Stanley Donwood explains why The King of Limbs is a newspaper

Stanley Donwood, who made the package for The King of Limbs Newspaper Album, has talked it through with Jon Severs of the trade magazine PrintWeek, in an interview Pitchfork has published with scans of the artwork. The whole idea of this album was to have something that was almost not existing, so we chose clear vinyl and the newspaper format.¹

The In Rainbows box went the other way. Donwood describes it as big, heavy and definitive, so solid that if you were determined, you could have killed someone with it!¹ The band are somewhere more transitory now, he says, and a newspaper suits that: it fixes one moment while the news carries on, as the album fixes where Radiohead stood on the day it came out.

He loves newspapers because they get thrown away and recycled. One left in the sun goes yellow at the edges and comes apart, like people getting older. A pile of cheaply printed late-1960s International Times and Oz magazines left at Colin Greenwood's place in the country has turned into an archive that exists nowhere on the internet, and it is worth having because nobody meant to keep it.

The typefaces come from American newspapers of the 1930s Depression, gathered by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and Donwood points to the echo of today's credit crunch. The paintings of coloured trees started with hearing the album being made, which had him picturing old churches with huge ceilings of colour twisting into each other. He admits he has not properly heard the finished record yet, and is waiting for the record company to send him a 12-inch.

He hated CDs for being so small, which is partly why the CD edition comes in a deliberately dreadful one-colour reverse board; they would have made it worse if they could. Asked about a sheet of more than a hundred tiny squares printed on blotting paper, he brings up Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the LSD chemist who died recently, and adds that he is not encouraging anything.

The Newspaper Album's own paper, 36 pages in full colour, is a different thing from The Universal Sigh, the free 12-page tabloid printed on newsprint like any daily and handed out in cities around the world on 28 and 29 March. Writing in NME on 4 April, Donwood traced the free paper to the crush of commuters at the top of the steps at Oxford Circus tube station, where people hand out London Lite, Metro and the Standard. He and a fellow conspirator gave away about 3,000 copies outside Rough Trade East on Brick Lane. But it is also a tactile pleasure, a finger-inking, page-flapping, paper rustling codex of information that won't crash or corrupt.³