There is a lot of self-loathing in this song, where Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke sings, "But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo."
When asked about the song in 1993, Yorke said, "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. 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... 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."
On the other hand, guitarist/keyboardist Jonny Greenwood said the song was in fact a happy song about "recognizing what you are."
Yorke says "Creep" is about being in love with someone, but not feeling good enough. He describes the feeling as, "There's the beautiful people and then there's the rest of us."
Thom Yorke wrote "Creep" in 1987 while he was a student at Exeter University in England. The band had already formed by this point, but they were using the name On a Friday. Yorke made an acoustic demo of the song that he brought to his bandmates, who developed it musically.
Those distorted guitar stabs before the chorus were Jonny Greenwood's attempt to liven up the song. "I didn't like it. It stayed quiet," he told the Chicago Sun-Times. "So I hit the guitar hard - really hard."
"Creep" was Radiohead's first single, released in their native UK in September 1992 (they signed their record deal in December 1991). It flopped, and they rather reluctantly included it on their debut album, Pablo Honey, in February 1993. To their surprise, it started getting some airplay and found an audience, so their label re-issued it in September 1993 and it rose to #7 in the UK.
Over in America, the song made a slow climb to #34, also in September 1993.
"Creep" is musically similar to a 1972 song by The Hollies called "
The Air That I Breathe," written by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, whose publishers took legal action. Radio acknowledged that the songs were similar and agreed to share some of the songwriting royalties and add Hammond and Hazlewood to the writing credits.
The other singles from the
Pablo Honey album didn't make much impact, so for a while "Creep" was the only Radiohead song most people knew, which frustrated the band. They were able expand their audience with their next album, The Bends in 1995, which includes tracks like "
High And Dry" and "
Planet Telex." Their third album,
O.K. Computer in 1997, brought them to a new level, especially among the many critics who played it on their "best of" lists.
On the album version, Thom Yorke sings, "You're so f--king special." For radio, he recut it as, "You're so very special." Yorke regrets changing the line for the radio version, saying it disturbed the "sentiment of the song." According to him, the song lost its anger as a result.
According to
Q magazine April 2008, the band recorded this song when their producers, Sean Slade and Paul Q Kolderie, were struggling with the songs "
Inside My Head" and "
Lurgee." They remembered a track that that the band had played in rehearsal, introduced by Yorke as "our Scott Walker song." This portrait of an outsider was then recorded in one take.
The video, directed by Brett Turnbull, was recorded at a club in Oxford called The Zodiac. One of the extras in the crowd scenes is a teenage Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet. The producer and DJ has remixed Thom Yorke and Radiohead tracks and also supported Radiohead on tour.
To their dismay, "Creep" became Radiohead's most popular song, with a certain slacker-anthem ubiquity that didn't suit them. Soon after the song make them famous, Thom Yorke started undercutting it in the press, referring to it as "Crap."
Even when the song was very popular, Radiohead didn't always play it in concert, and in 1998 they dropped it completely. They did bring it back from time to time starting in 2003.
Layne Staley of Alice in Chains was a fan of "Creep." While
acting as guest VJ on an Australian TV show named
Rage in 1994, he called it "the first new song I've liked in about two years, by any band."
Thom Yorke was often asked about this song in interviews for a year or so after it took off. At one point, he (jokingly, we assume) claimed he received fan mail from "murderers" saying how much they could relate to the song.
The song returned to the UK Singles chart in August 2010 after X-Factor auditionee Hollie Burns performed it on the show.
According to the book Radiohead: Hysterical and Useless, this song was inspired by Thom Yorke's obsession with a stranger. He was infatuated with a woman who was out of his league, who he'd never met but frequently saw in bars, and he found himself following her around.
Although "Creep" fizzled out in the UK when it was released there in 1992, it found an audience back then in Israel thanks to the DJ Yoav Kutner, who played it on Army Radio. When Radiohead played shows in Tel Aviv in 1993 they were shocked to see just how popular the song was there.
Lea Michele and Dean Geyer performed this on Glee in the 2013 episode "Guilty Pleasures."
This was featured on the TV series Community in the 2014 episode "Basic Intergluteal Numismatics."
Charlotte Church cites "Creep" as the song she wished she'd written. "It's just transcended all musical boundaries," she told NME. "People who are into hip-hop or hard house or whatever like it. There's just something about that song that, no matter who you are, you're going to respond pretty positively to it - especially in a festival situation."
The 2023 movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 starts off with a somber Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) singing "Creep" as he ponders on his traumatic past. Its prominent placement in the film's soundtrack struck a chord with audiences, propelling it back onto the UK Singles chart.
