Creep

"Creep" was released on September 21, 1992 as Radiohead's debut single, and it flopped: it stalled at No. 78 in the UK on about 6,000 copies, and BBC Radio 1 kept it off playlists for being "too depressing." Even inside the band it was contested — Jonny Greenwood's now-iconic guitar blasts before each chorus started as sabotage, the sound, guitarist Ed O'Brien later explained, of Jonny trying to wreck a song he couldn't stand: "He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song."

The hit happened almost everywhere except home. Israeli radio embraced it in late 1992 after DJ Yoav Kutner started playing it, then San Francisco's KITS picked it up that December, followed by Los Angeles tastemaker KROQ. By the time the album Pablo Honey arrived in February 1993, "Creep" was climbing American charts — No. 34 on the Hot 100 and No. 2 on the alternative airplay chart — and a September 1993 UK reissue finally sent it to No. 7 at home.

Success came with an asterisk: after action by the publisher of "The Air That I Breathe," writers Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood received co-writing credits and royalties for the melodic resemblance — Hammond later said they took only a small share because Radiohead had been honest about it. The band, meanwhile, grew to resent their signature song. "It's like it's not our song any more," Thom Yorke told Rolling Stone. "It feels like we're doing a cover." They dropped it from setlists for years, returning to it in 2001 — long after "Creep" had outgrown them. Its video passed one billion YouTube views in April 2024.