My top 10 pieces of art: 3

Kid A/mnesiac - Stanley Donwood (2000/2001)

I'm cheating a bit here as there's two artwork, but I firmly believe that both of these artworks should be presented together as part of one big outlook of Radiohead's Warp Records phase.

Simply put; this was a drastic change of musical direction from the band's masterpiece OK Computer back in 1997. They were applauded as the saviours of rock 'Post-Britpop' when the likes of Oasis, Pulp, Suede and Elastica etc had ran out of ideas. And so a world tour followed, coupled by the pressures of touring, primary singer-songwriter and lead vocalsist/third guitarist Thom Yorke addmitted to having a breakdown, and so 3 years down the line, with the world of music holding its breath, they returned in 2000 with an album completely devoid of guitars and full of electronic blips, keyboards, and vocals that sound like they were sung in the bath. Commercial suicide? It actually cracked America!

Enough about the music - Kid A's album artwork is that of a cold, seemingly dead world surrounded by iced caps and strange ghostly shapes. For me it represents Kid A's music - an ambient atmosphere compared to pre-Kid A material. Look into the background however, and you can see an errupting volcano, or perhaps just fire looming. Couple this with Amnesiac's artwork, and the connection becomes clear.

Amnesiac was released in 2001 and is often called "Kid A's B-side album". Far from being B-side material, Amnesiac features more promising use of guitars and harsher electronic avant-garde equipments compared to its older brother, so how does the artwork resemble the music?

If Kid A was the "calm before the storm", Amnesiac's artwork is us "within the storm", or in this case, fire. The cover is a harsh red colour of danger (the fire) surrounding the pathetic figure of the bear that weeps in the middle (Stanley Donwood created the Kid A bears in companion to the album's release) Another case of looking into the artwork carefully to examine all the little details that really bring out the hidden meanings.