Amid the necessary clamour that attended final week’s announcement of the line-up for 2025’s Glastonbury Competition – sure Gen Z game-changers Doechii and Gracie Abrams! No Rihanna! Whoop extra Kneecap! Why Olivia Rodrigo billed greater than Charli XCX? – there was one unifying response: that could be a actually fantastically designed poster.
(Picture credit score: Glastonbury poster design 2025)
Kudos, then, to the artist with the stained-glass sass, phoenix fetish and family-pass to the Bodleian Libraries. Stanley Donwood is the person within the (woodblock) body, a long-term, serial collaborator with Radiohead and Thom Yorke who’s been designing posters for the world’s best music competition for nearly so long as the world’s best band have been taking part in it.
What number of has he designed over time? Mr Donwood regrets that he forgets, however hopes that ‘certainly another person has a greater grasp of actuality than I do? I can not bear in mind what number of instances I have been to Glastonbury. However art work, I feel I’ve finished annually since 2002. What number of is that?’ This spiritual attendee of the competition has an equally shaky grasp on Glasto-related actuality, however will recommend that that quantity is round 20, relying on whether or not the artist had already accomplished posters for the festivals that have been Covid-cancelled in 2020 in 2021.
This month, Mr Donwood can also be busy on the fortieth version of London Authentic Print Truthful at Somerset Home, at which he’s exhibiting one in every of his Glastonbury work, a few of his Radiohead items and a brand new, at the moment hush-hush sequence created with Yorke at famed Montparnasse printing studio Idem Paris. He’s additionally undoubtedly gallery-deep in preparations for This Is What You Get, the primary main retrospective of his and Yorke’s work, opening this August at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.
Nonetheless, he graciously took time to reply some questions on his twentysomething-th foray into getting everybody correct excited concerning the competition summer time forward.
Wallpaper*: Greetings from the Stone Circle of the nation’s thoughts, Stanley. What have been your inspirations for this yr’s Glastonbury poster?
Stanley Donwood: Stained glass. Particularly, just a few years in the past I went on the closing of the day to a chapel on the Île de la Cité in Paris, the Sainte-Chapelle. Extra stained glass than I’ve ever seen in a single constructing. Extra not too long ago I obtained a replica of a Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, and one other e book known as Tales in Glass, and sort of took it from there. I am not remotely spiritual, and loads of the subject material conveyed by the glass was incomprehensible, so I attempted to think about stained glass made by a tradition that commemorated the solar.
W*: What’s the title of this yr’s font?
SD: I do not know. I made it by printing a woodblock typeface on the Bodleian Bibliographic Press in Oxford. I feel it was carved within the nineteenth century, nevertheless it’s laborious to inform with inky previous bits of wooden. Personally, I seek advice from it as Arcadia, however that is simply me.
W*: The phoenix was additionally a characteristic of your line-up poster final yr, and of your Worthy Forest portray for the competition. We all know what a phoenix usually signifies, however what’s the precise significance right here?
SD: I have been using the phoenix for just a few years as the symbol for a resurgent competition, flying as soon as once more after, firstly, years of police and institution opposition and obstruction, and latterly for surviving Covid and all of the financial uncertainty that lockdown entailed. One in all my daughters drew the primary incarnation, and it has developed additional since then. It would by no means die. And naturally, yearly, on the Wednesday night time, an enormous wood phoenix is burned on the hill overlooking the Vale of Pilton.
‘Worthy Forest’, Glastonbury Competition 2024 art work
(Picture credit score: Glastonbury lineup poster 2024 by Stanley Donwood)
W*: That Worthy Forest portray was a collaboration along with your two daughters. How previous have been they then, and what did they contribute?
SD: They have been 26 and 29. They did a lot of the portray. I did the ‘artwork course’.
W*: Are you able to inform us concerning the medieval tapestry within the Bodleian that you just ‘copied’ slash have been ‘impressed by’, and the way that grew to become a Glastonbury-friendly picture?
