Radiohead wanted ‘an iron lung’ for album cover – but ‘android’ in hospital was used instead

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The now iconic cover art for Radiohead‘s album, The Bends, could have been very different had the original image been approved.

Armed with a VHS video camera and looking for “discarded cardboard packaging” and “road signs” as a way of using interesting visuals, the members of Radiohead stumbled on an “android” in a hospital. Though they had been searching for various other objects, particularly an “iron lung” machine, the group decided to settle on the now-infamous image featured on the front of The Bends. The album, which has songs like Fake Plastic Trees, My Iron Lung, and High and Dry, was released in 1995. Stanley Donwood appears to be the man behind the magic album cover, with Thom Yorke recalling his meeting with Donwood, otherwise known as Dan Rickwood, while the pair were studying at the University of Exeter.

The two art students began working together frequently, with Yorke saying: “I met him [Donwood] the first day at art college and he had a better hat and suit on than me. That pissed me off. So I figured I’d either end up really not liking this person at all or working with him for the rest of my life.”

Donwood has since spoken about how he snuck a VHS camcorder into a hospital to capture the image which would feature on the album cover. He told Juztapoz: “We hired a video camera, a large boxy thing that had to be put on a shoulder.

“It took VHS cassettes, and we went out and filmed things that we thought would be somehow interesting; road signs, symbols on discarded cardboard packaging, street lights. We played these video cassettes on a machine hooked up to a TV and took photos of the screen.

“Then we took the films to photograph developing shops and waited to see if any of the photos were any good. If they were we could scan them.” Though they had aimed to get an image of an obsolete iron lung machine, a cylindrical pressure ventilator used to treat cases of polio, they instead opted for the “android” found elsewhere in the hospital.

Donwood explained: “We got into a hospital with the camera and were filming all kinds of things. I’m not sure if it was really allowed or not. Probably not. I wanted to find an iron lung because of one of the song titles on the album, but iron lungs are not very interesting to look at.

“In the room where the staff practice resuscitation were some mannequins, and one of them, in particular, had a facial expression like that of an android discovering for the first time the sensations of ecstasy and agony, simultaneously. And that was the cover of the record.”