Thom Yorke and artist Stanley Donwood open up about Radiohead’s legendary album artwork

At Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum – amidst the sturm und drang of impending doom rendered on album sleeves, the swashing dollops of tempera and gouache paints liberally utilized to Covid-era canvases, the black-spider scribbles in notebooks belonging to considered one of our best and most confounding lyricists – there’s a splendidly deadpan piece of writing. It is a part of an prolonged textual content below one of many big, wall-hung photographs that characterise ‘This Is What You Get’, a capacious and vibrant and sensible new exhibition of the work of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and his visible artist collaborator Stanley Donwood.

‘Donwood’s preliminary concept for the album cowl,’ runs the caption beneath the pair’s sleeve paintings for Hail to the Thief (2003), ‘was to create huge topiary phalluses, and digitally introduce them into the gardens owned by the Nationwide Belief, however Yorke was unconvinced.’