet them out' The reclusive figure responsible for Radiohead's album art is launching a solo exhibition. But is this mystery man really Thorn Yorke? By Alice Jones freewav. "It filled me with a sort of horror." savs the ust who is Stanley Donwood? The elusive artM has been described as the sixth mem- looking for something to be attached to for a long His last exhibition of Radiohead Iber of Radiohead; his artwork adorns all of the band's releases since their 1994 EP My Iron Lung. From the haunting medical dummy of The Bends to the pixellat- aioum cover art Barcelona went oy tne arresting title Dead Children Playing.

"It was a signl Slew Children a beautiful old thing the wheel that you turn is encrusted with a century and a half of inky Donwood likes to experiment. For his last show, London Views, he tried lino cuts. Inspired by the wood-cuts of the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle and the 2004 Boscastle floods (which reminded him of a "medieval cataclysm''), Donwood created a monochrome apocalyptic vision of the capital and its landmarks the Gherkin, the Dome sinking into the waves. The panel Cnut, showing a small man holding out his hand to stop the onslaught of the waves, became the cover of Thorn Yorke's solo album The Eraser. So does this new show hold some clues about the soon-to-be-released seventh Radiohead album? "I don't know at the moment.

When they start on a record I've got all these ideas. But then the music has its own dynamic he says. "With the last one, the artwork was done for the exhibition initially, I was working on it at the same time as Thom was working on his record. The artwork for that was going to be like the 'Nuclear Power? No Thanks' campaign, but as the music evolved it didn't seem right Thorn, Nigel Godrich, producer andlwere in the studio andlwas chiselling away making UttlepUesoflmo shavings. Th We should just use this, we're here, this is The pair have always enjoyed an organic relationship.

Donwood (who got a in his A-level art), says that after graduation, when he was languishing on the dole, Yorke caUed him up and asked him to designarecordexjver. Their working relationship is "pretty with Yorke often credited ontheartworkunder the moniker DrTbhock or Tchocky. "When Fm working IVe got their workonaloop in the stud so inconstantly in my head It not aconsciou thing you absorb things from the music and let them out in a different way." This approach has led to some of the most striking, cerebral and disturbing images seen on the CD racks. Kid A was apparently inspired by a newspaper photograph of the war in Kosovo, while ffoi to the Thief is based on road maps of cities such as Grozny and Baghdad. And OK Computer took its style from the old civil defence leaflet "Protect and Survive" about nuclear attacks.

"We were working in a 1930s suburban house ogf Thorn's in Oxford. I was looking out of the window and I had this horrible kind of vision of what it would look like after a bomb. It was an unpleasant summer in the news as well people were bemg attacked country lanes with hammers." With Gorillaz the highest-profile example, this is a golden age in the meeting between music and the visual arts. "People are less agrees Donwood. "They don't have record companies taking their music and subletting it to a graphic design agency, like it or not" So why is the artist so keen to conceal his identity? "Who I am is different from who I am when Fm making artwork.

It's almost like the person who does the artwork is different from the person who picks the kids up from school, washes up, does the Hoovering and has a normal life," says Donwood. "It's a kind ofbenign schizophrenia. But it's not a clinical problem or it hasn't been so far." If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now is at the Lazarides Gallery, London Wl until 14 July (www.lazincxom; 020-3214 0055) explains Donwood. "There it was, another useful 0 ed snowy peaks ofAidA and the red hardback book of Amnesiac, the special edition of which won the 2001 Grammy for Best Record Package, Donwood's visual accompaniments have ahvays been in tune with Radiohead's music. title." And before that there was an exhibition in the I I ieujd minify i jc xcpeu uuciib ui rveuiuoivc jt arauuia So in tune, in feet, that some have speculated that a Ramohead phrase if ever there was ona Cis This time, the exhibition is of Donwood's new J1S the mysterious Donwood is actually the bands lead singer Thorn Yorke, who studied Fine solo work.

A series of stark paintings show Art and English at Exeter University silhouetted stick figures running away and whose partner, Rachel Owen, is a from black and white houses against pnntmaker. Others have identified him as Dan Rickwood, a fellow graduate of abackdrop of vivid oranges and reds. "It's an exploration of my thoughts If 'V: I the Fine Art and English course at Exeter and an old friend ofYorke's. Whoever he is and the artist will only give telephone interviews, so the mystery remains unsolved-Don-wood is nowpreparing to openasolo and fears about the suburban experiment The whole thing is pred-icated on the assumption that there's going to be cheap oil forever," Donwood says. "But prices will get higher and suburbia will become the slums of the future.

Humans have built really brilliant places to live in the past We seem to have lost the show at Sohos uber-cool Lazarides Gallery, home to fellow artistic enigma Banksy and Gorillaz co- TV, Satellite Radio listings 16-19 Last Night's TV 22 Reviews 20-21 creator Jamie Hewlett, among others. IfYou Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now is an angst-ridden I meditation on the perils of mod- 7 em suburban livirthatwiU strike The rest of the exhibition will be taken up with 10 large-scale photographic etchings. Don-wood taught himself the laborious process from library books, experimenting with copper plate and ferric chloride and using his antique etching press for the final stages. "It's from about 1850, a laminar cnora witn naaioneaa fens. The work takes its title from a sign that Donwood spotted as he was driving out of Los Angelas titViiVi mAimiH fr a Virvnainrr ibDj TTIIKrl' subdivision an hour down the.