If you or your family have a passing interest in popular culture it’s highly likely that there’s some Stanley Donwood artwork in your house – even if you don’t know it.

The 50 year-old artist has designed every Radiohead album cover since The Bends in 1995 – albums that have sold around 30 million copies between them – as well as the distinctive book jackets for the perennially best-selling nature writer Robert Macfarlane. Add to this the artwork for Glastonbury Festival and there can’t be too many shelves, drawers or bedside tables, or indeed Kindles or computer streaming histories, in the land that remain un-Donwooded.

It’s not a bad feat for a former graffiti artist from Colchester who happened to crash on Thom Yorke’s floor while busking his way around the UK as a fire-breather in the early Nineties.

It speaks volumes about Donwood’s restless creativity that he can successfully create enduring images in the worlds of music, books and festivals, and much more besides. “I still don’t even know what art is,” he insists when I meet him. That’s either false modesty or his anarcho-outsider streak coming to the fore. Shaven-headed with one of those stretch-lobe ear piercings that – appropriately – screams ‘Nineties street performer’, Donwood hardly cuts an establishment figure. But one gets the impression that Donwood revels in his outsider status.

Donwood gives a fascinating insight into how he makes his creations in a new book, There Will Be No Quiet. His process is one of trial and error and he admits that nothing goes to plan “most of the time”, such as when he tried to convince Radiohead frontman Yorke to decorate an album cover with giant topiary penises. The working title was A History of My Disasters until he realised he’s “done alright” career-wise.

Stanley Donwood

Donwood – real name Dan Rickwood – is a blend of craftsman and futurist. He matches his fondness for old techniques such as etching and linocut printing with his love of cutting and pasting words and images from the internet. Like Radiohead’s music, his art is fidgety, intense, experimental and beautiful. Subject-wise, his works are infused with his obsession with landscapes and concerns about the future. The clearest iteration of these strands coming together is on the “nuclear winter” that adorned the cover of Radiohead’s triple-platinum-selling OK Computer.

But his book is no po-faced examination of an artist at work. It contains vivid nature writing and an eye-opening account about being the seventh member of one of the world’s biggest rock bands (long-time producer Nigel Godrich being the sixth).

Donwood met Yorke on day one of a Fine Arts course at Exeter University. Yorke was initially underwhelmed. “Donwood in a tweed cap and green tweed suit. Decided I didn’t trust him,” the singer writes in the book’s foreword. But they became friends.

After college, the men went their separate ways and Donwood designed fliers, graffitied buildings and tried his hand at writing novels and short stories for Take A Break-style women’s magazines. On the dole, he and a friend hitchhiked around the country as a fire-breathing act. Arriving in Oxford in the summer of 1991 with nowhere to stay, he saw a poster for gig by a band called On A Friday.

“I was like, ‘That’s my mate Thom’s band. They’re playing.’” He rang the band’s Cowley house and asked if they could sleep on the floor. Yorke and co agreed, even offering the fire-breathers a slot as their opening act (an offer kyboshed by the landlord of the venue, The Jericho Tavern). But the connection between the two old friends was remade.

Radiohead in 1997 credit: Getty Images

On A Friday signed to EMI and changed their name to Radiohead. Three years later, Yorke asked Donwood if he’d like to have a go at doing a record sleeve. The song was My Iron Lung. They never looked back.

It was around this time, in the mid-1990s, that Donwood became an early evangelist of the internet. He was wowed by the creative possibilities of the latent “information superhighway”, and started working in a web café in Bath. He used the internet as both a digital canvas and a library. He describes the ability to create websites as “like seeing magic”: art as a form of communicating with people had suddenly gone from “pasting posters up on derelict buildings” to going directly into people’s computers anywhere. Donwood’s early idealism faded, but the internet became central to his art.

Due to Radiohead’s penchant for recording albums in dilapidated country houses miles from anywhere, Donwood often found himself cycling down country lanes (he doesn’t drive) in search of the latest creaking Elizabethan pile, his panniers stuffed with art materials (in one instance following the July 2005 London bombings, his equipment included a disassembled paintball gun that – he realised too late – might not have looked too smart had be been stopped by the police). Once in the house, Donwood would settle in as the artist-in-residence while the band got to work. Surrounded by his tools, including a scanner and laptop, he’d create as he listened. “It’s a kind of osmosis,” he explains.

