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How Johnny Greenwood’s attempt to sabotage Radiohead became the making of them
For many people, Radiohead were the moody, discordant antidote to Britpop. In an era of swaggering and pint-swilling, these arty types offered up a clique of salvation for those who found the brash side of the zeitgeist a little bit too mainstream. However, fans were not alone; even the band members seemed determined to remain festering in the plashy doldrums of culthood. All of this came together to create perhaps the most inadvertent hit in music history.
‘Creep’ is a song that came soaring up from the gutter like some poor aptly named bastard in a Charles Dickens novel. In a declaration of despair, Thom Yorke penned downbeat lyrics that went against the boozy bourgeoise of the era, but also said to fans, ‘I’m a creep, don’t follow me’. Guitarist Johnny Greenwood didn’t like this much, and he hated the fact it had a chart-inclined hook even more.
Thusly, during the chorus, Greenwood would slam down hard on rotten notes to sabotage the song. However, this dissonance collided perfectly with the outsider notion of the track like fractured postmodernist prose offering up subtext to a story. All the elements came together, and Radiohead had a hit that defined the dark inverse underground of a flashy surface era.
While the rest might be ancient history, how and why was the fractured overthrow allowed to make it to record? Well, Greenwood thought that the quietude of the original tune wallowed in its own self-pity. Thus, in an angry act of deliberate dead-notes, he said, “I hit the guitar hard—really hard.”
Ears perked up in the practice room when this happened. As Ed O’Brien recalled: “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.” As it happened, Greenwood not liking the track resulted in a subconscious amendment. He thought it was too quiet and pathetic so he hit his guitar and suddenly the composition had a flash of noise and anger which was exactly what he thought was missing in the first place.
“It made the song,” O’Brien laughs. Now, this impromptu noise was simply part of the practice tape and the track didn’t sound the same when they played it without it. So, when they got around to recording it, the sabotage stayed put and everything changed. “Having a big hit like that wasn’t in the game plan,” O’Brien continued. ‘Creep’ pretty much yells that itself, however, by hook or by crook, it entered the charts and has since shifted over 1.2 million certified units in the UK.
Like it or loath ‘Creep’, its composition, and how it came about tells you a lot about Radiohead and their place in culture. If slackers are society’s self-sabotagers then this truly is their anthem.
