Pop Song 173 'Creep' Radiohead 1992

Pop Song 173 'Creep' Radiohead 1992

Singer Thom Yorke wrote "Creep" while studying at Exeter University in the late 1980s. Yorke said: "I wasn't very happy with the lyrics; I thought they were pretty crap." Guitarist Jonny Greenwood said they were inspired by a girl that Yorke had followed around and who unexpectedly attended a Radiohead performance. John Harris, then the Oxford correspondent for Melody Maker, said "Creep" was about a girl who frequented the upmarket Little Clarendon Street in Oxford. According to Harris, Yorke preferred the more bohemian Jericho, and expressed his discomfort with the lines "What the hell am I doing here / I don't belong here".

Asked about "Creep" 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." Greenwood said the song was in fact a happy song about "recognizing what you are"