Creep

Creep was Radiohead's debut single, released by Parlophone on September 21, 1992; it reached number 78 in the UK, on about 6,000 copies, and was reissued on September 6, 1993, when it reached number 7. It is track 2 on Pablo Honey, released in the UK on February 22, 1993 and in the US on April 20. The UK single carried Lurgee, Inside My Head and Million Dollar Question; a US jukebox 7-inch paired it with Anyone Can Play Guitar. The single is 3:53 and the album version 3:56 or 3:57.

It was recorded in 1992 at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire, produced by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. It was played spontaneously between rehearsals and recorded at Kolderie's suggestion. Thom Yorke wrote it at the University of Exeter in the late 1980s. Yorke sings and plays guitar, Jonny Greenwood plays lead guitar and piano, Ed O'Brien guitar, Colin Greenwood bass and Philip Selway drums. The piano was added at the producers' suggestion, and Kolderie forgot to put it up until the outro in the mix.

The Air That I Breathe

O'Brien noticed that the middle eight resembled The Air That I Breathe, and Yorke rewrote it to the same vocal melody. The publisher Rondor took action over the 1972 song, and Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood were added as co-writers. The chords are G, B, C and Cm, and Jonny Greenwood's three blasts of dead notes before the chorus were described by Yorke as the song slashing its wrists. In a 2026 Mojo interview Greenwood said he found it a bit wimpy and wanted to subvert it.

Accounts of the subject differ: Greenwood said a woman Yorke followed unexpectedly attended a show, John Harris wrote of a girl on an upmarket Oxford street, Yorke called the lyrics pretty crap, and Greenwood said it is really a happy song about recognizing what you are. Alex Ross in The New Yorker in 2001 called it self-lacerating rage over unrequited attraction. Yorke said it felt like doing a cover, and O'Brien believed EMI would have dropped them without it; its success freed them to make The Bends.

A hit by way of Israel

The song caught on first in Israel, through DJ Yoav Kutner, and then on US alternative radio from December 1992, starting with KITS. It reached number 34 on the US Hot 100 and number 2 on US Alternative Airplay, and number 3 in Norway and 6 in Australia; the UK has it at four times platinum and Canada at seven times. It was the most-streamed 1992 song in the UK as of April 2019, and re-entered the UK chart at number 37 in 2008.

The video was directed by Brett Turnbull at The Venue in Oxford, at a free short concert to raise money for the magazine Curfew; Four Tet was in the audience as a teenager. The band's own YouTube upload passed a billion views on April 23, 2024. Which audio edit it carries, the album version or the 4:01 radio edit, was not verified. Setlist.fm counts 414 Radiohead performances, the first listed on April 28, 1992 at Riverside in Newcastle upon Tyne; the band stopped playing it after Reading in August 2009, returned to it in 2016 and played it in the Glastonbury 2017 encore.

Covers

Covers include the Pretenders live in 1995, Alanis Morissette in 1996, Prince at Coachella, Scala and Kolacny Brothers in the 2010 trailer for The Social Network, Postmodern Jukebox, Korn, Weezer, Damien Rice, Moby and Kelly Clarkson. Yorke released Creep (Very 2021 Rmx) in July 2021. Melody Maker's Sharon O'Connell called it in 1992 a perfect monster of a malevolent pop song, and Entertainment Weekly's Marisa Fox called it the ultimate neurotic teen anthem.