Radiohead's ninth newsletter has The Bends at number six and silver

The Bends has gone silver, Radiohead write in the ninth W.A.S.T.E., the newsletter they send to their fans, and Pablo Honey has just gone gold in Britain. The music papers liked the new album.

The Bends kicked and chopped its way into the album charts settling at no.6.

Radiohead¹

The double A-side “Planet Telex” / “High And Dry” reached number 17 and got the band onto Top of the Pops, though the broadcast faded out before the guitar solo, so nobody saw Jonny Greenwood play it with a pound coin. The “High And Dry” video was shot in Vasquez Canyon outside Los Angeles, where the original Star Trek was filmed. Ed O'Brien grew suspicious when the crew put on oilskins and backed off about a hundred yards. They then drenched the band in freezing water, and said only afterwards that it could have been warm.

“Fake Plastic Trees” came out on 15 May on two CDs. The first adds “How Can You Be Sure”, which very nearly made the album, and “India Rubber”, a brand new song. The second has acoustic versions recorded at the Eve club in London. Jake Scott, Ridley Scott's son, shot the video in an aircraft hangar near Los Angeles, the same one, the band say, as the last scene of Casablanca.

At Norwich on 22 March Jonny half heard a shout from the crowd, took out his earplugs to catch it, found it was a crude request and hid behind his hair for the rest of the night. Leaving a Tokyo hotel after a week of promotion, he set off to thank a chambermaid with flowers, walked in on a man making the bed, and handed the bouquet to an elderly woman in the corridor instead. She fell over in shock, and he ran out of the building.