SD: It is a huge tapestry, about 4 metres sq., and it was woven in – I feel – the fifteenth century, though I might simply be incorrect. It is of Oxfordshire and a part of Gloucestershire and a few bits of different counties. Aha… I’ve simply obtained the e book down off the shelf and found that it is the Sheldon Tapestry map of Gloucestershire, from circa 1590. I had been very concerned about medieval artwork these days. We look like re-entering the Darkish Ages. I assumed that rewilding a model of the Glastonbury Competition website, making it kind of Submit-Human, can be, , sort of attention-grabbing.
W*: In accordance with Glastopedia, one in every of your earliest Glastonbury posters was 2003. Did that art work come about by way of your relationship with that yr’s headliners, Radiohead?
SD: No. Funnily sufficient, I met Michael Eavis’ daughter-in-law at a playgroup when my daughters have been very younger, and we obtained speaking, and so I ended up doing a design for the competition in 2002. Very way back. Within the olden days.
W*: How did you strategy that yr’s design?
SD: I had simply been to Tokyo, so I based mostly it on the Tokyo underground railway map.
(Picture credit score: Glastonbury lineup poster 2003 by Stanley Donwood)
W*: Did Thom Yorke contribute to the design in 2003?
SD: What? No! And he by no means has. Demarcation, is not it?
W*: When, usually, do you start work on annually’s poster, and what are the earliest phases of the design course of?
SD: Earlier yearly, it appears. Positively within the winter. Within the bleak months, the brief, darkening days. It is fairly troublesome to envisage a time of heat and light, of enjoyable. The earliest phases of the ‘design course of’ are just about the identical as all the opposite phases: there’s loads of drawing in sketchbooks.
2010’s poster was printed with glow-in-the-dark ink
(Picture credit score: Glastonbury poster 2010 by Stanley Donwood)
W*: What sort of conversations do you’ve gotten with Michael and Emily Eavis concerning the design of every yr’s poster?
SD: None in any respect. They simply let me get on with it.
W*: When it comes to filling within the artist names: do you add them as every artist is booked, or wait for everybody to be confirmed?
SD: No means. I used to do this and it was a nightmare. So now I simply design the poster and fill it with faux names devised by my colleague Lionel Hatred. Then I go away it to the competition people to place the actual names in, so it is a lot simpler. I can ship you the Lionel Hatred model if you happen to like. [Editor’s note: we’re still awaiting Maestro Hatred’s work.]
W*: Of all of the work you do, what appeals about being a serial collaborator with Glastonbury?
SD: I assume in some methods it is a kind of vacation within the thoughts – there are totally different issues after I make art work for a competition. In some way I have to challenge a kind of happiness, a sort of cheery vibe that does not, to be sincere, come very naturally to me. However over time I have been to dozens of festivals of all types, from travellers’ gatherings within the Eighties to, properly, fancy-assed Glastonbury within the 2020s. So I’ve a substantial memory-bank of varied psychedelic experiences to attract upon for inspiration.
W*: If push involves shove, what’s your favorite of your Glastonbury posters?
SD: I did one in 2010 with a large full moon on it that we printed with glow-in-the-dark ink. However, , I sort of like all of them.
W*: And what’s your favorite that’s been designed by another person?
SD: I actually just like the Eighties ones when it was known as Glastonbury CND Competition and it was lower than a tenner to get in. Not that we paid, we obtained in beneath a mattress at the back of the van that gave us a carry.
W*: Greatest ever Glasto gig?
SD: In all probability Radiohead in 1997, which I did not even see as a result of it was very muddy, my girlfriend was very pregnant and our daughter was solely two. We obtained the bus again to Bristol, however apparently it was an excellent gig. [Editor’s note: it was.]
Glastonbury runs 25-29 June 2025, glastonburyfestivals.co.uk
Supply: Wallpaper
