Quotes on or from Radiohead

On Stanely Donwood

1. Thom: And Stanley Donwood brings this other thing to it which is that he's completely unmusical but he's like this other presence that brings us out of ourselves in a different way because y'now he's painting or he's doing whatever it is, he's responding to the music and bringing an art mentality to it completely, like, effortlessly, y'know, cause he's just one of the crew and I grew up with him, I went to college with him and so it's a way of looking at what your music - it's like a non-music way of looking at what you're doing. He'll say stuff which is like, really important but, um, completely unhelpful but really important. Y'know.
2. Ed: In our studio we have, above the control room we have a mezzanine and Stanley hangs out there. And the best - one of my favourite memories of him about 11 o'clock at night and you've been banging on a track all day and you hear this - you've done a kind of playback and you hear, right at the top you hear "I know nothing about music, but that sounds fucking awesome!"

1. Jonny: "We were shown some mammary glands yesterday, weren't we?
2. Ed: "Yeah, we were shown some breasts for the first time ever!
3. DJ: "Seattle ladies were showing you their breasts?
4. Ed: "Good Lord! We're shy retiring Oxford chaps!
5. Jonny: "We had to cough and look away, didn't we! [all laugh]

1. (from the interview with Steve Lamacq for BBC Radio 1, October, 2000)
2. Steve: "How many songs have you got lying around in drawers?"
3. Thom: "Err... quite a lot. I mean, yeah, we always get... you get people at gigs going 'play 'True Love Waits'' or 'play...' - what was it - 'Nude' or... what was it, the other one, 'Big Boots', or 'Man-O-War' or, all these ones... and 'Lift', that's a classic one. (laughs)"
4. Thom: "Yeah, and 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' was a classic sort of... I did it because everyone was sort of saying 'oh, you know, we should do this', and I was mucking around with it on this pump organ thing, and then that was the extent of my involvement and had absolutely no emotional contact with it at all, you know. And Cozzie and Jonny and Nigel were really like into it, and they thought it was really great, and I was like 'yeah, ok, well I'm going home now', and I came back, you know, twenty-four hours later, and Jonny had basically done all these harps and double basses on it, and it just sounded like, you know... I'd always wanted that song to be this big tragedy, but actually it is supposed to be a homage to Disney, you know, it's basically sort of saying, you know, you've been sold a massive white lie, and there's something essentially missing from your life, but... erm... it's essentially Disney's fault, that's what it's saying. (laughs)"
5. Steve: "But that must be quite nice, to actually have....to be in a position where even now, you have a shared idea, even though you don't know it."
6. Thom: "Yeah, that's it."
7. Steve: "Jonny comes in and does all the things, you pick up an idea and turn it into something else."
8. Thom: "Yeah, I mean ask him where that came from, because I've got bloody no idea."
9. Steve: "Yeah, where did the harps come from?"
10. Jonny: "Err, oh, it's just a mixture of... I mean it's a bit like... it's... for me it's an adolescent dream at the moment because we just have a studio that just has instruments lying around, and that was always my kind of... always what I wanted to be able to do, and so you just have access to so many sounds and colours and instruments, and it's... you can try anything and..."
11. Steve: "Are you always in there? In the studio?"
12. Thom: "He's in there the most on his own. (laughs) You know what I'm saying?"
13. Jonny: "I know what he's trying to say (background laughter), musically speaking I'm just shaking the... you know."
14. Thom: "Yeah, exactly, no, no, don't go there."
15. Colin: "Cabassa."
16. Ed: (laughs)
17. Jonny: "So, yeah, that's going on."