The song Radiohead gave away

If you want to hear “Creep” live in 2026, the one act you shouldn’t buy a ticket for is Radiohead.

setlist.fm has logged the song 4,363 times across 763 artists. Radiohead account for 414. One covers band, Royale with Cheese, has played it 288 times. Postmodern Jukebox, 179. Tears for Fears, 149. Their own debut single isn’t even in their top seven live songs: “Street Spirit” (472), “Paranoid Android” (471) and “My Iron Lung” (443) all sit well above it.

How a band ends up playing its most famous song less than everyone else plays it is a story told almost entirely by dates.

A flop, then a hit they couldn’t escape

“Creep” came out on 21 September 1992 and reached number 78 in the UK. BBC Radio 1 reportedly left it off its playlist as “too depressing.” It broke through abroad instead. An Israeli DJ, Yoav Kutner, started playing it, and in December 1992 San Francisco’s KITS picked it up. By Christmas it was the station’s most-requested song. Reissued in September 1993, it went to number 7.

Even the sound people love most came from a band member trying to ruin it. Those three crunching “dead notes” before each chorus are Jonny Greenwood’s.

“I suppose the nauseating adolescent in me found it a bit wimpy and wanted to make it the opposite.”

— Jonny Greenwood, on the guitar before the chorus

The song wasn’t entirely theirs on paper either. After legal action, Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, writers of “The Air That I Breathe” (a hit for The Hollies), were given co-writing credits.

Four and a half minutes, over and over

Radiohead spent 1993 playing it at more than half of their 157 shows: 96 performances. Before the year was out, Thom Yorke had summed up what it felt like:

“It’s like it’s not our song any more… It feels like we’re doing a cover.”

— Thom Yorke, 1993

Then 1995 went bigger still: 169 shows on The Bends tour and 102 performances of “Creep”, its busiest year ever. Ed O’Brien described the effect:

“We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again.”

— Ed O’Brien

By the end of the OK Computer tour it was on its way out: 12 plays in 1998, then 0 in 1999 and 0 in 2000, when Kid A arrived. A crowd in Montréal that kept shouting for it was reportedly told, in unprintable terms, that the band was tired of it.

The escapes

After that, “Creep” didn’t return so much as slip out, a night here and there, usually without warning. This is every year it got out after 2000, from setlist.fm, with links to each night’s page on OutTwo:

1. 7 Jul 2001
   South Park, Oxford. A hometown encore and its only outing of the year, reportedly to fill a gap left by a keyboard fault.Show page →
2. 27 Jul 2002
   Coliseu do Porto. Once, then gone again.Show page →
3. 2003
   Ten times on the Hail to the Thief tour, including Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl and Earls Court. Its busiest year since the 90s.
4. 1 May 2004
   Coachella, at the Empire Polo Club.Show page →
5. Aug 2006
   Four nights in a row: both V Festival sites, Edinburgh, and Marlay Park in Dublin.
6. 25 Aug 2009
   Cytadela, Poznań. One of eight outings that year, and its only Polish outing since 2000.Show page →
7. 30 Aug 2009
   Reading Festival, at Little John’s Farm. They opened their headline set with it.Show page →
8. 23 May 2016
   Le Zénith, Paris. The comeback after almost seven years, as the last encore of the first of two Paris nights on the A Moon Shaped Pool tour. Reportedly it began with a fan who wouldn’t stop asking.Show page →
9. 23 Jun 2017
   Glastonbury, at Worthy Farm. In the encore of their Pyramid Stage headline set.Show page →
10. 25 Apr 2018
    Parque Simón Bolívar, Bogotá. The last time Radiohead have played “Creep”.Show page →

Look at who it was played for. After 2003 it turns up almost only at festivals and in countries the band rarely visited: Coachella, V, Reading, Glastonbury, and three South American festival dates in its final year. That fits what O’Brien said in 2017: they generally kept it back “because you don’t want it to feel like show business.”

“It’s our song”

Not playing it is different from letting it go. When Prince covered “Creep” at Coachella in 2008 and then had the fan footage pulled offline, Yorke’s response was short: “Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our song.” Ten years later, Radiohead’s publisher sought writing credits on Lana Del Rey’s “Get Free” for its resemblance to “Creep”. Del Rey said in March 2018 that the dispute was over.

That same spring, Radiohead played “Creep” in Bogotá. They haven’t played it since.

The longest silence

Radiohead came back in November 2025 with four nights at the O2 in London among twenty across Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin. “Creep” was at none of them.

Before Paris, a song they’d shelved for seven years came back because someone kept asking. We don’t know whether that will happen again. We do know who is still playing it.

Where you can actually hear “Creep” live