12/19/2023 0 Comments Radiohead spectre meaning![]() ![]() One night in Montreal during the OK Computer tour, weary of one heckler relentlessly harassing them, Yorke dismissed the requests with an abrupt, “fuck off, we’re tired of it” and later scolded fans of the song as “ anally retarded”. Having successfully navigated their way through the hype to enjoy critical acclaim and further hits on subsequent releases, Creep gradually dropped off the band’s setlists. ‘ This is our new song, just like the last one, a total waste of time,’ Yorke snarled on 1995’s My Iron Lung, the band’s self-confessed attempt to consign to the bin a song they’d since contemptuously renamed Crap. Radiohead have always had much more complex feelings, of course. In 2021, Rolling Stone named it the 118th greatest song of all time. Weezer enlisted the help of 90 YouTube fans for their take. Kevin Bacon once sang it to his pet goats and put it on the internet. Foo Fighters performed it with comedian Dave Chapelle. Over a billion streams on Spotify alone later, it’s fair to say that Creep has since taken on a life of its own, covered by artists as diverse as Moby, Macy Gray, Robbie Williams, Kelly Clarkson, Korn, and even Prince. “It took a year-and-a-half to get back to the people we were… to cope with it emotionally.” “We sucked Satan’s cock,” the frontman unceremoniously fumed. “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,” O’Brien told The Times in 1995. The intensity of touring that followed, coupled with the spectre of their potential one-hit wonder fate, hit the band hard. ![]() It wasn’t until the song took off on independent radio (first gaining traction in Israel, New Zealand, Spain and Scandinavia) that Stateside interest led to high-profile TV appearances and a UK reissue charting in the Top 10. Similarly, the NME dismissed Radiohead as a “ pitiful, lily-livered excuse for a rock ‘n’ roll group”, printed alongside images of Yorke ill-advisedly captioned, “UGLEE”. Upon its initial 1992 release as a single, Creep was banned by the BBC for the apparent crime of being “too depressing”, reaching number 78 in the UK charts and shifting a meagre 6,000 copies. This was a sudden yet belated turn of fortunes. imprint, swiftly produced a reactive marketing campaign, creating “I’m A Creep” promo badges and placing ads that referenced the episode, proudly heralding Radiohead as, “ Huh, huh, huh, music that doesn’t suck”. It was a significant endorsement, however, and not just because Yorke was a fan of the smash MTV show. “Beavis nearly comes, doesn’t he?” Greenwood quipped in a 1996 interview with Spin. “Don’t worry Butthead,” Beavis assures his pal, “it gets cool in a minute,” and right on cue those serendipitous dead notes send the pair into shrieking palpitations. In a 1994 episode of Beavis & Butthead, the animated duo watch the accompanying music video and despite some apprehension as the subdued opening bars unfold, they soon come around. That was what won over the two toughest critics of the decade, too. “He really didn’t like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. “That’s the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up,” recalled fellow guitarist Ed O’Brien. The reason? The guitarist wasn’t exactly a fan. “Halfway through it suddenly starts killing itself off, which is the whole point of the song really. “You have Jon’s ‘Ker-runch’ thing come in, and the song is like, slashing its wrists,” Yorke told Classic Rock's long-time Review's Editor Ian Fortnam, describing the effect in The Scene fanzine in 1992. This relaxed approach explains Johnny Greenwood’s attempts at sabotaging the recording. “The reason it sounds so powerful is because it’s completely unselfconscious,” drummer Phil Selway told the St. At the time, Radiohead were concentrating on two other songs ( Inside My Head and Lurgee) that they had much higher hopes for as their potential debut single, using it merely as a rehearsal to warm-up, unaware the tapes were even rolling. After some discussion, Yorke wisely used the opportunity to rewrite and rerecord those earlier lyrics, too.Ĭreep being recorded at all is somewhat of a fluke, however. ![]() Though concerns about selling out by bowing to such label pressures were rife, the unimpeachable Sonic Youth had done something similar recently, and so the Oxfordshire five-piece duly obliged. Earmarking Creep as the standout song on their 1993 debut album, Pablo Honey, EMI requested a “clean” version of the recording to maximise commercial appeal, removing the offending ‘ fucking’ from the second verse and replacing it with the much more radio-friendly ‘ very’. ![]()
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