How a Hospital Mannequin Became The Bends' Cover

The Bends was one of the most important points in Radiohead’s career.

Colin Greenwoods said once, “We didn’t realize that loads of people liked The Bends. Being tucked away in Oxford, we would occasionally see someone in a ‘Creep’ T-shirt, and that was about it. But when we toured around the world, we discovered that many people wanted to ‘hang’ with us because of that album. Which was nice.”

The album probably launched the band into the mainstream, paving the way for their future success. It also marked the beginning of a collaboration with an artist that would shape their career with iconic moments.

Stanley Donwood met Thom Yorke at the University of Exeter, where both were studying art. Yorke described Donwood as “talkative, a bit annoyed. Someone I could collaborate with.”



Yorke recalled their first meeting, saying, “I met him on the first day of art college, and he was dressed better than me, which annoyed me. I thought I might either hate this guy or end up working with him for life.”

It had to be the latter, and their collaboration was to be extraordinarily successful.

The cover of The Bends was also Donwood’s first with the band and struck the tone for everything else they would do together.

The artist himself revealed that it was taken by sneaking a VHS camcorder into a hospital and filming a resuscitation training dummy. “We borrowed a big, shoulder-mounted video camera that used VHS tapes. We filmed things we found interesting, like road signs, symbols on old boxes, and street lights.”


After recording, they watched the tapes on a TV, took photos of the screen and then took the films to be developed and checked if any of the photos turned out well.

“I’m not sure if it was allowed. Probably not. I wanted to find an iron lung because of a song title on the album, but they’re not very interesting to look at.”

However, he wasn’t put off quite yet. Something else caught Donwood’s attention.

“In the room where the staff practice resuscitation, there were some mannequins, and one of them, in particular, had a facial expression like that of an android experiencing ecstasy and agony at the same time. And that became the cover of the record .”