Take Cover: Radiohead: The King of Limbs
artist Stanley Donwood talks about his newspaper visuals.
words by Jon Severs
// pitchfork, 2 may 2011
:: english original
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Notable record covers help to define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking artwork and get the stories behind them. When Radiohead announced that their new album, The King of Limbs, would be released in a "newspaper" version, it left people with lots of questions. Like: What the hell is a "newspaper album," anyway? Photos of the deluxe set started rolling in last week, and Jon Severs of PrintWeek sat down with the band's longtime artist Stanley Donwood to talk about the ideas behind the unusual packaging. The interview and scans from the King of Limbs art are below:
— Was this newspaper concept driven by the music?
[laughs] I haven't heard the album yet — not properly, not finished, not since it was being made. I'm waiting for the record company to send me a 12" version! But when I was listening to it being made — because I work alongside the band when they are making the music — I loved hearing it emerge. I was hearing these shufflings and bangings becoming this sonic space that you can almost walk into. As I listened, I had this vision of these old churches where you had these huge ceilings of overarching, intertwined colors, and this led me to painting all these colored trees.
— So the newspaper album concept is something that the band inspired?
The whole idea of this album was to have something that was almost not existing, so we chose clear vinyl and the newspaper format. [In Rainbows] was this big, heavy, substantial thing — if you were determined, you could have killed someone with it! It was very much a definitive statement, and that isn't where the band are at the moment. Where they are now is more transitory. When a newspaper comes out, that doesn't mean news stops, what you have is just a snapshot of how things were at the moment that newspaper was printed. And similarly, this album shows where Radiohead are at the moment the record was released. The music is a continuing thing. And we wanted to make the album representative of that.
I also really love newspapers. They are disposable. They are recyclable. They fall apart so easily. They are not like iPads or Kindles that can't be disposed of and end up on some third-world shore. And I love the heritage of them, the whole history of mass communication. Newspapers changed the world from being a really class based, feudal system to people being able to cheaply get information that informed them.
— Is the issue of disposability an important one with this project?
There were two things to do with the newspaper. Firstly, I had left one out in the sun and it started to go yellow around the edges and fall apart. And I thought that was so nice because that is what happens to us as we get older. The other thing was that someone had left a big pile of old International Times and Oz magazines from the late 1960s at Colin [Greenwood's] place in the country. They were really cheaply printed and produced in a hurry and were decaying and had lost their corners, but they had become this archive that didn't exist on the Internet. And since they're not posh enough to be in the British Museum or elsewhere, they acquired a value because of their disposability.
— Is there a message in that?
The whole thing with this is, if you look after it, like most things, they will last. If you don't, then they will disappear very quickly.
— Is the old look of the newspaper deliberate?
We took the fonts from 1930s depression-era U.S. newspapers that had been collated by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society of America. So all the fonts are from the last big depression. They call it the "credit crunch" now, back then they called it a "depression" because they didn't like the connotations of a slump. It's all this use of euphemistic language.
— Putting out this elaborate packaging for an album in this era is quite a statement in itself.
Music packaging used to be quite a simple thing. Before, the way the music was produced determined the packaging, be it vinyl, tape, or CD. But, with digital, that's irrelevant. So now you could just make a whole load of art and sell it with the digital files. In that sense it's freed us up.
When I first started doing record covers, it was for CDs and I hated them for how little they are. They're so fucking horrible. That's one of the reasons the [King of Limbs] CD is in a dreadful one-color reverse board (below). If we could have made it any worse we would have done.
— Do you think digital music robs you of something then?
I guess it robs you of the context of the music, though that wasn't in my thinking at the time. The packaging for music has now become a sort of King James Bible, where it elevates the contents to something more spiritual. This is something else that drove me to a newspaper format. I thought, "Let's put it in a newspaper, to get away from that spiritual thing." You don't want to elevate music to something it isn't. Music is something you hear in your head, that's all, we shouldn't give it more than it is.
— Speaking of which, there's one bit of artwork, a piece made up of more than a hundred tiny squares of art printed on blotting paper, should we read into this one?
Ah! I wonder what people will make of it. There is a guy who recently died, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, who was one of the most famous creators of LSD in history, a very wealthy American. He set up a laboratory making very cheap, pure, good LSD. In theory, someone could dip them in something, they could do that. I don't think that's been done as a marketing ploy before — not that I am encouraging such activities.
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