Plenty of bands tire of playing their biggest hit, bowing to fans’ pressure by mixing up the arrangement, running through it in a perfunctory fashion or slipping a tease of it into a more recent track. Sometimes, though, they just ignore it for nearly a decade, fan expectations be damned. Radiohead did the latter for nearly seven years with “Creep,” the ka-chunk, chunka rocker from 1992 that helped thrust them into global stardom.
Watch Radiohead Play ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ Songs Live for First Time
Then, on Monday night, they kicked off their tour in support of A Moon Shaped Pool in Paris by treating the sold-out audience at the La Zenith to a run through “Creep,” the first time they’d played it since an August 2009 show at the Reading Festival. According to Rolling Stone, there were some other droughts broken at the show, including the first performance of “No Surprises” in seven years and the first time in their career they’ve played at least one song from all nine of their studio albums in a single show.
“This is for the funny guy shouting for ‘Creep’ at the back, if only to shock you,” singer Thom Yorke joked to the crowd of 6,000 at Le Zenith.
Woah they are playing Creep!
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) May 23, 2016
People are losing their minds this is incredible
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) May 23, 2016
The triple-treat came just days after the band played the first two shows of the tour at Amsterdam’s Heineken Music Hall, where they played five Moon songs live for the first time. Watch them play “Burn the Witch” in Amsterdam.