Friday, September 09, 2005

I'm a Creep, I'm a Weirdo.

When I first heard Radiohead's classic angst-ridden Creep, I misheard the lyrics as "I'm a creep, I'm a widow", which in retrospect only vaguely makes sense. Apparently, the band grew to hate this song, which brought them their first huge success. The memorable guitar scratchings preceding the chorus was an attempt by the guitarist trying to screw the song up (or so I'm told), which ironically made the song even more classic. I just recently found out that my favourite Radiohead song My Iron Lung is actually the band's bitter response to the overwhelming popularity of Creep. Intriguing.

In my iTunes collection, this song rivals Come Together, Whole Lotta Love, and Suffragette City as single most covered song... though they all got nothing on Crosstown Traffic. Here's a few:

Gina Jeffreys
I love this version, which is one of my favourite covers ever. It sort of reminds me of that scene with the singing Sirens from O Brother, Where Art Thou?. This is from one of the Andrew Denton's Musical Challenge CDs, which showcases artists performing unlikely covers.

SKAndalous All-stars

The Senti-Mentals

Moby
Moby's comments at the beginning of this version make me wonder what other bands covered Creep at Glastonbury 2003... a little research turned up nothing except that Moby probably misinterpreted what he had been asked to do. Other bands apparently did do some Radiohead covers (not specifically Creep) including The Darkness doing a version of Street Spirit (Fade Out), which incidentally rocks.

The Pretenders

Richard Cheese
Of all the Richard Cheese lounge covers, this is one of the few that (for me) transcends its novelty value.

http://www.yonner.co.uk/2005/08/mp3-creep-cover-radiohead.html
Found this cover by some guy, Yonner, who posted on the BenFolds.org forums. A lot of people didn't like it and let him know too... On first listen, it does sound like a complete butchering of Radiohead, though with his omission of chunks of lyrics it reminded me of a creepy poetic lullabye. Not great and a little annoying, but different nonetheless.

3 comments:

Elin said...

Wow, the Gina Jeffreys version is gorgeous. Thanks for posting that Careless Whisper-cover, too - I LOVE Rufus! Your blog is great, it's added to my bookmarks :)

Fongolia said...

Thanks for the comment. It's nice to get a reminder every now and then that someone is actually reading my blog.

Yonner said...

Hey cool!
I'm the "some guy called yonner"
I found this post using google blog search.
It was only a mess about version. I crapped out on the high bits of course but yeah.... I did want to do a non-typical cover. But let me say that I'm quite proud of my cover of Like Spinning Plates by radiohead. However, my site is down at the moment but I'm working on reviving it in the next day or 2 so please do check it soon and get that cover. I think you MIGHT like it. Much better than my creep cover anyway :)