Happy accidents often provided breakthroughs. During the recording of 2007’s In Rainbows, Donwood spent weeks in Wiltshire’s crumbling Tottenham House making precise technical drawings of buildings by candlelight; all vanishing points and clean thin lines. The trouble was that Radiohead’s music “bore absolutely no relation to what I was doing”. While the art was precise, the music was fluid. Fear beckoned until one evening Donwood accidentally spilt candle wax over one of his drawings. The parallax effect created by the wax covering his lines became the album’s aesthetic.

In Rainbows, digital composition, 2007 credit: © Stanley Donwood

For 2000’s Kid A, by contrast, he and Yorke were drowning in a “storm of ideas”. They ended up plastering dozens of potential album covers in the studio kitchen at Radiohead’s HQ until the eventual sleeve became clear.

Decisions are made “sort of” democratically, he says. He and Yorke don’t argue but they can disagree. “It’s to do with the colours of type, usually. Detailed stuff.” Yorke is “always wrong”, he jokes.

One battle Donwood didn’t win, however, concerned the cover of the band’s 2003 album Hail To The Thief, which he wanted to adorn with vast “topiary cocks” having intercourse with the clouds above. To his evident bafflement today, Donwood had joined the National Trust (“I’m honestly the last person to join the National Trust”) and become obsessed with its gardens.

His plan was to create giant penis-shaped bushes out of chicken wire and astroturf, sneak them into various Trust gardens and take pictures of them. He’d then rotate an image of the clouds by 90 degrees so they’d resemble vulvas in the sky. Donwood put the “totally serious concept” to Yorke when they were staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in 2002 (where Radiohead planned to record the album in two weeks, a plan they soon abandoned).

“We were on Thom’s balcony looking out… I described [the concept] to him and he said” – Donwood adopts a pained, lemon-sucking face – “‘Yeah. It’s not reeeeally what the record’s about’.”

“It just took someone to point out, ‘You f–––––– lunatic, what are you on about?’ And I thought ‘Christ, think of what I nearly did.’ I’d forever be known as…”

Topiary Cock Man, I venture? “Yes. Topiary Cock Man.”

The eventual artwork comprised dozens of primary-coloured hand-painted signs instead.

The cover of Stanley Donwood's book There Will Be No Quiet

He loves album sleeves. Record shops – or those that are left – are, he says, “like the most democratic art gallery because every sleeve is just up for short amount of time”. He remembers the “amazing” feeling of seeing his inaugural album sleeve, for The Bends, displayed on a wall next to the Peter Blake-designed cover for Paul Weller’s Stanley Road.

Donwood’s long association with Radiohead has also given him a ringside seat on the band’s giddy ascent from pub rock wannabes to global stars. “It was pretty mad because they’d gone from going around in a van supporting [indie minnows] Kingmaker to quite quickly becoming this huge band.”

He recalls a night in the dressing room at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 1998 when the band had just broken through with OK Computer. Beatlemania-like chaos ensued. “Jonny [Greenwood, Radiohead’s guitarist] was like the human theremin because there were loads of people outside and he could go to the window and they’d go [loud voice] ‘Whaaaay’ and he’d go back and they’d go [quiet voice] ‘woooo’. It was crazy.”

There are many more strings to Donwood’s bow than Radiohead. There are the Macfarlane jackets and Glastonbury (he got involved after he met Michael Eavis’s daughter-in-law at his child’s playgroup in Bath), there are exhibitions and there have been forays into running a record company, book publishing and art directing a film for writer Eric Schlosser.

But it was the five-piece band from Oxford that gave him the platform. I ask him about forks in the road and what he thinks he’d have ended up doing had he not visited Oxford that summer to breathe fire. “Oooh, good question.” He thinks hard. “Tree surgeon.”

And he would no doubt have been a very good one. But the record collections, streaming libraries and bookshelves of Britain would be all the poorer for it.

Stanley Donwood: There Will Be No Quiet is published by Thames & Hudson on October 10