And, although optimism pops up regularly on tunes like “Anyone Can Play Guitar” (the second single) and the plaintive soul tonic “Lurgee”, you get the feeling that Yorke is one troubled individual.

Not exactly, says Greenwood. “Like the rest of the band, he sort of doesn’t have any friends, really–which is a bit weird. We got back to Oxford after touring…and it was really sad. We all got home, and I phoned up one or two people that we knew, who were away, and then we ended up sort of phoning each other up again.”

Boston-based production team Paul Q Kolderie and Sean Slade were in the UK touting for business after Buffalo Tom’s excellent Let Me Come Over album. Nick Gatfield liked the sounds they’d been getting and played them Stop Whispering, They were impressed. The band admired their work in return, and Kolderie and Slade were hired to produce two songs for the next single, Inside My Head and Lurgee.
“My first impression was that they were desperately inexperienced,— remembers Kolderie of the rehearsals.— The other was that we didn’t like these songs Parlophone had chosen, and I don’t think the band liked them much either. Inside My Head was not very melodic, didn’t have any of the stuff we thought the others had, so we were rather disappointed. And then one day in rehearsal, they burst into this other song, which I guess they’d just written. When they finished it, Thom mumbled something like, ‘That’s our Scott Walker song’.. .except I thought he said, ‘That’s a Scott Walker song’. Now I was pretty familiar with Scott Walker, but Jeez, there’s a lot of albums and I could have missed something! We walked out of the rehearsal that night and Sean said, ‘Too bad their best song’s a cover'”. That song was Creep.

They chose the Boston-based team of Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, who’d previously worked with artists like Buffalo Tom and Juliana Hatfield.
The first two songs they’d planned to record as the next single, “Inside My Head” and
“Lurgee,” didn’t turn out so well, but another song carelessly tossed off during e sessions proved far superior. “Creep” was recorded in one take, and the story goes that the band wasn’t even aware that Kolderie and Slade were rolling tape. Kolderie remembered the session in an interview for the British music magazine Mojo: “At the end, everyone in the place was silent for a moment and then they burst into applause. I’d never had that happen before.”