Making Bad Island, he admits, was more exhausting than he anticipated. ‘When I got to about linocut number eight, I thought, “what?! I’ve got to do 10 times this many?”’ We talk standing next to all 80 of them, neatly lined up on boards and ready to be exhibited in East London later this month. A few rejects, which have figures on them, lie limply in a stack nearby. They’re the product of a realisation Donwood had half-way through the project, that he ‘didn’t want to make people the bad thing’.

Much of the work that Donwood has become known for – namely, the record covers for Radiohead, which he has been making since 1995, when their second album The Bends came out – has been the result of what he describes as failure. He has endless stories about the many false starts and 'accidents' that form part of his process. There was the paint-spewing dalek he wanted to use to create the artwork for the band’s latest album, A Moon Shaped Pool. When that didn’t work, he took all his equipment to the South of France where the band were recording and still struggled to come up with anything. It was such a ‘total disaster’, he considered having to get another job.

Before that, there was ‘eight months of horribleness’ inspired by an ambition to emulate Gerhard Richter, the famously proficient German portraitist, for The King of Limbs. Donwood says his attempts ‘ended up looking like dirty protests’. Some fans may know about the now-infamous ‘topiary cocks’ he wanted to make for the cover of Hail to the Thief (‘it turned out this wasn’t really an appropriate direction for Radiohead at that time’).

In previous studios, evidence of the above – and more successful expressions of Radiohead's visual identities – would have been scattered everywhere. But this one is relatively new and tidy (he only moved in last summer) and is mostly dedicated to Donwood’s current project: large, brightly coloured acrylic paintings that depict the landscapes of ancient hill-carvings around the UK. A representation of Eastbourne hill-carving, The Long Man of Wilmington, glints in gold leaf above my head. Donwood says he’ll spend our interview 'trying to figure out what [he’s] got to do with it.'