Exclusive: Thom Yorke on 30 years of Radiohead album art

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 applied to Covid-era canvases, the black-spider scribbles in notebooks belonging to one of our greatest and most confounding lyricists – there’s a wonderfully deadpan piece of writing. It’s part of an extended text under one of the giant, wall-hung images that characterise ‘This Is What You Get’, a capacious and colourful and brilliant new exhibition of the work of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and his visual artist collaborator Stanley Donwood.

‘Donwood’s initial idea for the album cover,’ runs the caption beneath the pair’s sleeve artwork for Hail to the Thief (2003), ‘was to create enormous topiary phalluses, and digitally introduce them into the gardens owned by the National Trust, but Yorke was unconvinced.’