Why Thom Yorke compared Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ to a Frank Sinatra song
Since its original release way back in 1992, Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ has been a perennial favourite among buskers, open-mikers, and dormitory Lotharios. Even the occasional professional recording artist has taken a shot at covering the woe-is-me classic, with Kelly Clarkson’s unexpected 2016 version becoming a very brief internet sensation.
Today, of course, we no longer have to wait for an artist to tackle ‘Creep’ of their own volition. As we enter the golden age of AI-generated music, we can simply imagine any singer in history performing the song, and it will be instantly prompted into existence, as evidenced by recent new ‘Creep’ covers by everyone from Miley Cyrus to Kurt Cobain to Frank Sinatra. You might say that these aren’t real recordings; that they’re uncanny “weirdos” that “don’t belong here”. Nonetheless, if we asked Thom Yorke to pick a phoney version of the track that was at least in the proper spirit of the original, he’d probably go with the Sinatra one.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1997, in the midst of promotions for Radiohead’s masterwork OK Computer, Yorke was asked about his already contentious relationship with ‘Creep’. Rather than rolling his eyes on this occasion, though, the musician suggested that he’d come to a new sort of peace with the song, a way of looking at it and performing it that made it less of an albatross.
“Sometimes I just enjoy hamming it up, like Frank Sinatra or something,” Yorke said. “If you take the sentiment of the lyric in a different way, it’s sort of a ‘My Way’ thing. It’s over-dramatic, and you have to have a sense of humour about that. You can’t take it seriously.”
How Thom Yorke turned ‘Creep’ into his own version of ‘My Way’
This was quite the bold new outlook for a then 28-year-old lead singer. Up to this point, he was perceived as an almost unbearably serious bloke, once telling Rolling Stone in 1995 that he’d had “a pervading sense of loneliness” since the day he was born. The lyrics to ‘Creep’ certainly matched a songwriter with that kind of worldview. Still, one must remember that even Thom Yorke was young once, and as he moved into his late 20s by the time of OK Computer, he had undergone quite a significant evolution—both as an artist and adult human in general.
Radiohead’s considerable success had perhaps exorcised some of his schoolboy insecurity demons, so much so that he no longer had to sing ‘Creep’ as the obvious teen-angst anthem it was; told from the view of a desperately shy boy (let’s call him Thom) brought to tears by the sight of a woman’s skin. Instead, the hit single could be joyously re-imagined as a sort of intentionally over-the-top character study, a bit of comical pathos that’s more theatrical than confessional.
The comparison to ‘My Way’ seems bonkers at first; Sinatra recorded his famous version of that song in 1968 at 53 years old, and it’s sort of a self-confident, blowhard torch song about leaving a relationship without regrets. Structurally, though, there’s no doubt that the slow-building introspective verses and big swirling choruses of ‘My Way’ and ‘Creep’ have a definite similarity. There are also some notable elements of vulnerability and self-pity in Sinatra’s tune: “I’ve had my fill, my share of losing / And now, as tears subside / I find it all so amusing”.
Yorke’s character in ‘Creep’ has a bit less bravado, maybe, but his pronouncements about his place in the world, and particularly his resignation about it, aren’t too dissimilar, with the line “I don’t belong here” mirroring the individualist sentiment of “I did it my way”.
Fun as the comparisons might be, the fact remains that Frank Sinatra never sang ‘Creep’, and Thom Yorke—to the best of my knowledge—has never performed ‘My Way’. The great artists, in those sad times before AI, knew how to wave to each other on the motorway but ultimately stay in their own lanes.
