Radiohead album cover image taken in hospital basement

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and artist Stanley Donwood have revealed the front cover of their album, The Bends, came about after the pair sneaked into a hospital basement.

Yorke and Donwood told the story in an interview ahead of a new exhibition of their work at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

This year marks 30 years since the release of The Bends, and Donwood said the cover was going to be based on the title of the album’s lead single.

“It was a literal thing, because the song was called My Iron Lung, and I was like, ‘Let’s go and find an actual iron lung and film it’,” he said.

Their hunt led them to the basement of Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, where they found the dummy that appears on the cover.

Speaking to the exhibition’s curator, Lena Fritsch, Yorke said it was “probably” Donwood’s fault it happened the way it did.

York said: “We managed to get into the basement of the John Radcliffe Hospital… we shouldn’t have.

“I don’t know how we got in. We weren’t supposed to be there.”

Donwood said they went into a “horrible storage area” which was like “something from a low-budget horror film”. But, when they found the iron lung, they thought it was “very boring… just a metal box”.

But nearby they found a mannequin used to train people to perform CPR and use defibrillators.

“There were a few of them, actually. The resuscitation dummy was literally lying there,” Yorke said.

Radiohead was formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire in the mid-1980s – comprising of frontman Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway.

Yorke and Donwood became friends at Exeter University, where they were both studying English literature and fine art.

They first joined forces in 1994 to design the cover of Radiohead’s single, My Iron Lung, and their second album, The Bends.

Donwood, whose real name is Dan Rickwood, has worked on most of Radiohead’s cover art as well as for Yorke’s other music projects.

Donwood, describing their artistic process at the time of The Bends, said: “We had a video camera and went out filming material, all sorts of things, it didn’t really matter what it was. We then played it back on Thom’s TV and photographed the TV screen with a film camera.

“At the time, all of the TVs were analogue. So, when you got close to them, their display was really interesting, like a pre-pixel world.”

Yorke said: “Blowing it up would pixelate it. Then we stretched the image, distorted it a bit to exaggerate the expression.”

“Not very much, though, because I think we had a deadline the next day… from the record company,” Donwood added.

The pair admitted they had only just figured out how to use Photoshop and the colours on the image came out wrong.

“They all looked great on the screen, but when you print it onto actual records, then it was like, ‘What’s that muddy mauve colour?’ ‘That’s your blue.’

“So, good job there’s not too much blue on the front cover,” Donwood said.

“Good job the record sold alright. It looked like we meant it,” Yorke laughed.

The exhibition This Is What You Get is on at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum from 6 August until 11 January.