‘We've got a lot less competitive': Stanley Donwood on creating Radiohead's iconic artwork

The Guardian

4 days ago

In the early 90s, Stanley Donwood was 'at a loose end after university', hitching around Britain and making a little money as a busking fire-breather. Fetching up in Oxford, he spotted a poster for a gig by a band called On a Friday. He recognised the name: a friend he'd met while studying at Exeter University's fine art department called Thom Yorke was the lead singer.
So he called Yorke up. An initial plan for Donwood to do his fire-breathing routine as the band's support act was scuppered by the venue's nervous manager, but the pair kept in touch. Some time later, after On a Friday had changed their name to Radiohead, Yorke called with a proposition. 'They'd done really well with Creep, which I hadn't heard, it wasn't my thing at all; I liked bleepy-bleepy, thumpy-thump music,' says Donwood. 'But he said: 'Our record sleeves are shit, do you want to come and have a go?''
Their collaboration began in a fairly inauspicious, on-the-hoof style. For the 1994 EP My Iron Lung, they came up with the idea of videoing an actual iron lung and using a still from the ensuing footage. But having managed to inveigle access to Oxford's John Radcliffe hospital with a video camera, they discovered that an iron lung was just 'a gunmetal grey box – kind of horrific, but aesthetically very boring'. On the plus side, while at the hospital, they spotted a resuscitation dummy: a grainy still from the video they made of it wound up on the cover of the 1995 album The Bends.
Thus began a collaboration that's lasted 31 years. Together, Donwood and Yorke have created the artwork for every Radiohead release since The Bends, as well as for Yorke's various other projects – solo albums, Atoms for Peace and the Smile – and a series of books. Donwood has also staged solo exhibitions, published books, worked with author Robert Macfarlane and designed the posters for Glastonbury for more than 20 years. But there's something particularly striking about his Radiohead-adjacent collaborations with Yorke, which are collected in a new exhibition at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, This Is What You Get, its title taken from the lyrics of the band's 1997 single Karma Police. The show spans a vast variety of mediums – from computer art to collage to oils to linocut – but invariably captures the existential dread at the heart of Radiohead's music.
Their working practices are unorthodox. Donwood usually moves into the studio where Radiohead are recording – or a nearby building, with an audio link to the studio – and creates art in direct response to what they're making. It is, by his own account, a nerve-racking experience. 'Loads of times, I've found myself in these amazing places, with the brushes and the computer, everything I need, thinking: 'This is terrible, I've got nothing. Maybe I've run out of ideas. I'm going to have to get a job.' It's quite depressing. And then something just sort of happens and it's like 'Wow!''
Yorke then adds to the work. Sometimes he deliberately obscures what Donwood has done, as was the case with the artwork for 1997's OK Computer. Sometimes they paint on the same canvas simultaneously. 'We used to compete to see who could finish [the artwork],' he says. 'We've got a lot less competitive, it's a lot more collaborative now. We're just older, you know. More tired!'
Snowfall on House, 1997'The figures and motorway from this OK Computer-era painting were blown-up photos Thom had taken on tour,' says Donwood. 'And we had these textbooks from Oxfam. We scanned them, and were using this tablet whose stylus acted like an eraser – the rubbing out was really thin, not very good. When you cover up your mistakes in real life, you're never very good at it, so we wanted the mistakes to still be there.'
Get Out Before Saturday, 2000'That was from Kid A. We got canvases that were almost too big to comprehend. I rented a studio in Bath and Thom came down and we just painted. Some of those paintings have grit on them, or Artex – it's a coating used to cover up mistakes and damage, but it doesn't fix it.'
Pacific Coast, 2003 (main image)'Radiohead were supposed to record Hail to the Thief in two weeks in LA. We would drive to the studio on Hollywood Boulevard, and the streets of LA were very textural, with a lot of big writing designed to be noticed by people driving by, all in the same bold seven colours. So I bought those colours and started painting words. Of course, they didn't do the record in two weeks – my arse! – so we went back to rainy old England.'
Soken Fen, 2013'My initial idea for [Radiohead album] The King of Limbs was blurred photorealist paintings in oil, like Gerhard Richter, but it went very badly. Then Radiohead did a playthrough in this beautiful old barn. I thought: 'Woah, this music is about growth and it's organic.' I thought about the people who'd built the barn with no machinery. I started painting these immediately.'
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A Map of the New World, 2024'This isn't a thing for [Thom Yorke's other band] the Smile, but it's definitely in that world. It was done on an enormous printing press in Paris, a beautiful old place called Idem. I'm such an idiot – I did it, then I found out it was two centimetres bigger than any standard cardboard, hardboard or chipboard backing, so I had to get it custom-made. It does your head in when you see it, because it's absolutely enormous.'
Wall of Eyes, 2024'Thom had been to this exhibition of maps and showed me the catalogue. There were these ones that an Arabic pirate had made: lovely rich colours, using tempera paint. So we made the Smile's Wall of Eyes artwork like that: maps that didn't look like maps, and then these paintings, which are almost like landscapes.'
This Is What You Get is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to 11 January.