SD I was a real evangelist for the internet in the beginning; I thought it was going to be amazing. I thought it was going to be like Gutenberg’s movable type; it was going to revolutionise the world, and it did, only in a way that I didn’t foresee. It’s become the worst thing that you could imagine.

SD We would start on two canvases next to each other, and after a certain amount of time, swap over and start working on the other one. And basically keep doing that until someone had … “won” the painting. Out of the first world war, and out of all the positivism of the industrial revolution, there was this disillusionment in the 1920s, right? You had this terrible Spanish flu, millions of people dying … and at some point it lifts. It all lifts, and then you get the roaring 20s. You get this explosion in music and art and film. What’s really interesting is that we’re witnessing on one side a determination by certain states, like Britain, to engage us in some horrific kind of doublethink. Being told how wonderful everything is when literally thousands of people are dying every day. Being told by the government how well they’re doing. That’s what we’re ingesting.Another book that probably more rightly deserves a three-and-a-half star rating than four, but we round up here. The nature of being a songwriter, or a painter, or whatever, is to retain a beginner’s mind. The search is the point. The flailing around is the point. The process is the point. I like being given material and maybe finding a narrative that someone else doesn’t see. I like when [Radiohead guitarist] Jonny gives me a piece of material, or Stan gives me a bit of writing, and I say: “This bit, and this bit.” And then likewise that will get done to me. Stan is very good at being able to see something in something I did that I was literally about to bin. That means you’re always working beyond what you expect.

TY We felt that there was a sort of uncomfortable shift in awareness going on. Maybe that was the fairly rapid disillusionment with Tony Blair: all the Cool Britannia nonsense, and all the artwork – the kind of thing that was called “ Brit art”, and the YBA phenomenon that preceded that period … it just didn’t speak to us. The phrase “spin with a grin” was flying around at the time, because of the aggressive and self-serving PR tone coming out of the New Labour government. It was a strange new phenomenon to behold, and one now taken for granted: an obsession with how one looks rather than what one does. while it somehow falls short at the uncreativity, the medium of peotry offers yorke more spaces to simply pour his artistic flair out, "all participation is a myth."; "my drug of choice is self-pity."; "to be happy is simple SD There was a lot of jingoistic triumphalism in popular culture. We felt there was a shift in awareness – maybe that was the fairly rapid disillusionment with Tony Blair Thom Yorke

TY I’d be going off on one in all directions, flailing around, experimenting with lots of different things, not even worrying whether it was going to be lyrics or not. And Stan was doing the same; Stan had also been writing short stories, and that was influencing me as well. It spiralled. Yorke has been cited among the most influential figures in the music industry; in 2002, Q Magazine named Yorke the 6th most powerful figure in music, and Radiohead were ranked #73 in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2005. Yorke has also been cited among the greatest singers in popular music; in 2005, a poll organised by Blender and MTV2 saw Yorke voted the 18th greatest singer of all time, and in 2008, he was ranked 66th in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" list.