Creep

a song from college

Thom Yorke wrote “Creep” at the University of Exeter in the late 1980s, years before Radiohead had a contract. Jonny Greenwood said the words came out of a woman Yorke had “followed for a couple of days”, who then turned up unannounced at one of their shows. John Harris, covering Oxford for Melody Maker at the time, said she frequented upmarket Little Clarendon Street. Yorke preferred bohemian Jericho, and in Harris's account the lines “what the hell am I doing here” and “I don't belong here” express Yorke's discomfort.

Yorke thought the lyrics were “pretty crap”. Jonny said it was a happy song, about recognising what you are.

chipping norton

EMI signed them between December 1991 and March 1992, and the Drill EP went nowhere. For a first single they booked Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie into Chipping Norton Recording Studios and spent days getting nothing usable out of “Inside My Head” and “Lurgee”.

Between takes the band played “Creep” to themselves. Yorke introduced it as their Scott Walker song, joking. The producers took him at his word and assumed it was a cover, and leaving that night Slade said to Kolderie: “Too bad their best song's a cover.”

one take, unaware

When the sessions kept failing, Kolderie asked them to play that other one properly. They did not know the tape was running. Everyone in the room applauded at the end of the first take, and that take is the single.

Kolderie checked with the band that the song was actually theirs, then phoned EMI, where everyone who heard it, he says, started going insane. He and Slade had Jonny add a piano; mixing it, Kolderie forgot to bring the piano in until the outro, and the band preferred it that way. Phil Selway put its power down to the band not knowing they were being recorded.

three blasts, meant to ruin it

The sound before each chorus is Jonny trying to wreck his own band's song. They are dead notes: fret-hand pressure released, the strings picked anyway. The producers turned that sound up until, they said, it punched you in the face. Yorke heard it as the track “slashing its wrists”, killing itself off halfway through.

That's the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up. He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song.

ed o'brien · cd inlay, 1993

I suppose the nauseating adolescent in me found it a bit wimpy and wanted to make it the opposite. Can't be having ballads!

jonny greenwood · mojo, 17 april 2026

nothing happens

EMI released it on 21 September 1992. Radio 1 found it too depressing and kept it off the playlists. It reached number 78 and sold 6,000 copies. Yorke, asked how that felt, said he was “absolutely horribly gutted, pissed off, self-righteous”. The two singles that followed got no higher than number 32.

israel, then san francisco

Late in 1992 an EMI representative played the song to Yoav Kutner, a DJ on Israeli radio, who started putting it on air. It became a hit there and the band booked Israeli dates to chase it. The same happened in New Zealand, Spain and Scandinavia.

In December KITS in San Francisco picked it up, and by Christmas it was the station's most requested record. KROQ in Los Angeles followed. Capitol pressed a promo, censored version included, with “so very special” in place of the swear word. The band had worried that censoring themselves was selling out, and decided it was allowed because Sonic Youth had done it.

Pablo Honey arrived on 22 February 1993. By the middle of that year America had filed “Creep” as a slacker anthem alongside “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Loser”. Under pressure from the press, from EMI and from its own audience, the single was reissued in Britain on 6 September 1993 and went to number seven.

the video

Brett Turnbull directed it at the Venue in Oxford. Radiohead played a free short concert to make it, running “Creep” several times over, and gave what the audience paid to Curfew, the Oxford magazine that had given them their first interview and their first review, as On A Friday.

Kieran Hebden, later Four Tet, says he was in that crowd as a teenager. The people who went looking for him in the video could not find him. The video passed a billion views on YouTube in April 2024.

the air that i breathe

Ed O'Brien noticed while they were still writing it that the chord sequence was the one from “The Air That I Breathe”, written in 1972 by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood and made famous by the Hollies. Yorke rewrote the middle eight over the same vocal melody. Rondor Music, which published “The Air That I Breathe”, took legal action, and Hammond and Hazlewood ended up with a writing credit and a share of the royalties. Hammond said they asked for only a small percentage because Radiohead had been honest about what they had reused. That is why two names that were never in the band sit on the credit.

In January 2018 Lana Del Rey said Radiohead were suing her over “Get Free”, which they said copied “Creep”, and had asked for all of the publishing. Their publisher denied that any lawsuit had been filed. In March she told an audience: “My lawsuit's over. I guess I can sing that song any time I want.”

the same four and a half minutes

They toured Pablo Honey for two years behind Belly, PJ Harvey and James, playing “Creep” almost every night. In America people shouted for it and left once it was done.

The success bought them something real. O'Brien believed EMI would have dropped the band without it, and because the record had paid for itself they were left alone to make The Bends. They named that album after decompression sickness. Yorke's explanation was that they came up too fast.

It did not stop the comparisons. By 1995 Yorke was reading reviews of “My Iron Lung” that said it was just like “Creep”.

We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.

ed o'brien

they stopped playing it

In 1995 it was in the set on 98 nights. By 1998 it was down to 12, and after that it was rare. On the OK Computer tour Yorke turned hostile whenever it came up, telling a Montréal crowd to fuck off, they were tired of it.

It came back by accident in 2001, at the homecoming show in South Park, Oxford, when a keyboard failed part-way through another song and they needed something to play. They opened Reading with it in 2009, and then left it alone for 2,458 days, until Paris on 23 May 2016. Two nights earlier, in Amsterdam, a man had kept shouting for it and Yorke had teased him by starting to play it; afterwards, Yorke told Q, they decided to try it just to see how it felt. It stayed in the set on and off for the rest of 2016, and they played it at Glastonbury the year after.

The last time was in Bogota on 25 April 2018. When they came back in 2025 it stayed out, and at the O2 in London, Mojo noticed, nobody shouted for it.

other people's song

The Pretenders were playing it live by 1995 and put a performance on The Isle of View. Alanis Morissette covered it in 1996, while Radiohead were opening for her. Prince played it at Coachella in April 2008, a bootleg went up, and it was taken down at his request.

Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our song.

thom yorke · yahoo! music, 30 may 2008

everyone's song

Prince got his way for seven years. In October 2015 a fan's film of the Coachella cover went up on YouTube, cleared this time, its title says, with Radiohead's publisher and his own. In December Prince tweeted the link himself, three times.

In July 2010 the trailer for The Social Network ran on Scala & Kolacny Brothers, a Belgian girls' choir, singing it slow over a piano. The trailer won Best in Show at the Golden Trailer Awards and got the choir an American record deal. In May 2023 James Gunn opened Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 on the band's own acoustic version, playing in the room as Rocket walks through the Guardians' base.

In March 2021 Yorke slowed it down for Jun Takahashi's Undercover show in Tokyo, and in July the nine-minute version came out as a single, “Creep (Very 2021 Rmx)”, credited to Thom Yorke featuring Radiohead.

YouTube did the rest. Postmodern Jukebox's 1940s version with Haley Reinhart went up in April 2015 and has more views than the band's own “High and Dry”. Jim Carrey sang it at an open stage in New York in 2011. The Voice has heard it in blind auditions in Portugal, France and Germany, and from children on The Voice Kids. In a sweep of YouTube on 24 September 2026, fan-made and third-party Radiohead videos past a million views came to about 1.3 billion views between them, and nearly two thirds of those were “Creep”.