Creep

a song from college

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, put her on Little Clarendon Street, the expensive end of town. Yorke drank in Jericho, and the gap between the two is the line “what the hell am I doing here”.

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

chipping norton

EMI signed them in 1991 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 record you know.

Kolderie checked with the band that the song was actually theirs, then phoned EMI. By his account everyone there who heard it started going insane. He and Slade had Greenwood add a piano; mixing it, Kolderie forgot to bring the piano in until the outro, and the band preferred it that way.

The reason it sounds so powerful is because it's completely unselfconscious.

philip selway · rolling stone

three blasts, meant to ruin it

The sound before each chorus is Jonny Greenwood trying to wreck his own band's song. They are dead notes: fret-hand pressure released, the strings picked anyway. He disliked the song the first time they played it and set about spoiling it. The producers then pushed that sound until, as they put it, it punched you in the face.

Yorke heard the same thing as an act of self-harm: the track “slashing its wrists”, killing itself off halfway through, which he said was the whole point.

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 six thousand copies. Yorke, asked how that felt, said he was “absolutely horribly gutted, pissed off, self-righteous”. The two singles that followed did no better.

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” standing in for the line no American station would play. 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, an Oxford magazine that had written about them when nobody else was.

Somewhere in that room was a teenage Kieran Hebden, later Four Tet, who would go on to support Radiohead on tour and work with Yorke. The video passed a billion views on 23 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”. That song was 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, the publisher, 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” 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” 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. Yorke in 1995: “People have defined our emotional range with that one song. I saw reviews of ‘My Iron Lung’ that said it was just like ‘Creep’. When you’re up against things like that, it’s like: ‘Fuck you.’ These people are never going to listen.”

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

It's like it's not our song any more… It feels like we're doing a cover.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 1993

they stopped playing it

Ninety-eight performances in 1995. Twelve in 1998. Then, for the most part, nothing. 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. In 2016 a man spent most of a concert shouting for it until they gave in, wanting to see how it felt, and they played it again at Glastonbury the year after.

The last time was Bogota, 25 April 2018.

'Creep' is like an aberration. It wasn't really a Radiohead song. It doesn't feel like part of the canon.

ed o'brien · los angeles times

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.

Yorke was asked about it in an interview a few weeks later.

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.

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”.

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.