COVER STORIES

Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the band's regular graphic design collaborator, Stanley Donwood, discuss the first retrospective of their visual work, now on show at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum

- WRITER: CRAIG MCLEAN

At Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, amid the impending doom rendered on album sleeves, the swashing dollops of paint liberally applied to Covid-era canvases, the blackspider scribbles in notebooks belonging to one of our greatest and most confounding lyricists, there’s a wonderfully deadpan piece of writing. It’s part of an extended text under one of the giant images that characterise ‘This Is What You Get’, an exhibition of the work of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and his visual artist collaborator Stanley Donwood.

‘Donwood’s initial idea for the cover,’ runs the caption for the pair’s sleeve artwork for the band’s sixth studio album Hail to the Thief (2003), ‘was to create enormous topiary phalluses, and digitally introduce them into the gardens owned by the National Trust, but Yorke wasn’t convinced.’

Yorke bursts into laughter when I read that back to him. Why, one wonders, was he so unconvinced? ‘It was a brief conversation when Mr Donwood arrived in LA,’ says Yorke, referring to the friend, real name Dan Rickwood, he met in the early 1990s when they were art students at Exeter University, and with whom he makes all the visuals for Radiohead, for his and guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s other band The Smile, and for his solo projects. ‘He walked into the [recording] studio, sat down and started saying this. I had five minutes of panic.’

‘We were supposed to build the artwork in two weeks,’ replies Donwood. ‘But I didn’t know how to make this happen. I had just joined the National Trust, though.’

‘The first thing I said to you, even before I said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work’, was something like: “Don’t we need three or four years to grow it?”’ Donwood clarifies: ‘Well, it was all gonna be about chicken wire and Astroturf – I was gonna cheat.’