An album sleeve is linked to the creative process of the band, and once it is unveiled, the listener can gain some understanding of the band’s evolution and the aim of the new production. Also, it is a visual representation of the band’s identity.
Nowadays albums are becoming obsolete, as whole records can be found on the Internet. Bands remain undeterred and continue to create album sleeves, since they see it as a special interaction between the artist and the fans.
In most cases, listeners remain blissfully unaware of who is responsible for the art on the cover.
Radiohead is a group that particularly pays attention to the details of its album sleeves. With each new album they develop a new, visual artistic concept. Hidden behind their album sleeves there is a story waiting to be told.
Dan Rickwood, who is better known in the music industry as Stanley Donwood, is an English writer and artist in charge of creating Radiohead’s record image.
In 1994, he and Thom Yorke met at the University of Exeter. He may not work directly for the band, but he understands what Yorke and his bandmates wish to transmit to the audience. He goes with the band to the studio whenever they record, and he keeps a visual diary of the sessions. From My Iron Lung to Kings of Limb, every Radiohead album sleeve comes with an anecdote.
My Iron Lung (1994) and The Bends (1995)
Thom Yorke asked Stanley to work on the sleeve for My Iron Lung after the release of the EP The Bends. “I was so poor I’d have done anything, after a series of disastrous low paid jobs,” he recollects in an interview for NME. He got a CPR mannequin and filmed it with an old camera. He never imagined this record would be awarded with a triple platinum record for its sales in North America and Europe.
Kid A (2000)
“I got these huge canvases for what became Kid A, and I went mental using knives and sticks to paint with and having those photographed, and then doing things to the photographs in Photoshop. The overarching idea of the mountains was that they were these landscapes of power, the idea of tower blocks and pyramids. It was about some sort of cataclysmic power existing in landscape. I was really chuffed with it,” shares Donwood.
The record was released in 2000. It had two booklets, one to illustrate the lyrics and credits, and the other one was behind the plastic cover. Donwood commented that the inspiration for these booklets came from Brought to Light by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz. In the book, the CIA measures death tolls by filling 50-gallon pools with blood. This image haunted Donwood during the studio sessions.
Amnesiac (2001)
“Kid A was for me a fucked up phone call, whereas Amnesiac felt more like someone had left a really, really long answerphone message,” Donwood remembers. The album was recorded in London and Stanley found inspiration in a graffiti. The streets suddenly started to speak to him, and he listened to them. “I wanted it to be like something that was found. I had this idea that there an empty house and you go up the dusty stairs without a carpet, go into the attic and there’s an old knackered chest of drawers, and inside there’s a box and inside there’s the book.” And the minotaur? It’s a horrible creature that I felt sorry for because it knew nothing but how to be a monster. So I wanted this little creature to be in tears,” he explains.
Hail of the Thief (2003)
Donwood travelled with Radiohead to a studio in LA to record an album that would change their lives forever. The artist spent most of the road trip sitting in the back seat, and to kill the time, he wrote every word he saw on the road. “The artwork were maps of cities that had some relationship with the war against terror. Manhattan, LA, London, Grozny, Kabul,” he remembers. Hail of the Thief’s art is a summary of the subliminal messages people perceive on a daily basis.
In Rainbows (2007)
The band recorded this album in an old manor house in Savernake Forest, the biggest one in England. “I’d read this very depressing book about what happens when civilization runs out of oil. I had this idea that I was going to do drawings of shopping malls as cathedrals surrounded by suburbia. But the music took a different direction and became much more organic, sensual and sexual so I started working with wax and syringes,” he states. Thom Yorke mentioned in an interview that the sleeve was inspired by the images the NASA uploaded in its website, alongside with Downwood’s experiments with wax.
The King of Limbs (2011)
Donwood’s first idea was to make portraits of the members of the band in Gerhard Richter’s style, but he had never worked with oil paint before, and the results were catastrophic. So, Donwood went for a different approach. During the recording sessions he began to think of forests, and he painted over the Richter portraits with colorful trees.
