Tag: art

‘Combined Honours’ – Thom and Stanley in 4D at the Ashmolean Museum

Not Thom and Stanley!
The author, his wife and their daughter

It was great fun to see the Donwood/Yorke takeover of several galleries at the venerable Ashmolean Museum in Oxford last weekend. ‘This Is What You Get’, an exhibition of Radiohead-related artwork and memorobilia, spanned 30-plus years of creative collaboration between the songwriter and the visual artist associated with Radiohead, one of the most interesting and influential rock bands of the modern era.

My wife and I took our daughter Grace along to the show. It seems the appeal of Radiohead endures, as successive generations of young people discover their music. I remember Grace wrote an essay on Donwood’s artwork as part of her Fine Art degree course a few years ago. Grace’s younger sister Lyra has sung on a recorded version of ‘Creep’. And, in my current work as a technician in a secondary school, I have overheard GCSE art students discuss the merits of a band that inspires fierce loyalty among its fanbase. So, what is the key to Radiohead’s enduring appeal?

Based on the evidence of this exhibition, the band’s ongoing allure (apart from the inventiveness of the music itself) could be embodied in the German concept of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, the ‘total work of art’ that synthesises multiple art forms. In Donwood and Yorke’s case, intense, emotional songs and playful, cryptic visuals combine to create a ‘Radiohead world’, given literal form in the KID A MNESIA video-game simulation on display in one of the galleries. (The recent collaborative production of ‘Hamlet: Hail to the Thief’ took this world onto the theatre stage.) Donwood summed up this synergy between art forms in the exhibition:

I don't think art is as strong as it would be alone. I don't think literature is alone. And I don't think music is alone, but when you put them all together it makes a fourth thing. It's a 4th dimension.

It’s this “4th dimension” that is celebrated in ‘This Is What You Get’, a cross-fertilisation between art and music, combined with a maverick interdisciplinary creative spirit, that encourages fans to fully immerse themselves in the Radiohead landscape. Though they didn’t start collaborating until at least a year after graduating from Exeter University (in 1991) the ‘combined’ nature of the English Literature and Fine Art degree that Thom and Stanley jointly undertook sowed the seeds for a uniquely successful creative partnership that has cleverly navigated art and commerce across three inspiring and game-changing decades.

playful ideas…
…emerge from sketchbooks
A blurry still from the KID A MNESIA videogame simulation on display at the Ashmolean

Bloke on the Water..

(..and fishes swimming by..)

Earlier this week, I visited the Cariad IV narrowboat to record a few Goldfinches songs for The Narrowboat Sessions. For those of you unfamiliar with these sessions, they are an initiative run by Mark Holdsworth and his crew, offering “the biggest platform for unsigned, original acoustic music videos in the UK”. Every year, the Cariad crew travel “thousands of miles of the British Canal system recording different artists every weekday of the summer”, raising money for Cancer Research along the way. It’s a very cool and unique project. I took part in a session with John Slattery in August 2022 when we drove up to Shropshire and I remember the silencer fell off my exhaust pipe on the way! We sounded like a tank as I pulled up to a quiet canal-side location to make our recording in the remote countryside.

This summer, Mark and his crew had intended to wend their way down to Bristol (where Goldfinches would’ve joined them) but ill health, followed by a major canal breach in Cheshire, put paid to any ideas of travelling very far from the source. It was not possible for Goldfinches to drive up to Merseyside so, rather than cancel altogether, I decided to attend the session at Ellesmere Port on my own as I needed to drop off one of my daughters in Manchester anyway.

Cariad IV ‘stranded’ at the National Waterways Museum

It was great to see Mark again and revisit his tales of depping on keyboards for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band and Gentle Giant (among others) and to learn more about his maritime past. (Bristol readers will probably know that the Bonzo’s Viv Stanshall brought the iconic ‘Thekla’ ship – when it was called The Old Profanity Showboat – from Sunderland to Bristol’s floating harbour during the 1980s, so there is a kinship – though a big difference in scale – between Mark’s snug floating studio and Viv Stanshall’s vision of a cabaret theatre on the water.) Working on the crew with Mark on this occasion were Cerys and Eli, of the Manchester-based horror-rock duo Body Water, who’d just discovered their latest single had been played on Radio 1! (Gosh, the talent on this boat!)

The Snug, with Bob the fish

And then it was time for me to record my three songs: one brand new one and two from the Goldfinches album ‘Shanti Time’. I started with the new one, ‘Attenborough’, an homage to the broadcasting icon ‘Sir David’, played on my ukelele. This was a debut performance as Goldfinches haven’t had the opportunity to play it live yet and it was a challenge to remember all the words. However, I think I got away with it and the crew seemed to enjoy the performance! I then followed ‘Attenborough’ with ‘Queen of New York’ and ‘Shanti Time’, songs which I’m more familiar with, both performed on Mark’s lovely Washburn ‘Tahoe’ acoustic guitar.

To conclude, it was a shame Goldfinches never got to squeeze into the snug studio to record a set for the Narrowboat Sessions this year but I was happy to take one for the team! We hope to join Cariad IV next summer when the meandering musical journey will hopefully happen once more.