Artists having a fractious relationship with their most popular song is not an unusual phenomenon. Nirvana famously grew to loathe Smells Like Teen Spirit. Robert Plant once remarked that he’d “break out in hives” if he had to perform Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven every night. In the case of Radiohead and Creep, however, it almost ended the band entirely.
“It was frustrating being judged on just that song when we felt we needed to move on,” frontman Thom Yorke told The Denver Post in 1995. “We were forced on tour to support it, and it gagged us, really. We were on the verge of breaking up. It was a lesson.”
All because of a throwaway track written in a drunken haze in 1987, while the frontman was still at Exeter University.
Supposedly, an unrequited crush on a woman he used to questionably follow around town inspired it. Insecure, socially inept, and powerless to do anything about his obsession, for Yorke feelings of frustration soon turned to shame and self-loathing, making for the song’s apt yet none-more-‘90s refrain, ‘I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.’
