CREATIVE REVIEW, October 2000
RADIOHEAD - MODIFIED ORGANISMS
"Prepare yourself: the bears are coming, and boy are they scary. They're everywhere: in the artwork, the animation, the paintings, absolutely everything to do with Radiohead's new album, Kid A. Drawn by Stanley (the artist formerly known as Stanley Donwood, see CR, Jan 98) with Doktor Tchock, the creatures originate from a bed time story Stanley used to tell his daughter, in which forgotten toys rise up and eat the adults. These same toys then live happily with the children until they too begin to grow up, and the toys start looking at them with hungry eyes.
Not your average bedtime story, but then Stanley doesn't draw average artwork. The bears first officially featured in an online cartoon strip called Modified Organisms, drawn by Stanley with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke: now they've got a starring role in the album artwork. "Thom's dedicating the album to the first human clone," Stanley explains, but there's a lot more to the artwork than clones of bears: there's a real sense of apocalyptic destruction throughout.
Radiohead's political beliefs and ideals are well-documented: their website (again designed by Stanley) regularly links to organisations such as Jubilee 2000, which campaigns for the end of world debt. Stanley doesn't shy away from at least attempting to address serious issues within this work: one image has a wireframe monster stalking the land. "The dinosaurs roaming the earth are like these rapacious corporations storming over the planet and chewing it up," he says. Another image which appears throughout is the icon of a swimming pool. This refers to the idea that one pool can hold the blood of 50,000 people: the CIA apparently assesses how bad an atrocity is by calculating how many swimming pools the amount of blood spilled would fill.
.......They're quite political and pessimistic," says Kenworthy. "There's stuff about war and death, death by nature, how we're raping the earth. Stanley has a whole theory about an ice age that's going to come and destroy the world - and that theme crops up in Thom's lyrics. I think Thom shares a lot of his ideas with Stanley, so it's all very inspired by what the songs are about."
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Remember the goul.
Shake n' bake
Do whatever it takes