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I have spent a lot of time looking at photographs of Iceland. Blue water, white land. Drinking wine and considering what to do. Since I last posted anything here on this stupid blog much has occurred, some planned, some unexpected. We gave out the newspapers, so one secret is out. I did a thoughtless interview for a snazzy magazine from Hong Kong, in which I said this:"I thought I'd better try painting with oils. I can't remember exactly why, but I used to like the smell of oil paint and turps whilst I was at art college, and I had a vague and rather old-fashioned notion that oil was what proper artists used. This has probably more to do with romantic novels of the mid 20th century than anything else. Never mind, never mind. Anyway, as usual I was hugely over-ambitious and tried to copy the work of Gerhard Richter, a fantastic painter. Of course, I failed terribly and miserably and I deserved to do nothing less for my appalling presumption. It was a very depressing period, as for weeks and months my work got steadily worse, until I wanted to burn my studio to the fucking ground, leave my stupid job and do something less totally pointless. Perhaps luckily I eventually worked through this dark valley and started to paint the woods and forests, and the odd creatures who dwelt inside. These scenes were starting to emerge from the music that Radiohead were making. Just at the right time. Maybe. The newspaper album was an idea that I developed concurrently with the oil painting. I was reading a newspaper one sunny summer morning, and after a while I left it on the bench where I was sitting. A few hours later I came back to the bench, and the newspaper had started to curl, get brittle, and go slightly yellow in the sunlight. This, to me, was very appealing; here was a medium that was like a speeded-up version of our own bodies, something that was mirroring the inevitable decay that comes with being alive. At the same time, someone had donated a big stack of old 1960s counterculture newspapers to Radiohead's studio. These were mostly copies of 'it' (International Times), a few copies of Oz and other strange publications. Because of their age, these newspapers had acquired a sort of value, an archivable quality that was surely far from the minds of the radicals who had produced them with the aim of documenting and advertising the day by day activities of revolutionaries."They asked me a lot of questions, very politely. I tried to be polite back.In other 'news', printing continues in a rather experimental fashion in the Manufactory... and my stupid blog was quoted in a newspaper. So I will have to become ever more elliptical, to avoid that kind of horror occurring again.- 2nd April 2011