Stanley Donwood tells how a hospital dummy became The Bends

The face on the cover of The Bends belongs to a resuscitation dummy, Stanley Donwood says. In 1994 he and Thom Yorke got into Oxford's John Radcliffe hospital with a video camera, meaning to film a real iron lung for the My Iron Lung EP and use a still. The iron lung turned out to be a dull grey box, so they filmed the dummy, and a grainy frame of it, photographed off a TV screen, went on the front of the album the next year.

Donwood told the story to the Guardian and the Big Issue as This Is What You Get, the Ashmolean Museum's show of his and Yorke's art, opened in Oxford on 6 August. It runs to 11 January with about 180 pieces, from cover paintings to unpublished drawings, lyric sheets and sketchbooks.

The two met at Exeter University in the late 1980s, both about 20. Donwood barely remembers it, and thinks what they had in common was a bleak, sarcastic cynicism. Both were bad at painting, and the partnership grew out of sharing a very early Apple Mac in the graphic design department. In the early 1990s, after university, he was hitchhiking round Britain, busking as a fire-breather, when he saw a poster in Oxford for an On a Friday gig, recognised the singer and rang him. A plan for him to support the band with his fire act fell through when the venue's manager got nervous.

Yorke rang him once “Creep” had done well. They'd done really well with Creep, which I hadn't heard, it wasn't my thing at all; I liked bleepy-bleepy, thumpy-thump music¹, Donwood says. What Yorke said on the phone was Our record sleeves are shit, do you want to come and have a go?¹

The pair have made the art for every Radiohead record since, and for Yorke's solo work, Atoms for Peace and The Smile. Donwood usually sets up in the studio or a building nearby with the music piped through, and Yorke works over what he makes; on OK Computer he deliberately covered parts of it. The OK Computer cover is a photo of a traffic interchange taken from a hotel window, collaged with graphics from an airline safety card, and all the art for that record was made on an A5 tablet with a stylus. It doesn't anticipate AI at all², Donwood says. Bored of the screen, he made Kid A on canvases about six feet square in a rented studio in Bath, with palette knives, sticks, cloths, shirt sleeves and the occasional kick.

We've got a lot less competitive, it's a lot more collaborative now

Stanley Donwood¹

, Donwood says of the two of them today. We're just older, you know. More tired!¹