Canongate signs first Radiohead books from Thom Yorke and Donwood

Canongate has signed the first Radiohead books from lead vocalist Thom Yorke and artist Stanley Donwood.

Kid A Mnesia and Fear Stalks the Land! celebrate the process and artwork created for the Radiohead albums "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" and will both publish on 4th November 2021. Canongate acquired world rights for both books from ATC Management. 

Francis Bickmore, publishing director at Canongate said: "Radiohead have created their first ever books and fans are going to flip out. On the 30-year anniversary of the band’s formation and 21 years after 'Kid A', Canongate is proud to publish this pair of books this November by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. One visual and one verbal, these books chronicle the band’s immersive, feverish and frankly demented creative process, channelling inner demons and the wider anxieties of the age. Reliably ahead of the curve with their output and wary of cliché, don’t be surprised if you hear a lot about Radiohead this autumn."

Fear Stalks the Land! is a book that includes faxes, notes, fledgling lyrics, sketches, lists and scribblings sent between the two authors during the period 1999 to 2000 during the creation of the Radiohead albums "Kid A" and "Amnesiac". It has been described by the publisher as "a document of the creative process and a mirror to the fears, portents and fantasies invoked by the world as its citizens faced a brave new millennium" and a "must-have" for all Radiohead fans. 

It will be published alongside Kid A Mnesia, a book of more than 300 colour artworks. The publisher said: "Whilst these records were being conceived, rehearsed, recorded and produced, Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made hundreds of images. These ranged from obsessive, insomniac scrawls in biro to six-foot-square painted canvases, from scissors-and-glue collages to immense digital landscapes. They utilised every medium they could find, from sticks and knives to the emerging digital technologies.

"The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago – but so much remains the same.

It also features a dialogue between Yorke and Donwood about the creative process and a specially commissioned essay, "Kid Alphabet", by Gareth Evans about Radiohead’s body of work.

The book is also publishing alongside a multiple format triple-album release marking the 21st anniversary of the albums "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" named "Kid A Mnesia", out on 5th November.