INTRODUCTION LENA FRITSCH
Now internationally celebrated, the British band Radiohead was originally formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire in the mid-1980s. Comprising Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Philip Selway, the band members were all pupils of Abingdon School, an independent day and boarding school for boys. After signing to EMI in 1991, they released their debut album, Pablo Honey, two years later. Following the great success of their first single, Creep, their international popularity and critical standing rose rapidly. Not your average band, Radiohead has presented elaborate musical structures and created unusual sound worlds, linking experimental rock music with electronica, orchestral instrumentation, and a wide array of other musical influences ranging from jazz to techno, while using a rather abstract harmonic language. The lyrics are poetic, political, and powerful, performed by Yorke in his distinctive voice. The records differ to each other in style and mirror the dedication of the band to continuously breaking musical barriers and creating new sounds. To date, Radiohead have sold more than 30 million records worldwide and Creep has had over 1.7 billion streams on Spotify. Since 2014, their award-winning album, OK Computer (1997), has been preserved in the US Library of Congress. In 2019, Radiohead were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke (b.1968) and artist and writer Stanley Donwood (b.1968) first met at the University of Exeter while studying for a joint honours degree in English literature and fine art. Yorke remembers seeing Donwood for the first time at college in a ‘tweed cap and green tweed suit’, reading a book and looking ‘like he was there by mistake’. Meanwhile, Yorke himself was a ‘shaven-headed guitar-playing pretend DJ type who was going to do music’.1 They became friends and first joined forces in 1994 when designing the cover of Radiohead’s single My Iron Lung and related second album, The Bends. After filming a CPR mannequin in the basement of John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, Donwood and Yorke photographed the film visuals on a TV screen, which resulted in striking, pixelated images. They have now collaborated for over three decades, exchanging ideas and bouncing images and texts off each other in various ways, be this by faxing each other letters, jointly manipulating images on a computer, or by sitting at different ends of a desk and erasing each other’s drawings. Their artistic partnership has resulted in an extensive archive of visual material linked to Radiohead’s CD and LP covers, booklets, posters, merchandising products, and internet projects. Their work has also been used on record covers for Yorke’s solo projects, and for his recently founded band The Smile. Sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, and using a wide range of artistic materials, their works have linked music and text with visual imagery in experimental ways. Together, Donwood and Yorke have pushed and led ad absurdum the boundaries between record covers, artworks, and music marketing in a distinctive way. This book features a carefully curated selection of the visual works of art by Donwood and Yorke, made over the last 30 years to accompany albums by Radiohead, Yorke, and The Smile. Organised chronologically, it showcases the great variety of their collaborative work, ranging from well-known digital compositions to tempera paintings, and from iconic etchings to unpublished drawings from their sketchbooks. The book title, This Is What You Get, a line taken from Radiohead’s well-known song Karma Police (1997), represents their artistic approach: direct, honest, poetic, dark, and sometimes comedic. The artworks are complemented by exclusive interviews with Donwood and Yorke, representing the artists’ own words, and reflecting their unique, playful approach to working together creatively. Four essays explore their works from diverse new perspectives and contextualise them in complementary ways. Director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson, writes from a personal angle about his time with the artists at the University of Exeter in the 1980s, and explores their unique approach to creating visual art in dialogue with music; independent curator James Putnam introduces the art of record covers and related collaborations between artists and musicians more broadly; British Museum curator and drawings expert Jennifer Ramkalawon views the sketchbooks made by Donwood and Yorke in the context of art history; freelance writer
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Introduction