This Is What You Get – Everywhere, Forever

Stanley Donwood | Radiohead | Thom Yorke -Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, August 2025.

Stanley Donwood | Radiohead | Thom Yorke -Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, August 2025.

When I found out from WASTE that this exhibition at THE ASHMOLEAN was taking place, I booked a ticket for the first day, possibly more out of habit than a desire to actually see it. I have singularly failed to write about The Smile gigs that I’ve been to since I last updated this site, and I’ve not been listening to as much music as I used to, let alone as much Radiohead. Because reasons. As folks much younger than I am now would probably no longer say.

Anyway, as the date approached, I started to wonder if I’d just booked to have something in the diary, if I’m just forcing myself to do something faintly challenging.

I started pages in notebooks with headings like “Ageing, fandom and wondering if you’re over it.”

As a friend remarked recently, perimenopause is a bit like reverse puberty. And it does seem to come with the same bouts of low mood, apathy, and feeling like the world doesn’t understand you. (Although I’m not sure that ever went away.)

I wondered what it would feel like to see all that artwork in a prestigious museum, all at once, and how freighted with meaning it would be, how weird.

I’ve understood for a long time that this band no longer belongs to me and hasn’t for even longer. But I still put on my “Property of The Radiohead Corporation” T-shirt and feel, in some ways, the statement is still true. What if I arrive and just sit down in the middle of the exhibition and weep? Do I still have it in me? Do I still get it? Does anything ever make you feel like things used to make you feel? Everything is so instant now. And over as quickly as the cycle of an Instagram reel. Stuff used to take longer, used to take effort, used to require connection of the interpersonal kind rather than the broadband variety. Is nostalgia for past youth just an increased perception of time passing? Does any of this stuff matter? As you can probably tell, I’m still stuck in my own head, still trying to make meaning.

Arrival in Oxford is always a shock to the system. This academic Epcot Centre is an always-ready film set, where everything looks oddly familiar and there are too many tourists walking too slowly. If this is the only version of England that they see, then the rest of it will make them sorely disappointed.

The Ashmolean is a museum, not an art gallery. A repository of treasure, a curated collection of objects. This exhibition is not billed as a retrospective but rather “a look at the creative forces” behind the artwork. Radiohead have already set about mining their considerable archive of work – both music and visual – with rereleases, lavish coffee table books, and special vinyl editions. As with everything else they’ve done since they escaped the corporate clutches of the old-fashioned Music Business, quietly wreaking havoc in their wake, they have chosen the methods of marketing carefully.

In a typically Radiohead fashion, this exhibition reveals what they want you to see, controls the narrative, and selectively remembers. So, as the earlier years are not covered by Thom and Stanley’s artistic collaboration, they are not mentioned. This is not the story of a band, but of this artistic project.

It starts with The Bends – the well-worn story of finding a resuscitation dummy in a hospital basement. No, it’s not meant to be Thom, yes, it was a still from footage shot with a video camera (remember those). And here is a page from a notebook. Thom always had a notebook on him.

It took me a moment, but those are lyrics that were used in India Rubber (a Fake Plastic Trees b-side)

I went round the exhibition twice, once on my own, once with one of my oldest Rh pals (and listening to the audio guide). I didn’t take this in on the first go round.

Art work designed to be seen in a record shop.

Slightly weird to know that I have a couple of these, rolled up in a bag in my wardrobe.

Thom was the eraser before he was The Eraser.

This from the re-release. By coincidence, there was a billboard across from my window when the original came out.

The notebooks of course pre-date the records. FRIDGE BUZZ NOW.

Of course! MPIE was based on market research. YOU ARE A TARGET MARKET.

A very well preserved fax. The original R logo was degraded by fax to give it that wobbly look.

There’s something about trying to treat these as “museum art” and not as a puzzle that really bugged me.

I think we’ve forgotten all the conflicts that inspired this era. Yugoslavia, Somalia, etc etc. War never stops.

Phew! For a minute there. Promo postcard if you know to look up. This is all a marketing exercise afterall.

I realised, as I walked through this section, that I was only able to listen to Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes twice. Ever. I don’t think I managed to engage with Anima at all. Let’s not mention Atoms for Peace or AMOK. OK?

I feel so detached from this period. Not all me, not all them, bit of both.

Of course, everyone was here the day before. Yeah, cheers.

If Oasis are Sports Direct, with pop-up shops selling merch for a week either side of their residency in a massive park, then Radiohead are a museum shop. With print-your-own artwork, souvenir tea towels and the option of an expensive artisan rug.

Ashmolean tea to brew in your hundred quid Radiohead tea pot.

Like watching my life flash before my eyes.

I thought I could write about this. But. I ended up going round two days in a row. Once on my own in a funk – setting off invisible alarms when I leaned on the vitrines trying to read that atrocious handwriting. Once with Lisa, who goes back even further than I do, when I listened to the audio guide, which contains some clips from interviews with Thom, Stan, and the other curators. Locking down the meaning. Controlling the narrative and maybe offering a bit of closure.

After we’d been round the show, Lisa and I went to The Jericho Tavern, scene of Radiohead’s first gig as Radiohead.