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9:36 · 1,605 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The framing scene is a 2016 Paris show where a fan spent the gig shouting for Creep, Thom Yorke acknowledged him, and the band teased only the chords of a song they had not played in nearly seven years.
▶ 00:00:01
- Yorke wrote it in 1987 at Exeter University, out of an obsession with a woman and his own sense of inadequacy, years before the band had a deal.
▶ 00:01:08
- The band did not want to release it. Jonny Greenwood played the famous dead notes before the chorus specifically to wreck the song, and the noise became the hook everyone remembers.
▶ 00:01:50
- The producers went over the band's heads to the label, and it went out as the first single from Pablo Honey anyway.
▶ 00:02:11
- It worked in the US and Israel before it worked at home. In Britain it flopped first time out, with NME suggesting the label drop them.
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- On re-release it reached 34 on the Hot 100 and 7 in the UK, and by the end of that year Yorke was saying it no longer felt like their song, more like playing a cover.
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- When Anyone Can Play Guitar and Stop Whispering failed to repeat it they were written off as one-hit wonders, and the touring that success demanded kept them out of the studio.
▶ 00:03:06
- The Bends is named for decompression sickness, which is the band's own description of how fast they rose, and My Iron Lung was written about Creep and what being its authors did to them.
▶ 00:03:42
- They were sued over the resemblance to The Hollies' The Air That I Breathe. Its writers were added as co-writers, and because Radiohead had admitted the influence, those writers took only a small share.
▶ 00:04:23
- Greenwood's account of the resentment is the most concrete detail: the band felt they were living the same four and a half minutes over and over, with audiences shouting for the song and leaving as soon as it finished.
▶ 00:05:48