His sleeve art for Radiohead so perfectly fits the band’s music and ethos that a debate continues to rage over whether Stanley Donwood and the band’s frontman Thom Yorke are, in fact, one and the same.

They have been pictured together only once – when collecting a Grammy award for Best Recording Package for 2001’s Amnesiac (and who can prove that was actually him?) – and the enigmatic Stanley chooses to conduct most interviews, including this one, via email. When questioned on the issue, he says only that Yorke’s hair is “slightly better than mine”.

Another – very plausible – theory is that Stanley is simply an artist who truly understands the band.

Otherwise known as Dan Rickwood, he met Thom when they were both art students at the University of Exeter. Since My Iron Lung 15 years ago, he has created designs for each and every one of the group’s releases, bar a single from their much-feted album The Bends – “So I think that ended up having a woman wearing a bikini on it. But maybe that’s just my addled memory.” From the bleak, mountainous landscapes of Kid A to Hail To The Thief’s bright, politically charged imagery, his work has provided a physical tag for Radiohead’s music. He says: “The band have ideas and I have ideas and I kind of aim my ideas at their ideas until there’s some sort of collision. Or ‘incident’, as the police say nowadays.”

Most recently, Stanley scooped another Grammy for the art direction for 2007’s digital download album In Rainbows, which included a website and, later, artwork for a physical album package.

“I wanted it to be beautiful,” he says of the design, which was loosely based on his love of the rainbows formed in puddles of spilled motor oil.

“The music was becoming very spacey, very sexy and kind of dirty in a way, so I had to ditch all this figurative work I had and in the end I went almost completely abstract, but keeping the dirtiness of the side of the road at night and the fluidity of oil... the whole project was kind of a blast.”

The process of creating sleeve art is different every time. “Usually the cover is the last thing, the culmination of much time, savage editing, anxious times. I don’t get any ideas immediately.

I have to use tact, diplomacy and wheedling, like with recalcitrant children.”

He hates the word “inspiration” but admits to liking the work of certain sleeve artists – Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols, Gee Vaucher for CRASS, Peter Saville for Factory. But the muse also comes from more unlikely sources. “At the moment I have a very deep appreciation of Cillit Bang packaging. It’s totally cool.”

Stanley is also known as a fine artist, last seen exhibiting at the Lazarides gallery in Soho. In addition to examples of his Radiohead work, his show for Ink_d sees him unveil Pandemonium, a topical new print he describes as “a feral, carnivorous parasite, feasting ingloriously on the foully smouldering remains of late-period Western consumer capitalism”.

“I’ve started drawing these things and I don’t know why. I can’t stop yet. I’ve got another two on the way and I think there are more after that. Everyone is revolted by naked, slavering greed and these f***ing bankers are the embodiment of that.”

He sees little difference between the two strands of his work. His Radiohead covers are commercial, but art nonetheless. “The pictures on ice cream tubs are art. And you already know how I feel about the packaging of household cleaning products.  All art is advertising something and whoever buys art of any kind is proclaiming something.”

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