Robert Fripp and Toyah Willcox continue to offer up compellingly non-essential viewing every week with their Sunday Lunch cover videos, and this week’s instalment sees them take on Radiohead’s monster hit, Creep.
It is another expert choice from a couple of much-loved weirdos – a fact somewhat underlined this week by Willcox’s decision to don Seran wrap costumery (don’t try this at home, please). This is Sunday Lunch, after all, so we suppose its only appropriate to incorporate kitchen-based materials. The scene is completed with a lovingly-crafted “Fripp’s a creep” sign.
Notably, the couple’s latest unhinged cover sees Fripp bring in a little bit of (admittedly, very wispy) distortion for the chorus, so perhaps we can expect a few more flourishes on the effects front down the line.
Creep originally featured on Radiohead’s 1993 debut album Pablo Honey and was the track that broke the band worldwide. The group disavowed and refused to play it live from 1998 – sometimes despite baying audiences. They have since appeared to come to terms with its popularity and perform it at selected shows, like their 2017 headline slot at Glastonbury festival in the UK.
As noted in Alex Ross’ 2001 New Yorker profile, the song, like many early Radiohead tracks, makes good use of pivot tones – i.e. holding one note of a chord and then forming a new one around it.
“Yeah, that's my only trick,” Thom Yorke jokes in the same piece. “I’ve got one trick and that's it, and I'm really going to have to learn a new one. Pedals, banging away through everything…”
