Thursday, August 3
Oslo

See Kurt Cobain's suicide letter on the back of someone's T-shirt for the first time. Follow the girl around various shops trying to read it. Something about being moody. Everybody here is blond and good-looking. And they all wear orange, which is my favourite colour.
I'm really proud of the way we play tonight. There's a new song called Lucky and I think it's the best we've ever played it. The room has this immense sound and the words just bounce around it. I get the shivers virtually all the way through the song and just grin like an idiot.
Watching R.E.M. tonight makes me think how huge they are and how much they have gone through. Now, of course, Bill Clinton writes them letters and they play stadiums. Not that this is my definition of an idyllic future. Briefly consider just how long Radiohead can last. I still get days when I want to clock in all my billions of utterly useless executive air miles and fuck off forever to a shack in Kare Kare in New Zealand with its alien plant life. But then what?
The R.E.M. machine is astounding. How is it possible to redress the balance in your head between all this stuff and being some guys with drums and guitars and a couple of mikes? I guess the answer is with songs like Strange Currencies or a brand new one called The Undertow. Songs that would make me jam on the brakes in the middle of the motorway and veer into the hard shoulder until they had finished. What else is there to life except moments of honey like this? Listening to Finest Worksong makes me feel like I'm 10 feet tall and can crush anything in my path.
I play everyone a new song in the dressing room (which is a toilet). It's called No Surprises, Please. Colin goes nuts. Afterwards, I try not to get blind drunk but fail miserably. Go out dancing and locate my aggressive streak on encountering a couple of Nordic males who are flexing their impotence in tracksuits. Dance it out to the Beastie Boys' Root Down. Feel much better.