THIRTY YEARS OF CREATIVE COLLABORATION: DONWOOD, YORKE & RADIOHEAD
Inside This Is What You Get exhibition galleries
It was 40 years ago and in Abingdon, around the corner from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, that Radiohead was formed.
Comprising Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway, the band members were all pupils of Abingdon School, an independent day and boarding school for boys.
Following the great success of their first single, Creep, in 1992, their international popularity and critical standing rose rapidly. Not your average band, Radiohead has presented elaborate musical structures and unusual sound worlds, linking unorthodox rock music with electronica, orchestral instrumentation and a wide array of inspiration ranging from jazz to techno, while using a rather abstract harmonic language.
Radiohead, 1996. Photo courtesy Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and artist and writer Stanley Donwood first met during their studies of English and Fine Art at the University of Exeter. After leaving university, Yorke and Donwood went their separate ways until Yorke got back in touch in 1994, asking Donwood to have a go at creating the record sleeve for Radiohead's second album, The Bends (1995).
In search of an iron lung – there is a song on the album called My Iron Lung – Donwood and Yorke managed to get into the basement of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. However, a resuscitation dummy they found with its metal nipples and a facial expression evoking ‘ecstasy and agony, simultaneously’, as Donwood remembers, was far more interesting-looking.
They filmed the dummy, played it on a TV screen and then repeatedly photographed and rescanned the image. The final picture with its distorted style echoes the feel of the music on Radiohead’s second album.
The Bends album cover, Thom Yorke & Stanley Donwood, 1995 © 1995 XL Recordings Ltd
Untitled, Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke, 1994, printouts of designs. Stanley Donwood Collection © Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke
Often referred to as the ‘silent Radiohead member’, Donwood has collaborated with Yorke on all Radiohead albums ever since, for 30 years. They have worked in a wide array of artistic materials and unpredictable styles, ranging from drawing to digital collaging, acrylic painting to working with wax, and etching to experimental marbling.
Every recording is an opportunity to try something new musically as well as visually, to embrace challenges and risk. Almost all the visuals accompanying Yorke’s solo projects and his recently founded band The Smile have also been created together with Donwood.
There are many precedents for successful collaborations between musicians and visual artists that have resulted in iconic record covers.
Think of the cover of Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut album with Andy Warhol’s design of a banana, or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) with its famous collage of celebrities and influential people from the present and past – a collaboration between Paul McCartney and British Pop Art legend Peter Blake. A few decades later, the photo of a baby underwater reaching for a dollar bill became almost as well-known as the music on Nirvana’s album Nevermind (1991). The image was conceived by art director Robert Fisher in collaboration with Kurt Cobain.
But it is very rare that an artist is involved in the creative process as early as Donwood. His album covers and all visual works relating to Radiohead's and Yorke’s music are not illustrations of sounds and texts but rather created in tandem with them.
This Is What You Get exhibition wall of albums display
When new music is rehearsed and recorded, Donwood is often in the same building: painting, drawing, or experimenting on a computer; he witnesses how a musical album gradually takes shape. In a room next door to the recording studio, hearing the sounds and lyrics, you can find Donwood working away – be this at Abbey Road Studio, London, Oxfordshire, in Los Angeles or the South of France. Yorke takes breaks from the music to engage with the emerging images, which means the visual works also feed back into what he takes into the music studio.
Stanley Donwood, La Fabrique Recording Studio, 2015
‘A flatbed scanner was the most exciting thing ever invented in the whole universe, as far as we were concerned. It just sat there all the way through [recording] OK Computer, just scanning, scanning, scanning,’ Yorke remembers the creative work for Radiohead’s third album.
OK Computer album cover, Thom Yorke & Stanley Donwood, 1997 © 1997 XL Recordings Ltd
Yorke and Donwood collaboratively created collages on a newly-acquired Mac computer, using images from their sketchbooks as well as various found images.
Notebook featuring lyrics for Karma Police, Thom Yorke, 1995 © Thom Yorke
Surface, Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke, 1995, lambda print on paper. Collection SCHUNCK © Thom Yorke & Stanley Donwood, photo Peter Cox
The duo set itself the challenge of creating all the artwork without using the ‘undo’ function. Instead, they used the digital eraser, creating a multi-layered aesthetic that evoked a feeling of anxiety typical of the late 1990s, similar to the music.
