Dan Richards - The Beechwood Airship Interviews

I’m in Brick Lane, in a long queue of people that snakes back several hundred metres from a Rough Trade record shop.

Stanley has made a concomitant newspaper that is to be given away at noon today around the world, apparently. All the noons.

Information is somewhat scarce yet here we all are in the queue, and there’s a buzz; something’s up.

A strange website has appeared with directions to this place and a warning reminiscent of the fire escape instructions above Stanley’s studio window:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

This newspaper IS NOT the newspaper that accompanies the Newspaper Album version of The King of Limbs.

This event WILL NOT be repeated. This event IS NOT a live performance by Radiohead.

I am here to experience the physical, tactile event of being given a newspaper and leafing through it to see what I can see … I imagine Stanley will be still cycling around Devon or somewhere and the last I heard the band were in LA so it’s a bit odd to turn the corner and find him and Thom Yorke dressed up as barrow boys in flat caps and braces, proffering copies of The Universal Sigh *newspaper.

‘Socialist Worker!’

‘Sooo-cialist Worker!?’

‘Socialist Worker, sir?’

• • • • •

Derelict dance hall, Bath

July 2011

The last time I saw you was just before the Socialist Worker debacle.

‘Oh yes … I was a bit scared because I didn’t know where it was happening. I got to Liverpool Street and then walked round and round the queue. I felt like a hyena circling a herd of wildebeest. It was a good day!

It was the most orderly and polite London mob I’ve ever experienced.

There was quite a lot of fuss and I was very pleased because we had this big meeting before we began with all the record company people who were to act like this big distribution network for the paper, and the publicity plan was to give out a newspaper in sixty-one cities around the world, simultaneously, for free, that mentioned neither the band nor the title of the album once. They took a little persuading but I think it worked. It got into every real newspaper. It was sufficiently stupid to even catch the eye of the Sun:

‘“Read all about it,” says Yorke, miserablist.

‘“Professional Gloom-monger Thom Yorke was today spotted in London’s Brick Lane handing out an incomprehensible art project …”

‘And then I went home and then I had a cup of tea and thought, “That was alright! I can begin to forget all about it.” Which I almost have.

It was fun though. We both wore flat caps and everything.’

Was The King of Limbs newspaper album designed around the same time as the Universal Sigh?

‘No, that was from the year before; September or something, and it went through lots of redesigns. Imagine setting up a newspaper and publishing the first issue, all that tweaking, changing … because there were going to be loads of sections and a little A5 magazine; lots of different sections, one black, white and red like an old-fashioned tabloid …’

We spoke about these things obliquely before, I suppose, down the pub.

‘Yeah, though it’s weird; when I was doing all the King of Limbs stuff it was all I was thinking about, but now it’s quite hard to recall … but I just thought it was really nice how the newspaper album turned out and the prints were quite rough, with mistakes and holes punched – so valueless, you know? So ephemeral. If you want to keep it nice you’ve got quite a job on your hands.’

Keeping it out of the sunshine … because it’s on the way out already.

‘Exactly. Self-destructing record packaging. I won’t get a Grammy for that one, I’ll tell you now. (Laughs) They won’t appreciate such irreverence, the Grammers.’

I see you’re cutting some wavy lino in the other room.

‘Yeah, meteors or fireballs, Vorticist waves; it’s taken a long time … it’s not just waves, you know! They’re the easy bit, they’re like a little treat for me after doing all the buildings. I did the downtown financial district and all these modernist blocks and they’re really boring to do, but the nicer stuff takes a long time so it’s a bit of a trade-off really.’

Is this for Atoms For Peace? *

‘Yes. I hope so. It is at the moment.’

A lot of your Radiohead work seems cloak and dagger. You’re wrapped up in these projects but can’t discuss them.

‘Yeah, I know, it is weird – very internal, all of us very locked in. I didn’t over-listen to this record either. I mean, I listened to it, obviously, I couldn’t avoid hearing it a lot, but I wanted to try and keep it as something I could enjoy later rather than being sick to death of it – because I usually get really enthusiastic and listen to it intensely, which is great for the year or so it takes to do the artwork but after that … no.

I’ve recently just about been able to listen to OK Computer. I really over-listened to that.’

How does that situation arise? Do you put it on?

‘In shops? It makes me slightly uncomfortable for some reason when I hear Radiohead music in shops. I don’t know why. I don’t know … because in my head it’s still quite a secretive thing and then you think, “Oh no! Everybody knows!”’

Where does this bunker mentality come from, do you think? I mean, other bands are able to embrace it.

‘I know! Able to “Live The Dream!” We’re congenitally unable to live the dream. That’s it. That’s what everybody wants to do, don’t they?

I don’t know what the secrecy thing is about really … perhaps it gets out of hand.’

It’s a bit late now, perhaps, on album number fifteen.

‘Is it!?’

Not really, no. (Laughter)

‘No, it’s about eight or something … I’m supposed to be getting the lino stuff finished because that’s supposed to be being exhibited around the time the Atoms For Peace record comes out.’

Can you tell me that? Surely that’s supposed to be shrouded in subterfuge.

‘I can’t live the dream!’

A while ago you mentioned painting a series of portraits in oil. What became of them?

‘They ended up being the trees for King of Limbs! I was going to paint naturalistic portraits of the band because I looked at Gerhard Richter’s paintings and they were really good and I thought, “I’ll do that,” but, of course, I’m not Gerhard Richter; I couldn’t do that. It was not possible. Where he managed to get all these great blurred effects in oil paint, mine turned into mud, it was awful; very depressing for about three months … and then I started painting trees in oils in Oxford … and it all came about because of the way cathedrals used to be all different colours inside. Apparently all the vaults and tracery used to be painted really bright colours before the Puritans came along and painted over them white. All Northern European ecclesiastical architecture is based on the forest – being in glades, being in a sacred grove – they would paint their cathedrals in the brightest colours they’d got, absolutely beautiful. Going into a cathedral would have been like entering into an illuminated manuscript forest and I just thought, if all the trees of the forest were all different colours, how beautiful it would be … and that’s how King of Limbs came to be.

There you are, a rare moment of articulacy! You should put it in a special box with red arrows pointing to it.’

JENNY SAVILLE, RA (1970– ) is a Cambridge-born artist. Her visceral oil paintings and drawings of the human body are often realised on a massive scale and have appeared in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Art, Gagosian Galleries and Norton Museum of Art, Florida. Her work has featured on the covers of two albums by Manic Street Preachers – The Holy Bible (1994) and Journal for Plague Lovers (2009).