Card catalogue. Photo: Tulane Public Relations, CC BY 2.0
Years ago, when Ed O’Brien started writing songs, he asked Thom Yorke how it was done. The answer was not about chords. It was not about talent, or waiting for lightning.
It was about shelves.
Be a good librarian, Yorke told him. Catalogue the idea when it arrives. Find it again later, when it is ready. Transgressive’s account of O’Brien’s songwriting tells it plainly, and it is the plainest description of creative work we know. No muse. No genius in a thunderstorm. A system of memory, and the patience to use it.
For thirty years Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood have run a library together. Its shelves are the sleeves of Radiohead’s records, and the posters, the websites, the notebooks, the paintings nobody bought. Last year the Ashmolean in Oxford opened the doors and let the public walk the stacks.
This page is a library too. Some lines are slips you can file. File one and it is stamped and kept, at the bottom of the page, in a drawer of your own. There is no undo. You’ll see why. Most chapters also hold a listening copy, the record itself, if you want a soundtrack while you read.
Donwood’s real name is Dan Rickwood. He met Yorke as a student at the University of Exeter, and the name he works under was one they cooked up together. A pseudonym is a kind of catalogue card: it files the work somewhere other than the self.
They lost touch after university. In 1994 Yorke got back in touch and asked Donwood to have a go at a record sleeve. First the single My Iron Lung. Then the album that would become The Bends. The library had its first shelf.
Catalogue the idea when it arrives. Find it again when it is ready.
They went looking for an iron lung, because of the song. They found their way into the basement of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, and down there, instead, they found a resuscitation dummy.
They filmed it, played it back on a television and photographed the screen. Donwood remembered its face as an android discovering, for the first time, “ecstasy and agony, simultaneously.” That face became The Bends.
Look at what happened there. They didn’t invent the image. They noticed it, kept it, put it through a machine and then another, until it wasn’t a hospital object any more. It was a feeling with a mouth.
That is the librarian’s trick. Not making things from nothing. Moving things to the right shelf.
Here is the least glamorous fact in the story, and the most important. Donwood worked in the room next door.
When Radiohead rehearsed and recorded, at Abbey Road, in Oxfordshire, in Los Angeles, in the south of France, the Ashmolean’s curator writes, you could find Donwood through the wall, painting, drawing, working at a computer, listening. Yorke would step out of the music to work on the pictures, and walk back in with whatever the pictures had told him.
Most of the industry works the other way round. Finish the record, then call the designer. Brief, deliver, approve. Tidy, and thin.
Next door is different. Next door, the work can overhear itself.
The artwork listened. The music looked back.
By OK Computer the library had a new machine. “The most exciting thing ever invented in the whole universe,” Yorke said of their flatbed scanner, which sat there through the whole record, “just scanning, scanning, scanning.”
Sketchbooks went in. Found images went in. Out came collages, built on a newly bought Mac, and built under one rule. No undo.
If something went wrong it had to be rubbed out with the eraser, or covered with something else. Every mistake stayed in the picture somewhere, a layer down, like a pencil note in the margin of a borrowed book. Which is why the sleeve looks the way the songs feel: a clean system with damage underneath.
The machines have changed since. The rule hasn’t aged a day.
No undo. The mistake stays in the picture.
After OK Computer they went back to paint. Donwood rented a studio where the two of them could work at scale, with brushes and knives and whatever paint would go on.
The mountains of Kid A came out of that room. White peaks. Small, wrong figures. It looks like weather. It isn’t.
Some of those paintings began with newspaper pictures of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Donwood remembered one of snow marked with boots, cigarette ends and blood. The snow on the sleeve is that snow, catalogued and kept, until it was needed.
That is what a library is for. Not to make the past comfortable. To keep it where you can find it.
For Hail to the Thief, Donwood rode the passenger seat around Los Angeles, writing down the words on the signs.
Just words. The ones a city shouts at you all day, about where to go and what to buy and what is forbidden. He filed them, and they came back as the cover: blocks of colour, crowded with words, a map of a place made only of instructions.
It is bright at first. Then it isn’t.
Power has a typeface. Copy it down and it starts to show.
In 2004 a flood went through Boscastle, in Cornwall. Donwood and Yorke saw it. Donwood had a battered book of medieval pictures with him, the one he has called the source of all his woodcuts.
The flood and the book met on the shelf. Out of the meeting came London Views, Donwood’s linocuts of the city’s landmarks going under a wave, and a detail of one became the cover of Yorke’s solo record The Eraser. The style came from the Liber Chronicarum, printed in Nuremberg in 1493. In the picture, a lone man seems to direct the sea.
A real flood. A five-hundred-year-old book. A modern city. Filed apart, they are references. Shelved together, they are a myth.
Filed apart, they are references. Shelved together, they are a myth.
The library kept growing after Radiohead. In 2019 the Bodleian Library put on Talking Maps, an exhibition of very old maps, and Yorke went to see it.
A few years later, around the end of lockdown, he and Donwood were painting side by side in a small shed at Yorke’s home, in tempera and gesso, slow materials, the kind you can’t rush. The old maps went into the paintings. Some of them became the sleeves of The Smile, Wall of Eyes among them. Some were woven, in Brussels, into tapestries.
They were early to the scanner. Now they have gone back to the brush. Not out of nostalgia. Friction is a material too, and they had a shelf of it waiting.
In August 2025 the Ashmolean opened This Is What You Get: more than 180 objects from thirty years, paintings and prints and sketchbooks and lyrics. It was extended to January 2026.
Not everyone loved it. The Guardian gave it two stars and called the big Kid A canvases a mess, the work far better as a CD insert than on a museum wall.
Maybe so. But a CD insert is not a lesser place for a picture to live. It is a place you can hold, on a bedroom floor, for twenty years, while the music plays. That is its own kind of museum, and these pictures have hung in a few million of them.
The Ashmolean’s best line is a simple one. Each is the other’s first critic, catalyst and collaborator. That’s the library card. Everything else is what got filed.
We keep a library at RIOT. This journal is part of it: the artists, films, cities and objects we want to be able to find again on the day a brief needs them. Inspiration isn’t a mood. It is somewhere you put things.
So here is what we take from the room next door.
Thirty years on, the dummy still gasps. The snow still holds its boot prints. The wave is still over London, and the man is still pointing at the sea.
Keep the fragment. You don’t know yet which one opens the room.
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