The following is a blog post by Stanley Donwood appeared on NME.com today.  The part that is in bold near the end is quite interesting.

On March 28th and 29th 2011, thousands and thousands of copies of a publication entitled The Universal Sigh were handed out in many major cities around the world. Many people might now be wondering why this happened.

Well me, I got back from London, from Brick Lane, where I and a fellow-conspirator handed out about three thousand free copies of The Universal Sigh outside a record shop called Rough Trade East.

This was the culmination of an idea that had its germination in a seething mass of humanity that I’d been embroiled in at the top of the steps down to Oxford Circus tube station, where amongst the heaving throng of commuters were valiant distributors of London Lite and Metro and the Standard, attempting to hand them out.

The newspaper thing began some months previously, in the summer. I’d left a newspaper on a bench in the sun, and when I returned to get it a few hours later it had already begun its inevitable decay; the paper had rippled slightly, the whiteness was yellowing, and it was feeling more brittle and delicate than it had before. I thought that this constituted a wonderful medium.

There’s nothing archival about a newspaper. It doesn’t pretend to be definitive; just because a newspaper comes out we don’t expect news to stop, or sport to finish. A newspaper is just a simple statement, an account of how things were at the time of writing. Newspapers aren’t even preserved. The vast bulk of them are recycled and turned into more newspapers.

The last packaging that I’d produced for a record was the hefty chunk of cardboard and paper that accompanied ‘In Rainbows’, but something of that kind was entirely inappropriate for this new record, which was very much more a state-of-play document.

After a lengthy concatenation of ideas, the usual meetings, conversations, work, doubt, worry and fear of the unknown, we had produced a large-format 36-page full colour newspaper which was to be presented, along with various other articles with the record ‘The King of Limbs’.

Afterwards, in response to the idea that began in a crush of commuters at Oxford Circus, we made another one. The Universal Sigh was a 12-page tabloid, printed using web-offset lithography on newsprint paper, just like the LA Weekly or London Lite or The Daily Mail. It may have been printed using the same machines that produce these newspapers.

Read the full article here

Also, the photographer Sebastian Edge who took the photo of Radiohead standing in the woods send out the following message on his Twitter account: http://twitter.com/sebastianedge

“May be the date. A set”

Will get to see all of the photos that he took next month when the Newspaper Edition arrives?  I think we would all like to know a little more about these photos.

And Radiohead drummer Phil Selway sent out an interesting message from his Twitter account: http://twitter.com/philipselway

“Just emerged from a couple of months in the radiohead lair, hence the radio silence recently. I’ve got some UK…http://fb.me/DQWzZfGT“

Phil has some upcoming solo shows in the UK.  Though this bit about the “Radiohead Lair” is quite interesting because it appears as if The King Of Limbs was recorded at Drew Barrymore’s house in Los Angeles in January of last year.  The photo below was taken at the location and you can tell that because it was taken from an iPhone using the GPS option where it shows the location on the photo.  They also thanked Drew Barrymore in the liner notes for The King Of Limbs.

Thanks to inkybrown for finding this photo and the details on where/when it was taken.

And this week both The King Of Limbs and The Universal Sigh will be released in Japan:

Japanese The King Of Limbs release : April 6th
Japanese The Universal Sigh event : April 9th

Check out this article by James over at www.fakeplastictunes.com titled ‘The Answers In The Trees’ here.  I am going to look at this closer in my next post.

Buy the physical edition of The King Of Limbs on Amazon.com here.  My latest YouTube video on Radiohead is here.

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