If you’d have suggested to us that Billie Eilish would do a good job of covering Radiohead’s Creep we’d have agreed with you - it just feels like a good fit for her. But the good news is that we no longer need to deal in hypotheticals, as she gave us what we didn’t know we always wanted in Amsterdam over the weekend.
Performing with her band, Eilish sang Creep during the latest stop on her Hit Me Hard And Soft world tour. Things didn’t go entirely to plan - Eilish broke the sombre spell she was casting by collapsing with the giggles towards the end - but she did a fine job, overall.
Eilish and her producer-brother Finneas are known to be long-time Radiohead fans. Finneas covered Fake Plastic Trees, another of the band’s songs, in BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge last year, and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has spoken in positive terms about them, too.
“You’re the only one doing anything fucking interesting nowadays,” Yorke is said to have told Eilish when he met her backstage in 2019, which is probably about as close as he gets to giving a compliment. News of this came via Brian Marquis, Eilish’s tour manager, in a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, where he also revealed that Finneas later told Eilish: “That’s the coolest thing anyone’s ever said to you.”
This was, presumably, at the Eilish gig that Yorke took his daughter to and which he talked about to The Times. “I like Billie Eilish,” he confirmed. “She’s doing her own thing. Nobody’s telling her what to do.”
Creep has been covered by numerous artists over the years. Perhaps the most famous non-Radiohead performance came in 2008, when Prince performed it at Coachella. After excitable fans uploaded footage of it to YouTube, the videos were taken down at Prince’s request, but this didn’t go down well with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.
"Really? He's blocked it?" said Yorke, when he discovered what had happened. “Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song."
In the end, Prince’s Creep did find its way back onto YouTube, and you can enjoy it in all its blurry glory below.
