How Thom Yorke, Mark Pritchard & Jonathan Zawada Created a Surrealist Audio-Visual Realm Reflecting Modern Anxieties

Hulking, technicolor humanoids dancing bizarrely in a town square. Robotic arms painting scenic vistas in tandem. Black-and-white mid-century footage of children run amok. A lighthouse projecting a technicolor beam as the waters around it swirl. These are just some of the scenes in Tall Tales, the surreal, disorienting hour-long film that accompanies Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard’s collaborative album of the same name.

The film, created by the Australian multi-disciplinary artist Jonathan Zawada, will screen in theaters worldwide for a single night on May 8, the day before Yorke and Pritchard’s album arrives. For the three creatives, the unnerving project culminates a half-decade of work – and through its often experimental music and visuals, reflects the chaotic and profound uneasiness of modern life.

Yorke and Pritchard’s relationship dates back more than a decade. In 2011, Radiohead tapped the English-born, Australia-based producer – who praises the band’s longstanding commitment to championing underground electronic music – for a remix of “Bloom” off that year’s The King of Limbs. The following year, when Radiohead was touring in Australia, Portishead’s Clive Deamer, then a touring drummer for the band, asked Pritchard if he could get the group into Sydney’s OutsideIn festival, where Pritchard was playing with Steve Spacek as Africa Hitech; the producer still remembers the promoter’s disbelief when the fabled band actually materialized at the event.

Yorke kept in touch with Pritchard, appearing on his 2016 album Under the Sun, and as COVID descended on the world, the Radiohead frontman checked in on Pritchard. The producer passed him about 20 demos, and a few months later, Yorke started returning the tracks with his own vocal demos. “That was the point where I was like, ‘Well, this feels like it could be an album,’” Pritchard recalls, adding that he “didn’t want to assume this is an album we’re working on together… Maybe he wanted to take some tracks for a solo project, and maybe I’d take some tracks. So I just kind of left it open.”

But as the pandemic wore on, and the duo became more immersed in the project, it became clearer: This could be an album. Pritchard describes a relaxed, collegial creative process – one by two legends who, if anything, might have been too deferential. “Emailing felt very difficult for this kind of thing,” says Pritchard, remembering a time where he sent Yorke a note of praise and Yorke replied that he could refine the recording more. “I was like, ‘No, I really like it, it’s done!’” Pritchard recalls with amusement. The duo switched to Zoom.

Concurrently, Pritchard was sending some of the same demos to Zawada, who has worked with artists including Flume, The Avalanches, Röyksopp and Baauer, and has been a collaborator of Pritchard’s for a decade. “As soon as you got that email [from Thom], you probably told me that was happening, and sent me some songs,” Zawada recalls.

Like the album’s amorphous beginnings, the corresponding film’s conceptualization was gradual. From the jump, Zawada understood that “every song seemed just as important and interesting as every other song”; for that reason, he explains, the initial idea was to do “to do a thing, some sort of thing, for every song,” whether that meant music videos, installations at art galleries, or other disciplines entirely. And as he, Pritchard and Yorke settled on doing videos for every track, Zawada says he had “the idea in my mind, this kind of broad narrative structure of somebody trapped on a strange island.”

But even after the videos were completed, “the idea of actually putting it together into a film, I was very dubious of that,” Zawada says with a laugh. Then, he had the idea to illustrate this strange island and use it as something of a staging ground – one Zawada likens to a video game map – for a bird-like figure with a bindle to navigate between songs, triggering each video one-by-one. (The film is sequenced differently than the album; as Zawada puts it, “they’re two different things.”)

At a press screening of the film in March, these cute, interstitial clips drew big laughs. “[The film] needed something to give you a breather from the music,” says Pritchard, calling the interludes “a palette cleanser.” Because, while the videos are largely fantastical, “they’re quite heavy songs,” Pritchard says. “There’s playful things happening in some of the videos, but there’s a lot of heavy dystopian-feeling things.”

Neither Pritchard nor Zawada offers direct interpretations of Yorke’s lyrics – though some, like haunting standout “The White Cliffs,” where he sings “I get kind of nervous/ I want it all to end/ I don’t understand the purpose,” are relatively straightforward – but like much of Radiohead’s music, dread pervades Tall Tales. And in Pritchard, Yorke found another collaborator who could musically match those emotions. Throughout the project, Yorke manipulated his voice; Pritchard remembers more than one occassion when he connected with Yorke in the morning to begin work and found himself watching the singer unboxing another studio gadget for vocal trickery. Yorke’s voice lends Tall Tales much of its uneasiness, like on “Happy Days,” where his multiplied warbles drift over an unsettling and militaristic instrumental.

Visually, Zawada used black-and-white mid-century footage from Manchester – kids digging holes, smashing windows, lighting bonfires – and spliced it together with colorful claymation clips from decades ago. The emotions it conjures are of a piece with the rest of the project, but its aesthetic isn’t. Since they met, Zawada has admired the musical eclecticism of Pritchard, who has recorded in different styles under a series of monikers over his career, and he mirrored that philosophy on Tall Tales, which flits from abstract psychedelia to vibrant cartoons to snippets of real-life footage culled from the internet.

“For me, it was really just a reflection of the music,” Zawada says. “The music was so varied sonically that it never felt like it could possibly be right to narrow it down into any particular aesthetic style. It contributes to that feeling of disorientation and complexity.

“‘Disorientation’ is like the word of the last 10 years,” he continues, “and every year that goes past, things get more and more disorienting.”

Still, as disconcerting as Tall Tales may be, it also contains the moments of unvarnished beauty that have long populated the work of all three of the creatives behind it. “The Spirit,” which comes midway through the album and concludes the film, is the project’s gentle centerpiece: “I wish you well/ Pray for peace,” Yorke croons over a twinkling instrumental.

As for whether Yorke and Pritchard, who appeared onstage together in Sydney last November, may eventually take this music on the road, Pritchard is non-committal – and defers to his “unbelievably busy” collaborator. “It’s just down to his schedule, really,” says Pritchard, adding that he told Yorke he’d be up for it.

For now, listeners will have to immerse themselves in Tall Tales‘ sprawling world – which, it turns out, bears some striking similarities to our own.