My Ramblings on Radiohead's Creep

By Dave Tant

During the mid to late '90s my music taste was all about "indie" rock n roll. My favourite band was Oasis to whom I listened almost every day and studied the lyrics in great detail. I was also a big fan of other indie bands like The Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, Travis and Supergrass.

Then someone lent me two albums: The Bends and OK Computer by Radiohead. I was immediately impressed, especially with Fade Out on The Bends and Paranoid Android on OK Computer. I bought these two albums and listened to them for a couple of years, and it was only when I heard them playing live did I hear Creep.

When I bought Pablo Honey and started (as I always did with new CDs) reading the lyrics I noticed that Creep was actually the first song Radiohead had written. I was surprised mainly because I thought it was so good that only a truly experienced band could have written it.

Creep impressed me so much that I did what I do only with bands and songs that I think are really great - I did some research on it. From what I can find out the lead songer Thom Yorke wrote the song about a fellow student who came and watched one of Radiohead's shows while the band were still at Exeter uni. In fact, Radiohead's guitarist has quoted as saying that Thom started following this poor girl around campus, and it's this that prompted him to write the song.

Creep, and possibly Radiohead, only became successful because it became very popular in the Unite States. A radio station in San Francisco heard it and started playing it, and it then spread to other stations and MTV. After the success in the states Radiohead re-released the song and it reached No 7 over here in the UK.

The trouble with Creep was that Radiohead ended up disliking it during the mid to late ninties. They played it less and less in their live shows and according to wikipedia they didn't play it once between 1998 and 2001. It has, thankfully, started to be played again!

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