They had one of those TV shows recently, Countdown to the Best Record in the Universe Ever, and it was getting near number one and OK Computer wasn’t on it, and I thought, “That’s weird,” but then it turns out that it was number one. So yeah, they rented it and moved all their gear there and recorded the album there.
This lane starts off ok and then it gets more and more filled up with potholes, until you get to this big old Elizabethan manor house with its own church nestled in this tiny little cocoon-like valley. Because I could ride my bike to where they were recording-it’s only about an hour from Bath on a bike-and they had this beautiful house in this place called St. It was really with OK Computer that I got more heavily involved with the band. We have many arguments, but they’re very genteel arguments about fonts and composition, we don’t fight, fight. And he was like, “I want it over there,” so I conceded and he won. I was like, “Fucking massive mate.” And I wanted “The Bends” to be central. I vaguely remember me and Thom arguing about how big “Radiohead” should be on the cover. The cover of The Bends was a dummy that had metal nipples that were in slightly the wrong place so that you can put the paddles on to go “zzzzt”.
DIFFERENT COLORS WALK THE MOON ALBUM COVER HOW TO
So we’re wandering around, and I was trying not to film the old and the dying people, and then I was in a room where they have the mannequins they use to teach people how to bring someone back from the dead. We eventually found the iron lung and it was rubbish it’s just a grey metal box. We’d heard that there was an iron lung in the hospital, and I wanted to film it because of “My Iron Lung” the song. But I didn’t think about it, I was young. The Bends was interesting because somehow we managed to sneak a video recorder into a hospital-that’s not right is it? You shouldn’t do that. Apart from The Bends, which was, now, comparatively minimal at the time, but for me it was like, “Whoa!” But the cover, we had a deadline, and we were like, “Fucken hell, what are we going to do?” We didn’t have a cover, we had a few possibles, but we were young then, like 25 or something. This is the amazing thing, Radiohead record covers-a little-known fact, published in Monster Children for the very first time-are always last minute, always last minute. But then I was listening to it and there was one on The Bends that I particularly liked called “Just”. “Guitars? Who uses guitars?” So I didn’t really like it. I was into dance music before I got into the other things that went along with dance music. I’ve got a feeling that I didn’t particularly like their first record, Pablo Honey. It’s a very dangerous tool in the wrong hands, Photoshop, like a nuclear weapon. Somewhere in here I’ve got loads of A4 printouts of veraciously poor record designs. When you first get Photoshop it’s like, “Oh my god, bevelled edges, embossed, chrome effect, wow!” And you fucking do everything and pile everything into one picture. We’d both fucked around on computers a bit and we taught ourselves Photoshop really badly-I still don’t know what half of the things are, I think I’ve found a very narrow skill set that I refuse to deviate from in case I fuck everything up. We went to the same university (Exeter) where we both did fine art and English literature, but we used to sneak into the lovely lush carpeted graphic design area from the shitty hell hole of the fine art building. The phone rang and it was Thom, “Do you want to have a go at doing the record sleeve?” So you had to pay for calls, but when we ran out of money we’d unlock it and get the money out. I was living in this share house down in Plymouth where we had this payphone on the wall that we had the key for. The first record I did was the first single from The Bends-“My Iron Lung”-and I’d never done a record sleeve before. One blustery evening in Bath, after a couple of glasses of vino, we were lucky enough to sit down with Stanley Donwood in his studio as he pulled out the records one at a time and went through the laughs, tears, self-hatred, and last minute jubilation behind each one. His role has evolved into less hired gun, and more of an intrinsic part of who the band are and what they stand for. More than simply designing one image for the cover of the CD case or the record, Stanley’s produced a whole catalogue of work for each release that’s as sweeping and complex as the records themselves. Radiohead have released nine studio albums, and since The Bends in 1995, Stanley Donwood has been responsible for the covers and accompanying artwork for everyone. The images that grace the covers are etched into the consciousness of fans the world over, but the stories behind them remain largely untold.
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