Would Radiohead rather delete ‘Creep’ from their history?
It’s starkly obvious—each member of Radiohead absolutely hates ‘Creep’. Despite being their biggest song and the one that first brought them notoriety, the band couldn’t loathe their 1992 track more if they tried. They dismiss it at every opportunity, refuse to play it live, and have even been known to yell at fans who request it. So, would they rather it had never existed at all?
“Fuck off” is the succinct response Thom Yorke gave an audience member in Montreal when they dared to request the band’s biggest hit. “We’re tired of it,” he said, but this wasn’t years or even decades on. This was in 1997, only four years after the song’s release. It was still relatively new in its life cycle and, in the grand scheme of timelessly beloved anthems, the band surely should’ve known that this was still really only the honeymoon period.
But even then, they loathed it. They seemed to look down on people who liked their own hit, once going so far as to call those fans “anally retarded”. As they moved into new eras, embracing the more experimental sounds of OK Computer and later projects like In Rainbows, the band developed a kind of superiority over their own music.
In the same way that certain music fans scoff at those who prefer the biggest hits over deep cuts, Radiohead seem to take that attitude toward their own work. Fans of ‘Creep’ often come across as low-brow losers in their eyes, and at times, they act like they resent ever attracting those “silly little anthemic-rock” fans in the first place. With that in mind, it’s easy to believe they’d erase the song from history—and those fans along with it—if they could.
That wasn’t the case in 1993, though. While Yorke looks down on the song and its fans now, he once seemed to think it was pretty great. “I have a real problem being a man in the ’90s… Any man with any sensitivity or conscience toward the opposite sex would have a problem,” he said. Back then, the song had nuance to him as he explained it in a sociological way, “To actually assert yourself in a masculine way without looking like you’re in a hard-rock band is a very difficult thing to do.”
But even more so than that, the song seemed to be tapping into precisely what he wanted to say and exactly what he wanted the band to do. He said, “It comes back to the music we write, which is not effeminate, but it’s not brutal in its arrogance. It is one of the things I’m always trying: To assert a sexual persona and on the other hand trying desperately to negate it.” So, really, in 1993, ‘Creep’ was not only the band’s biggest hit but briefly stood as their artistic ethos – so would deleting the song delete that? Leaving the band baseless with no foundational understanding of what they were originally trying to get at?
Maybe it’s not about the song at all. “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying,” Johnny Greenwood said about the band’s early tours. From this point of view, it seems to be less about the worth of the actual track and more about the simple fact that the band were playing it over and over and over and over. Even listening to a song that many times would drive you mad. You’d be sick of it, and you’d never want to hear it again. While most artists grin and bear this, with many eventually talking about how tiring it is to play their one hit on repeat, Radiohead simply refused to dance the dance.
However, the elephant in the room is that if you delete ‘Creep’, you delete Radiohead – not to mention the money that track has brought them. If it wasn’t for the heights that the song hit and the breakout global success that the debut single brought them, who knows if the band would have ever made it? So maybe they should just be grateful.
