What Radiohead's artwork tells us about their music (and a new album)

Times

5 days ago

In 2007, when Radiohead surprise-released the album In Rainbows, their legions of devoted fans were given a choice. Click here, we were told, and you can have the music for free. Or click here and you can pay £40 to have the music plus a load of artwork. Reader, I paid the £40 — and that record, with its gorgeous, trippy rainbow splurge of colour, is still on display in my living room.
Hence This Is What You Get, an era-spanning hits, rarities and notebooks exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in the band's home town of Oxford, and which is named for a lyric in their song Karma Police. Because nothing sums up Radiohead diehards better than spending hard-earned cash on some photocopied paintings instead of opting to own In Rainbows for zilch . Do the band have a sleeve as iconic as Sgt Pepper? Nevermind? Parklife? No. But nobody else gets close to the synergy between music and image that Radiohead's body of work boasts — a point This Is What You Get pushes over and over again as it traces the singer Thom Yorke's professional relationship with his artist friend Stanley Donwood through 180 exhibits.
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They met at Exeter University in the late 1980s and started working together for the front cover of The Bends in 1995 — that image of a crash test dummy looking as if he is at the point of climax. The duo have put images to music for everything Yorke has written since. For fans, then, this exhibition will be essential, from the opening display of album and single covers they probably own, all the way to the gift shop, where a blue and white teacup and saucer will set you back £42.
Yet fans are hardly the test here. Heck, we spent money on essentially free music and acolytes will lap up not so much the art on the wall as the personal items, mostly shown in display cabinets. There is a self-portrait by Yorke with spiders in his beard. One notebook shows an alternative track listing for the album Hail to the Thief (I tried it out; it's better). Another lists Yorke's fears from 2006, which include Iran, smoking ganja, getting fat, the suffering of millions as a consequence of global warming, and evangelists. Scribbled above some lyrics is a phone number for someone called Ellie. These lived-in pages in themselves prove to be a joy, probably as close to an autobiography as Yorke will get, showing us a mind that is always on, always jotting. The explanatory text for his solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes says it was made at 'a particularly bleak time for Yorke'. I am not sure we knew that.
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Still, the focus here is not Yorke's words, nor his music, which plays very little role in the exhibition at his insistence that nothing would be played through speakers (there are a couple of points offering headphones for the uninitiated who have somehow found themselves in a Radiohead exhibition). Instead the point is is to let the visuals speak for themselves, to extricate Donwood and Yorke's artwork, which they mostly create at the same time as the music is being recorded, from the awards-laden band that made said art famous.
'It was years before I could go into a gallery,' an introductory text by Donwood reads. 'They're just intimidating, whereas a record shop is full of all kinds of oiks.' It says something about the confidence of the two men that we are clearly not in a record shop any more.
So do the paintings, drawings and sketches, on canvases great and small, digital and analogue, stand alone? It is hard, as a fan, to divorce the art from the music — this is a nostalgia trip on which you recall where you were when you first heard each album in every room — but, largely, yes they do, albeit not at the start. The Bends, for instance, is limited here to a couple of posters, but its acclaimed follow-up, OK Computer, is gifted its own big room for artwork that was a parody of self-help and business speak — that lack of soul the album was railing against. It follows Yorke's lyrics and technological fears, thus making it less album art, more art for an album. Non-fans may wonder whether the room actually belongs in a gallery.
Move on, though, and as Radiohead's music became more abstract, so did the images. The initially divisive, glitchy Kid A, we are told, was made when Yorke was struggling with the idea of following up OK Computer's success. 'Some anxiety could be exorcised by painting with brushes, knives, sticks, rags, anger, frustration and kicks,' the supporting text reads, and the nightmarish paint-splatter mountains and monsters perfectly evoke music that had left guitars behind and lyrics that no longer told stories but dealt with feelings.
Which is pretty much what the past quarter of a century has been for Yorke, a man who, over time, became perhaps more interested in the visuals than he was in music. A real highlight is Yorke's debut solo album, The Eraser, for which Donwood created a London cityscape swept away in a flood. It is black-and-white, eerie and powerful in a way very little album art manages because most of it is not made in cahoots with the musician.
At certain points the music supports the art, rather than the other way around: the monochrome sketches of endlessly chopped-down trees for Radiohead's single for war veterans, Harry Patch (In Memory Of), is far more memorable than the actual song. Now that I have seen that image, which I never had in full given I had only streamed the track on Spotify, the song packs a greater power.
The exhibition ends with the Smile, Yorke's most recent band. This final room showcases how free-form his partnership with Donwood is. Made after lockdown, the bright, vivid paintings are full of life. It was a happy time and it shows. Many yellow suns are out and the trees are growing again. Donwood said he wanted to make 'less miserable pictures', something both Radiohead fans and haters will smile at.
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But then the show ends — with a full stop rather than the comma fans would like. They would, after all, love another room, a hint at a new album by Radiohead, if one will ever exist. It is a question this exhibition does not even try to answer but it does at least point us towards what we already knew: that Yorke is an enigma who has put the art into art rock, someone who long ago left behind the idea that his music can be defined, let alone predicted. There is, after all, no mention whatsoever of the breakthrough hit Creep, made before Yorke really knew who he was — and before he started to work with Donwood, his most important creative partner.This Is What You Get is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Aug 6 to Jan 11, ashmolean.org