El logo de Radiohead. Modified Bear

Sin lugar a dudas, el famoso oso de Radiohead es uno de los logos más famosos de la música. Comenzó a usarse tal y como lo conocemos para las promociones televisivas tras el lanzamiento del álbum KID A, aunque se quedaría con la banda para siempre.

Aunque realmente tras este dibujo hay mucho más. El logo nace de un extraño cómic que en su día hicieron juntos Standley Donwood y Thom Yorke, que lo firmaba como Dr. Tchock.

El cómic trataba la siniestra historia de tres osos manipulados genéticamente que eran asesinados por un cuarto oso mientras les hacía una foto. De ese cómic, que durante años estuvo perdido por la web de la banda sin ningún tipo de publicidad ni información, salieron importantes imágenes slogans e ideas para muchos de sus trabajos. No sólo musicales, sino pósters, frases y libretos de futuros discos.

Más tarde, poco antes del lanzamiento del Hail to the Thief, todo fue borrado.

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AQUÍ OS DEJO UNO DE LOS POQUÍSIMOS MOMENTOS QUE TENEMOS REGISTRADOS EN LOS QUE THOM YORKE Y STANLEY DONWOOD HABLAN EN UNA ENTREVISTA TRANSCRITA SOBRE EL LOGO Y SU ORIGEN. (En el próximo vídeo subiré el cómic completo con la transcripción de las viñetas en la descripción).

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Interviewer: There's a song on Amnesiac called "Hunting Bears," and Radiohead also have their "blinkybear" band logo. Why the obsession with bears? QUIGLY 1000.

Thom: Er, if I remember rightly, it stemmed initially from a deep paranoia of genetic engineering. And then from a children's book. You know: creating monsters, only to awaken one morning to the terrible truth that there is nothing at all you can do to stop them. We're over it now.

Interviewer: What’s the Radiohead angry bear (above) all about?
Stanley: “It isn’t angry; it’s hungry. It’s all the toys you used to play with when you were little. I first drew it for my daughter when she was about one. It was part of a story about how forgotten toys wake up in dusty boxes and go and eat the adults who abandoned them.”

Interviewer: Or is it a bear? It looks-
Colin: That came about as a drawing that Stanely's, one of Stanley's children has done some drawings, and also Stan was experimenting with, uh, different kinds of technical drawings, schematics of tops of metal screw heads and things like that, and blowing them out to like large size, so the actual sort of eyes in the circle of the bear are sort of 2D, you know I can't remember the name, the tops of nails and stuff like that, so, to go with the sort of hardness, and sort of, you know, sharpness of the image.

Thom: That was entirely my fault [laughs]. Early on, Stanley Donwood, who does our artwork, and I started doing this thing, Test Specimen, a cartoon about giving birth to a monster, the Frankenstein thing. For example, the bear logo -- that is the Test Specimen, the first mutant. The idea was loosely based on stuff we were reading about genetically modified food. We got obsessed with the idea of the mutation entering the DNA of the human species. One episode was about these teddy bears that mutate and start eating children.

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