‘We had a fierce anger and suspicion’: Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood on Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac

In this extract from a book compiling artworks made by Donwood and Yorke for Radiohead, the pair discuss how alienation with Cool Britannia saw them retreat into landscapes, labyrinths and inadvertently inventing Twitter

Stanley Donwood I can't believe the innocent world we lived in when we were making this work. It was before 9/11, before the war on terror", before the conjoining of the police and the military - all of the social changes that have led towards the position we now find ourselves in. It wasn't possible to know what was going on around the world in the same way that it is now, when news has become a sort of surrogate entertainment.

Thom Yorke Everybody involved felt like we'd been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. We all did, in a way. Rather than immersing ourselves in this congratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy - but that's where we were at.