Tired of working digitally, Donwood rented a studio space in which they could paint at scale, using brushes, knives and a variety of different paints. He enjoyed the physicality of working on a canvas again.
Kid A album cover, Thom Yorke & Stanley Donwood, 2000 © XL Recordings Ltd
For Yorke, painting was also a welcome distraction from the pressure that followed the enormous success of OK Computer. Some works from this highly fruitful phase were inspired by the newspaper images covering the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
In Residential Nemesis an empty landscape in thick white paint conveys a dark atmosphere that links to images of concentration camps covered in snow.
Get Out Before Saturday, Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke, 2000, acrylic on canvas © Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke
Residential Nemesis, Thom Yorke & Stanley Donwood, 2000, acrylic on canvas. Private collection of Jordan Brand. Courtesy of TIN MAN ART
The cover of Yorke's first solo album, The Eraser, features a detail of a linocut by Donwood that was partly motivated by a flood he witnessed together with Yorke in Cornwall. The style of the linocut was inspired by a medieval encyclopaedia with engravings of cities, The Liber Chronicarium (1493).
It depicts familiar London landmarks, such as the Gherkin, engulfed in a large wave, while a lone man seems to be directing the sea. London Views represents Donwood's interest in traditional printing methods and art history, linking it to contemporary events.
London Views (for The Eraser/Amok album), Stanley Donwood, 2015-6, composite image, full print of linocuts © Stanley Donwood
Yorke's album was recorded in Cornwall as well as Covent Garden, London. XL studios in London later asked Donwood to turn the work into a large-sized mural, which you can see when strolling through Ladbroke Grove.
XL recording studio front in Ladbroke Grove with Stanley Donwood's mural of his London Views linocut
Fast forward to 2022, as the UK came out of lockdown: after some extremely busy years, Yorke and Donwood found quiet time to work together in a studio again, painting collaboratively. These recent paintings, made with tempera and gesso, are influenced by ancient maps that Yorke saw in an exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Wall of Eyes, Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke, 2023, tempera, gouache & gesso on linen (used for The Smile's Wall of Eyes album) © Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke
Over the Edge, Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke, 2023, termpera, gouache & ink on board (used for The Smile) © Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke. Photo courtesy of TIN MAN ART
The abstracted landscapes and cartograms appear colourful, gentle and somewhat optimistic. Some of these paintings were used on the covers of records and releases by The Smile.
Unusually, they were not made during recording and the music was in a much more finished state when Donwood and Yorke began their visual response.
Wall of Eyes (for The Smile), cd cover mock up, 2023, print on photography paper © Stanley Donwood
Donwood and Yorke have been a team for 30 years: they are each other’s first critic, catalyst, and collaborator, aware of their respective skills. Together they have pushed and led ad absurdum the boundaries between record covers, artworks and music marketing in a distinctive way. Each album has generated a whole series of images, beyond the final cover, always looking different from the previous album.
Wraith (for A Moon Shaped Pool album), 2016, enamel on canvas © Thom Yorke & Stanley Donwood
The visual identity is as experimental and integral as the music, complementing the sounds and lyrics to create a synthesis of the different art forms – a Gesamtkunstwerk. Merchandise, ranging from T-shirts to tea cups, is playfully done in-house, often using guerrilla methods and always controlled by Donwood and Yorke.
The Ashmolean’s exhibition is titled ‘This is What You Get’, citing a line from one of Radiohead’s best-known songs, Karma Police (1997). But it is only what you get for now. To end with Yorke’s own words: ‘anyway, we’re not done yet’.
Most of the artworks described above are in the This Is What You Get exhibition which runs until 11 Jan 2026. All of them are included in the beautifully-illustrated exhibition catalogue.
The exhibition features listening posts with headphones to hear Radiohead and other Thom Yorke music while enjoying the show. There is an audio guide you can buy (with your tickets), narrated by comedian Adam Buxton and featuring Yorke and Donwood in conversation with Lena Fritsch. See below for links.
