Thom Yorke hands out The Universal Sigh outside Rough Trade East

Radiohead gave away a newspaper of their own, The Universal Sigh, from street stalls and shops around the world on Monday 28 March, and in London Thom Yorke handed out copies himself. A long queue had formed at Rough Trade East on Dray Walk when Yorke stepped out of the shop into the newspaper stall to give out papers, pose for photos and shake hands. Remi Graves, queuing for the Oxford student paper Cherwell, says it took about a quarter of an hour for the queue to work out who the vendor was, and when her turn came she managed only a mumbled thank-you.

The paper came out on the day The King of Limbs reached shops on CD and vinyl through XL, weeks after its early release as a download. The band announced it on 24 March with an image on Dead Air Space, their blog, and a site, theuniversalsigh.com, listing where to collect it in 28 countries, Iceland, Japan and New Zealand among them, but kept the contents quiet until the day. Our dedicated teams of newspaper delivery people will be handing out copies of THE UNIVERSAL SIGH to anyone who wants one, until we run out!¹ It is not the paper that comes with the Newspaper Album edition, which ships on 9 May, and the press release said the giveaway will not be repeated.

The United States and Canada have their turn today, Tuesday 29 March, as the album reaches shops there through TBD Records. In Toronto, where the paper is handed out in Yonge-Dundas Square, NOW Magazine found almost 50 people waiting by 12.10pm, and square security moved the queue across the street. Anyone further away has been able to read a PDF of the whole paper since Monday, and copies are on eBay for $20 to $40, one British seller asking $78 plus postage. Staff at the Guardian answered the paper with a cover of “Creep”.

The Universal Sigh runs to 12 pages, in black and white apart from the covers and one splash of red on page six. Poems, stories and short statements, some woven with the band's lyrics, sit among dark drawings of nature and spirits. It is credited to the five members and the artist Stanley Donwood, whose story “Sell your house and buy gold” is on page 11, with the artwork credited to Zachariah Wildwood and Donald Twain. The two outside writers are Robert Macfarlane, with “Tree Climbing”, and Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey. Griffiths has told NME that a member of the band asked her to write, and told her only that it would be a free newspaper about woods, trees and forests, given out internationally. She ties it to the clearing of forests in West Papua and the Amazon. They dropped off the paper in big urban cities and that was like bringing the forests into the heart of the city.¹²

Where to collect it

Livemusic.fm at the launch of The Universal Sigh, Rough Trade East, London, 28 March 2011, with Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood· lmfmTVwatch on youtube →