The success of Radiohead’s 1992 debut “Creep” transformed the track from a career-defining breakthrough to a career-threatening schtick seemingly overnight, prompting the British alt-rockers to write a new song in response to their smash hit two years later.
“My Iron Lung,” the band’s 1994 follow-up, aptly described the song that had garnered them tremendous financial success while also shoving them into a singular, creepy corner.
Radiohead Wrote Their Response At Their Label’s Request
As is often the case when a band unexpectedly strikes gold with a hit single, Radiohead’s record label pressured the group to come up with another version of “Creep” in an attempt to mimic its lightning-in-a-bottle success. But instead of writing a new incarnation of the 1992 smash hit, the band decided to write a wholly different song in response to it.
Faith, you’re driving me away, frontman Thom Yorke begins. You do it every day; you don’t mean it, but it hurts like hell. My brain says I’m receiving pain, a lack of oxygen from my life support, my iron lung. If there was any room for a listener to misinterpret Yorke’s lyrics as a response to “Creep,” he clarifies later in the song: Suck your teenage thumb, toilet-trained and dumb. When the power runs out, we’ll just hum. This is our new song, just like the last one, a total waste of time: my iron lung.
The title of Radiohead’s response to “Creep” was, of course, cynically appropriate. An iron lung is a mechanical respirator that, on the one hand, helps patients breathe, but on the other hand, is incredibly restrictive and claustrophobic. “Creep,” in a way, was the same. The track propelled the band into international stardom with other similar 1990s artists like Nirvana and Beck. But soon, “Creep” was all anyone wanted to hear. This, the band would later explain, served as an invaluable lesson.
How “Creep” Affected The Band’s View Of The Music Industry
Radiohead’s dizzying ascent to fame quickly lost its sheen after the band realized their audiences were pigeonholing them to be the “Creep” band. “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,” guitarist Ed O’Brien later said (via Rolling Stone). “It was incredibly stultifying.”
His bandmates, who had begun glibly calling the track “Crap” instead of “Creep,” agreed. “It was frustrating, being judged on just that song when we felt we needed to move on,” Thom Yorke explained. “We were forced on tour to support it, and it gagged us, really. We were on the verge of breaking up. It was a lesson. The way that modern music culture works is that bands get set in a period of time, and then they repeat that small moment of their lives forevermore. That’s what everybody wants. And that’s just what we weren’t going to do.”
We’re too young to fall asleep, Yorke sings in the second verse, too cynical to speak. The verse seems to call out to the audience for help: We are losing it, can’t you tell? We scratch our eternal itch, our twentieth century b****. Finally, Yorke acquiesces to the band’s fate. We are grateful for our iron lung, he insists, not daring to suggest that Radiohead was somehow unappreciative of the millions of fans their 1992 debut earned them—even if it was a debut they resented and, later, refused to play live.
Photo by Roger Sargent/Shutterstock
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