Stanley Donwood on BBC Radio 6

Since Thom Yorke asked him to help with a single sleeve in 1994, Stanley Donwood has made every Radiohead cover and most of the artwork around them, working alongside the records rather than after them. The presenters call that close to unique for a visual artist and a band.

The Christie's exhibition gathers the canvases he painted between 1999 and 2001 for Kid A and Amnesiac, with drawings, lyrics and digital work from the same years. Donwood tells Matt Everitt he wants people to come and see them and not only bid, because the originals have a texture and depth that the sleeve photographs flatten.

The exhibition they first planned never happened. The idea was to weld together a stack of shipping containers, arrange them to look as though they had crashed into the side of the Albert Hall, and put the show inside. Westminster council declined, on the grounds that it amounted to an enormous advertisement for Radiohead. Donwood's reply was that the Albert Hall is an enormous advertisement for Prince Albert.