“If Creep hadn’t been as big as it was, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t have made another record”: Ed O’Brien on the impact of Radiohead’s biggest hit
With well over 40 million monthly listeners on Spotify, Radiohead remain one of the most listened-to rock bands on the planet. And at nearly 3 billion streams on that one platform alone, Creep still stands as the group’s most enduring hit.
And in a new interview with Uncut, guitarist Ed O’Brien reflects on the song’s impact, saying were it not for its success, the band might have been out of the game entirely afterwards.
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Asked about the moment in his career when he felt Radiohead had created something completely artistically new, he replies: “I think The Bends, really.
“You could feel the influences on the sleeve of Pablo Honey, but The Bends was pretty diverse. If you think about the way that that album bookends, it starts with Planet Telex and ends with Street Spirit. Two quite different songs – the power and the sonic playfulness of one, and then the emotion of the other.”
He continues: “We knew there were flaws with the first album, and it was propped up massively by Creep.
“If Creep hadn’t been as big as it was, there’s a very good chance we may never have made another record, because the record company would have dropped us.”
Despite its lasting success as Radiohead’s biggest track, the band famously dislike it, and only very rarely play it during live shows.
Frontman Thom Yorke has, in the past, unaffectionately called the track “Crap”, and according to the Guardian, answered a Montreal crowd’s request for them to play the song with “Fuck off”. He has also previously called lovers of the track “anally retarded”.
As the story goes, guitarist Jonny Greenwood even injected some grating crunchy guitar blasts at the start of the chorus as an act of sabotage to ruin the song during the recording of My Iron Lung, but they were later kept by the producer.
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