Creep

During sessions for their debut single at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire, Radiohead were struggling. They had hired the producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie and were working on the songs "Inside My Head" and "Lurgee", without results. Between rehearsals, the band spontaneously played another number, "Creep", which the singer Thom Yorke had written at the University of Exeter in the late 1980s. Yorke jokingly called it their "Scott Walker song", and the producers misinterpreted the remark. As they left that night, Slade told Kolderie, "Too bad their best song's a cover." After further sessions failed, Kolderie suggested Radiohead perform "Creep" properly. The first take drew applause from everyone in the studio, though the band had not known they were being recorded. The drummer Philip Selway believed it sounded powerful because it was completely unselfconscious.

Kolderie convinced EMI to release "Creep" as a single, and it came out on 21 September 1992. It initially flopped, but found radio play in Israel and later on American alternative rock stations, prompting a 1993 reissue that turned it into an international hit. Because it borrowed from "The Air That I Breathe" by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, legal action led to the pair being credited as co-writers.

The guitarist Jonny Greenwood disliked the song at first and tried to spoil it, playing three blasts of guitar noise before the chorus. That noise made the song.