A musical analysis of why The Hollies are credited with writing Radiohead’s ‘Creep’
Since the turn of the new millennium, there have been seven officially credited writers for the Radiohead classic ‘Creep’. Five of them are who most people would expect: the five members of Radiohead, all of whom receive composing credit, while Thom Yorke is credited as the sole lyricist. The other two individuals had no direct involvement in the song’s writing – Albert Hammond (father of future Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.) and Mike Hazlewood.
In 1972, Hammond and Hazlewood wrote ‘The Air That I Breathe’, a ballad that appeared on Hammond’s 1972 debut album It Never Rains in Southern California. Two years later, British pop group The Hollies covered the song a took it to number two in the UK and number six in the US. The song would have been well-known, especially to British audiences, when Radiohead originally released ‘Creep’ in 1992. According to Hammond himself, it was the song’s publishers, not the writers, who instigated a lawsuit that eventually put Hammond and Hazlewood’s names in the ‘Creep’ credits.
“I don’t publish ‘The Air That I Breathe’, I only own the writer’s end, so the publisher of the song, Rondor Music, when the song ‘Creep’ came out, he felt it was a steal from ‘The Air That I Breathe’, and he sued Radiohead, and they agreed,” Hammond claimed in a 2002 interview. “Radiohead agreed that they had actually taken it from ‘The Air That I Breathe’. Because they were honest they weren’t sued to the point of saying ‘We want the whole thing’. So we ended up just getting a little piece of it.”
There are two main comparison points when analysing the similarities between ‘The Air That I Breathe’ and ‘Creep’: the chord progressions and melodies. The first part is fairly cut and dry. Both songs use a I-III-IV-iv chord progression – a major one chord, a major three chord, a major four chord, followed by a minor four chord. That progression doesn’t follow that standard progression of most pop music (the major III and minor iv are both atypical), and the back-to-back flip from a major IV to a minor iv is relatively unique.
When ‘Creep’ hits its bridge section, the melodic similarities between it and ‘The Air That I Breathe’ become more apparent. According to guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Yorke reworked the bridge to more directly reference the melody of ‘The Air That I Breathe’ once rhythm guitarist Ed O’Brien realised that the two songs shared the same chord progression.
That acknowledgement of the similarities and connective tissue between the two songs opened the door for Hammond and Hazlewood to receive songwriting credits. The lyrical content, specific beats, and the majority of the two melodies are dissimilar enough for it to seem like a coincidence, but Radiohead’s tacit nod to The Hollies turned into a full-on copyright claim once they acknolowedged ‘The Air That I Breathe’.
