The artist has been collaborating with the rock group’s frontman Thom Yorke on their distinctive visuals since the mid-90s. As a retrospective opens in Oxford, he looks back on three decades with the band
I
n the early 90s, Stanley Donwood was “at a loose end after university”, hitching around Britain and making a little money as a busking fire-breather. Fetching up in Oxford, he spotted a poster for a gig by a band called On a Friday. He recognised the name: a friend he’d met while studying at Exeter University’s fine art department called Thom Yorke was the lead singer.
So he called Yorke up. An initial plan for Donwood to do his fire-breathing routine as the band’s support act was scuppered by the venue’s nervous manager, but the pair kept in touch. Some time later, after On a Friday had changed their name to Radiohead, Yorke called with a proposition. “They’d done really well with Creep, which I hadn’t heard, it wasn’t my thing at all; I liked bleepy-bleepy, thumpy-thump music,” says Donwood. “But he said: ‘Our record sleeves are shit, do you want to come and have a go?’”
Their collaboration began in a fairly inauspicious, on-the-hoof style. For the 1994 EP My Iron Lung, they came up with the idea of videoing an actual iron lung and using a still from the ensuing footage. But having managed to inveigle access to Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital with a video camera, they discovered that an iron lung was just “a gunmetal grey box – kind of horrific, but aesthetically very boring”. On the plus side, while at the hospital, they spotted a resuscitation dummy: a grainy still from the video they made of it wound up on the cover of the 1995 album The Bends.
