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Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Stills \/ The Darkness<\/p>\n
Mon 7 September 2026 10:21, UK <\/p>\n
Since the turn of the new millennium, there have been seven officially credited writers for the Radiohead<\/a> classic \u2018Creep\u2019. <\/p>\n Five of them are who most people would expect: the five members of Radiohead, all of whom receive composing credit, while Thom Yorke is credited as the sole lyricist. The other two individuals had no direct involvement in the song\u2019s writing \u2013 Albert Hammond (father of future Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.) and Mike Hazlewood.<\/p>\n In 1972, Hammond and Hazlewood wrote \u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019, a ballad that appeared on Hammond\u2019s 1972 debut album It Never Rains in Southern California. Two years later, British pop group The Hollies covered the song a took it to number two in the UK and number six in the US. The song would have been well-known, especially to British audiences, when Radiohead originally released \u2018Creep\u2019 in 1992. According to Hammond himself, it was the song\u2019s publishers, not the writers, who instigated a lawsuit that eventually put Hammond and Hazlewood\u2019s names in the \u2018Creep\u2019 credits. <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t publish\u00a0\u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019, I only own the writer\u2019s end, so the publisher of the song, Rondor Music, when the song \u2018Creep\u2019 came out, he felt it was a steal from\u00a0\u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019, and he sued Radiohead, and they agreed,\u201d Hammond claimed in a 2002 interview. \u201cRadiohead agreed that they had actually taken it from\u00a0\u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019. Because they were honest, they weren\u2019t sued to the point of saying \u2018We want the whole thing\u2019. So we ended up just getting a little piece of it.\u201d<\/p>\n There are two main comparison points when analysing the similarities between \u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019 and \u2018Creep\u2019: the chord progressions and melodies. The first part is fairly cut and dry. Both songs use a I-III-IV-iv chord progression \u2013 a major one chord, a major three chord, a major four chord, followed by a minor four chord. That progression doesn\u2019t follow that standard progression of most pop music (the major III and minor IV are both atypical), and the back-to-back flip from a major IV to a minor iv is relatively unique. <\/p>\n On its own, that progression doesn\u2019t make the two songs identical. Plenty of songs share chords without anyone needing to shuffle around the writing credits, and the performances could hardly be mistaken for one another. But because this particular sequence is so distinctive, hearing the same changes underneath both songs creates a familiarity that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore once the melodies start moving in a similar direction as well.<\/p>\n When \u2018Creep\u2019 hits its bridge section, the melodic similarities between it and \u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019 become more apparent. According to guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Yorke reworked the bridge to more directly reference the melody of \u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019 once rhythm guitarist Ed O\u2019Brien realised that the two songs shared the same chord progression.<\/p>\n Further reading: Features<\/p>\n Strangely enough, then, Radiohead\u2019s response to discovering the resemblance wasn\u2019t to run away from it. Yorke instead appears to have made the connection more explicit, turning what might initially have been an accidental overlap into something closer to an acknowledgement of the older song. A confident moment for a still fledgling band. <\/p>\n That acknowledgement of the similarities and connective tissue between the two songs opened the door for Hammond and Hazlewood to receive songwriting credits<\/a>. The lyrical content, specific beats, and the majority of the two melodies are dissimilar enough for it to seem like a coincidence, but Radiohead\u2019s tacit nod to The Hollies turned into a full-on copyright claim once they acknowledged \u2018The Air That I Breathe\u2019.<\/p>\n
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