One of the biggest songs of 1993 came from a then-unheralded Oxford band named Radiohead.
Creep was a monster that charted around the world, gave a British act a rare hit in the United States, and became so big it almost destroyed Radiohead before they really got started.
But for a song that would come to dominate radio and TV around the world for much of 1993, Creep was surprisingly a huge flop on release.
The BBC refused to play it and Radiohead's label eventually gave up on the single due to its disappointing sales.
So how did Creep fail upon release, yet somehow become revered as an alt-rock classic 30 years on?
'When you were here before…'
Creep was written by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke in the late 80s while he was a student at Exeter University.
The song was written about an unhealthy obsession with a member of the opposite sex and Yorke's own feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing — a theme that would resonate with hundreds of thousands of teenagers in the years to come.
As Yorke told British music mag Melody Maker in late 1992, the song came out of a crisis point in his life as a form of therapy.
"You see in our book, 'creep' is not a term of abuse — it means people who hate themselves but get something creative out of it," Yorke explained.
Things moved fast for the band, who were initially named On A Friday.
One of their early demo tapes (which didn't feature Creep) led to record label interest and by their eighth gig, they had signed to EMI/Parlaphone and changed their name to Radiohead.
They released an EP in May 1992, and then went back into the studio to record a single, with two tracks earmarked as possibilities.
Neither of them were Creep, but while warming up in the studio, the band ran through their hit-in-waiting.
"When it was recorded, we didn't even know it was being taped," drummer Phil Selway told the St Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993.
"We were just warming up for another track — the reason it sounds so powerful is because it's completely unselfconscious."
The producers Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie loved it but dismissed it initially, thinking it was a cover due to an off-hand comment by a band member.
But once the misunderstanding was cleared up, the initially unplanned recording was polished up and sent to the record label for release as a single.
One element left unpolished was what Radiohead members would come to call "The Noise" — the "kerchunks" leading into the chorus, courtesy of Jonny Greenwood slashing at his guitar.
"That's the sound of Jonny trying to f**k the song up," fellow guitarist Ed O'Brien recalled.
"He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song."
Slade told MTV in 2013 that some "very professional producers" at the time were stunned that The Noise was left in the song.
"Of course, not only did we leave it in, but we made it so loud that it punched you in the face," Slade said.
"And really, 'The Noise' has almost become as famous as the song itself."
'I wish I was special…'
EMI loved the song, the producers were delighted with it, and Radiohead felt certain they had a winner on their hands.
"In five, six, 10 years' time, people will be saying that Creep is a f***ing classic record — we know that," Yorke told UK music mag NME in 1992.
And then the wheels fell off.
Released on September 21, 1992, Creep flopped, selling just 6,000 copies and only reaching number 78 on the UK singles chart.
BBC Radio 1 refused to play it, calling it "too depressing", according to Melody Maker, and the single was promptly "deleted" by EMI/Parlaphone, meaning no new copies were to be printed.
But while the UK couldn't care less about Creep and Radiohead, the US cared a lot.
At the time, the search was on in America to find the next Nirvana, after the band's grunge anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit and its parent album Nevermind did the impossible by kicking down the door between the alternative scene and the mainstream.
Creep fit the Teen Spirit bill, boasting a requisite level of angst to match its Pixies-inspired quite-loud-quiet dynamics, and it began getting airplay on American college radio.
Radiohead's rise in the US started with a music director who found the single in a Berkeley record shop's import rack and added it to a San Francisco college station, according to a 2000 New York Times article.
Soon, the song was "an underground rage up and down the California coast" and began spreading across the country, working its way into heavy rotation on MTV and slowly but surely climbing into mainstream radio playlists and up the Billboard charts.
By the time Radiohead did a quick press tour of the US in April 1993, the song was already a phenomenon stateside, peaking inside the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 and mainstream pop and rock charts.
Back in the UK, EMI/Parlaphone were paying attention.
Radiohead's follow-up singles had also failed to impress, but suddenly the single that died — Creep — was all anyone was talking about.
In a rare backflip for the music industry, the label re-released Creep as a single in the UK on September 4, 1993, almost exactly 12 months on from its initial failure.
Suddenly UK radio and fans "got it" and Creep made its second "debut" on the UK singles chart, this time at number seven.
The UK re-release brought it properly to Australia, and the song reached number six on the ARIA charts two weeks before Christmas in 1993, spending 17 weeks in the top 50.
In the triple j Hottest 100 of 1993 — the first in the current best-of-the-year format — Creep polled at number two, pipped at the post by the far-less-classic novelty song Asshole by American comedian Denis Leary.
'What the hell am I doing here?'
Creep's success drew attention to the song's likeness to The Hollies' 1972 track The Air That I Breathe, leading to an out-of-court settlement and the addition of the names Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood to the songwriting credits.
The settlement was reportedly amicable, with Radiohead admitting they had changed the melody in the bridge to be more like The Air That I Breathe as an homage to the track.
But the copyright claim was the least of Radiohead's concerns around Creep.
As Rolling Stone put it, the band "quickly came to resent — and even hate — the very thing that vaulted them to superstardom".
By the end of 1993, they were utterly sick of the song, retitling it "Crap" among themselves, and the band apparently came close to breaking up under the weight of the sudden success.
"There was a point where we seemed to be living out the same four-and-a-half minutes of our lives over and over again," Ed O'Brien said in a 1995 interview.
The song had put Radiohead on the map, but now it was a place they wanted to get away from, both sonically and in term of the world's view of them.
Their next single My Iron Lung was Yorke's attempt to put "the final nail" in Creep's coffin, he told B-side magazine.
The song's title likened Creep to something that kept the band alive but had become cumbersome and suffocating, with a key lyric being "this is our new song, just like the last one, a total waste of time".
My Iron Lung was the first taste of their 1995 album The Bends, the start of Radiohead's run of acclaimed classic albums that would include Ok Computer, Kid A, and In Rainbows — all of which appeared in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and on Rolling Stone's 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Each of those albums saw the band push further and further away from the sound of Creep.
Yet Creep remains far and away Radiohead's most-streamed song, with over one billion plays on Spotify, compared with second-place Karma Police on 375 million plays.
Regardless, the band has gone to great pains to distance themselves from it over the years.
According to Setlist.fm, Radiohead all but retired the song between 2000 and 2002, playing it just twice in almost 100 gigs, and then didn't play it at all for seven years after headlining Reading Festival in 2009.
And if you've attended a Radiohead gig since then, it is still more than likely you have not seen Creep played live.
As The Guardian noted in a review of the band's headlining spot at 2017's Glastonbury Festival, which featured a rare airing of the song, "given Radiohead's famously fractious relationship with their first big hit – and it's almost complete lack of resemblance to the music they went on to make – the performance of Creep is greeted with something approaching astonished delight".
