By Bea Hipson Holder
British Rock band ‘Radiohead’ have sold over 30 million albums, and boast six Grammy Awards, four Ivor Novello Awards, and five Mercury Prize nominations, the most of any act. Alongside their highly acclaimed lyricism and advancement of what many have described as ‘alternative rock’, one of the most striking features of their work is their iconic album covers. Lead singer and songwriter, Thom Yorke, met visual artist Stanley Donwood while they were both students at the University of Exeter, and the two have collaborated on every album cover for the band since The Bends in 1995. From this point on, the band’s music and visual identity became closely intertwined. Over their 30-year partnership, Donwood and Yorke produced original paintings, digital compositions, etchings, unpublished drawings, and lyrics in their sketchbooks. I could go on to talk about all three of these decades, but I will focus on their first decade of collaboration: the 1990s. While the age-old saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, I want to zoom in on how some of Radiohead’s most iconic album covers shape our perception of the themes within.
Caught between human sensation and machine-like vacancy
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford recently hosted an exhibition celebrating ‘the visual art of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke and the iconic images of Radiohead’. Titled ‘This Is What You Get’ (after ‘Karma Police’, on the OK Computer album), the exhibition showcased over 180 pieces from Radiohead and Donwood’s collaboration, which I was lucky enough to see last month. The Bends includes hits such as ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘My Iron Lung’. The contorted figure of the rubber dummy, caught between human sensation and machine-like vacancy, was the product of a clandestine hospital visit and some experimental editing on an old TV screen. ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ opens with the description of “a rubber man”, “a cracked polystyrene man”, who arguably becomes the album’s unifying motif. Much like the songs themselves, Donwood and Yorke’s cover art transitioned through stages of production. They began with early sketches and underwent a process of layering, colouring, and texturising, and often used both digital and physical artistic tools. The suspension between the human and the machine at the heart of The Bends became the spine of much of the band’s work to come.
Radiohead’s third and best-selling album OK Computer is both a continuation of the technological anxiety of the previous album, and a turning point, both musically and visually. Released in 1997, Yorke said the lyrics were inspired by observing the “speed” of the world in the 1990s. Where The Bends had a distinctly introspective, self-conscious focus, embodied with the up-close image of the dummy, OK Computer turns outward, tuning into the fears and growing feelings of alienation that came with the end of the millennium. Featuring songs such as ‘Exit Music (for a film)’ and ‘Paranoid Android’, the album experiments with song structures and incorporates avant-garde and electronic influences, prompting Rolling Stone to call the album a “stunning art-rock tour de force”. The album’s cover art shares this impressive complexity and dynamism. Unlike the solitary portrait of The Bends, OK Computer is a frantic collage of maps, diagrams, handwritten phrases, photographs of motorways, text fragments, logos, and even health warnings in Greek. In an interview for the exhibition, Donwood described the collection of images as “stuff you find on the floor, things you find in the back of your pockets, tiny little things, overlooked bits”. The white scribbles over the pale blue motorway are not just visual noise, but Donwood’s way of correcting mistakes: instead of pressing “undo”, he would draw over the error by hand. The visuals of the album cover reflect the overprocessed, overwhelmed, overexerted mood of the album, and of Radiohead’s world at the time.
The visuals of the album cover reflect the overprocessed, overwhelmed, overexerted mood of the album
Radiohead’s cover art serves not only to market their albums as unified collections of songs with shared themes and musical aims, but also to visually help Radiohead’s listeners navigate and settle into the mood of the albums. Radiohead’s cover art acts much like the art on the cover of a puzzle box, helping us find and fit together all the pieces within. Each album cover visually marks a milestone, arguably an era, of the band’s legendary career. Radiohead strain against the boundaries of what we think of as rock, and they have frequently been categorised as various alternative forms of art rock, electronic rock, and experimental rock. Their visual style is similarly tricky to pin down yet remains entirely distinctive and unique. Thom Yorke’s partnership with visual artist Stanley Donwood has most certainly enhanced the band’s musical and lyrical achievements, while intensifying the listening experience for Radiohead fans.
Images: radiohead.com
