-Julian-Broad.jpg?trim=0,19,0,19&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Art snobs won’t find much to love at Radiohead and Stanley Donwood’s exhibition – hooray for that – UK Times")
Famous pairings have yielded some of music’s most recognisable and celebrated artworks. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground. Peter Blake and The Beatles. Storm Thorgerson and Pink Floyd. Arguably less ingrained in the public consciousness are Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, who met as students at Exeter University, where they studied fine art and English literature and whose longstanding collaborations have appeared on the front of every album by Radiohead, Yorke and The Smile since 1995’s The Bends invoked that instantly iconic image of a CPR dummy’s lips parted in ecstasy.
A new exhibition at The Ashmolean in Oxford, where Radiohead formed and a stone’s throw from where they played their first gig, at the Jericho Tavern in 1987, explores Yorke and Donwood’s work over the past three decades, spanning album covers, etchings, unpublished drawings, and sketchbooks full of the frontman’s lyrical scribblings. It’s fascinating, and not just for Radiohead fans but for anyone intrigued by the interweaving of sonic and visual art forms.
That symbiotic relationship underpins this entire endeavour, making the negative reviews of This Is What You Get, which critique it solely as an art exhibition, slightly odd. Those raised eyebrows might’ve come down a bit had the naysayers reminded themselves that the Ashmolean is not a gallery, but a museum home to works that do not adhere to any one strict definition of art.
It is impossible to view the vivid acrylic canvases for Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief – inspired by their visit to Los Angeles and drives past endless gaudy signs screaming words like “HAMBURGER”, “DANGER” and “DONUT” – and not think of the band’s blaring walls of sound, from the deafening crescendo on “Sit Down. Stand Up” to the waspish buzz of “Myxomatosis”.
And, as Donwood himself points out in quotes printed around the walls of the exhibition, all of the pieces on display were created in tandem with the music itself. Going back to The Bends, we learn how Donwood’s original plan was to scour an Oxford hospital in search of an iron lung to put on the cover. Upon seeing one in person, however, the duo realised what an uninspiring image this would make and instead stumbled across a room of plastic CPR dummies, resulting in the now-famous shot of a mannequin taking in a borderline-orgasmic breath of oxygen.
Curated smartly in chronological order, the exhibition leads us to Radiohead’s 2000 record Kid A, created at the dawn of the millennium when Donwood and Yorke were growing frustrated with the formerly state-of-the-art technology they had once revelled in. Yorke was also feeling the pressure in the wake of the critical and commercial success ushered in by 1997’s OK Computer – he fled to Donwood’s studio and busied himself with painting, instead. The lyrics to songs such as “How to Disappear Completely” align perfectly with the album cover’s eerie, lonely mountain spires – not to mention a twin canvas of those same peaks looming over an ominous black void (a lake or a pit?) – in a visualisation of Yorke’s anxiety and the defensive walls he wished to erect around himself.
-Thom-Yorke.jpg)
It’s brilliant, too, to have the chance to trace the throughlines in each of Yorke’s and Radiohead’s albums. These are studies in loneliness, of willing solitude and punishing exile. They are jittery, paranoid dives into America’s war on terror, and a searing condemnation of rampant capitalism that’s plain to see on Hail to the Thief, with those greasy black spouts of oil gushing from the ground. Yorke’s interest in the occult, in witchcraft, folklore and myth, transpires in The Eraser’s lonely figure – inspired by King Canute – holding a futile hand to the raging sea that surges towards him. More abstract but equally evocative are the distorted pink arms flailing against a blue background, which Donwood created for Yorke’s score to the 2018 horror film Suspiria.
-Donwood-and-Yorke.jpg)
Choosing to exhibit the album artwork of a band like Radiohead over, say, The Beatles, makes more sense when you consider how Yorke’s songwriting has steadily grown increasingly abstract, away from the literal loner he sang about on “Creep” and towards the more unspeakable helplessness he channels on “Decks Dark”, singing: “All we trapped ragdoll cloth people/ We are helpless to resist/ In our darkest hour.” Out of the band’s wholehearted embrace of technology grew a suspicion of the monster it was creating, looming over our existence like the forbidding geometric doodles on the cover of Yorke’s neurotic second solo album, 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.
-Donwood-and-Yorke.jpg)
As for their more recent output, we find a newfound sense of playfulness in both the music and accompanying artwork for 2024’s Wall of Eyes, the second album from Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s experimental outfit The Smile. Donwood’s canvases here are celebratory and bright, as fast and fluid-seeming as the way in which the music itself was created.
Art snobs beware, for this is a marvellously accessible exhibition from one of Britain’s most enigmatic bands.
