Many artists have offered their takes on Radiohead’s “Creep” over the years, and now Thom Yorke himself has revisited the track: He made a new nine-minute acoustic remix of the classic for Jun Takahashi’s “Undercover” as part of Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo 2021.
Takahashi told Vogue of the show, “The theme is of a person who is frail and weak but has a truly pure heart. I was expressing the worries and anxieties that individuals carry every day and the hope of what lies ahead. It probably doesn’t seem to directly link to clothing design, but I wanted to put the complicated emotional state of society into a physical form. This is what I considered while designing.”
Famously over the years, Yorke has expressed his disdain for the song, or at least his reluctance to perform it: The band has played it live on just a handful of occasions since the ’90s. At a Montreal concert in support of OK Computer, the audience called for the band to play the song and Yorke responded by shouting, “F*ck off, we’re tired of it.” In a 2017 interview, Yorke said of playing the song live, “It can be cool sometimes, but other times I want to stop halfway through and be like, ‘Nah, this isn’t happening.’”
Listen to Yorke’s “Creep” remix above.