Radiohead's Bends sketchpad sells at auction for £5,000

An A2 sketchpad Radiohead filled while writing and rehearsing The Bends in 1993 sold at Omega Auctions on 23 February for £5,000, or £6,400 with the buyer's premium. Its eight pages hold drawings, chords and words: lines for “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, and workings for three songs that never came out, “Too Easy”, “Idiot Boy” and “Dead Bank Clerk”.

The seller, who stays anonymous, had lent the band instruments and a PA for the sessions, held in a disused barn on a fruit farm in Oxfordshire, and cleared the room when they were over.

I was informed that anything remaining in the room was not required by the band and should be thrown away or kept by me if I so wished.

The seller²

He threw out the carpet that had been laid down to deaden the room.

The pad fell short of its reserve and the seller took the top bid; Omega had hoped for as much as £12,000. The house's previous Radiohead lot, the On a Friday tape Gripe, made £7,600 with commission in January.

The same seller sold a 1960 Fender Precision bass, one of the instruments he rented to the band for those sessions, for £6,000. Colin Greenwood played it on “Fake Plastic Trees”.