Prince dazzled Coachella with Radiohead's 'Creep.' Years later, fan videos finally found a home.

Despite their admirable efforts to evolve creatively, moving into beat-driven abstractions and lushly orchestral art-rock, Radiohead will probably (for a large chunk of the listening public) always be "the band that released a self-loathing post-grunge hit with the deafening guitar thwack before the chorus." The song, of course, is 1992’s "Creep," and over the years it’s become something of a rock-music standard.

According to Setlist.fm, it’s been covered by 665 artists over the years—at this point, it almost feels like it’s part of the public domain. (In one notable recent example, a college music-theater student went viral with an incredible, operatic version.) But no rendition of that angsty anthem is more famous than Prince’s. He performed the track only one time, at the 2008 Coachella festival, transforming it into a sexy, simmering slow jam. It was a joyous moment of reinvention, of one iconic artist saluting another, but, for years, it was nearly impossible to see the footage.

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Prince's strange but electrifying take on "Creep"

The breathtaking cover is eight minutes long and completely different from the Radiohead tune, even structurally. (To geek out for a second, you’ll notice that Prince modifies the chord progression by essentially removing chunks of it, meaning he sings the lyrics in different spots. It’s a little disorienting at first.) The overall vibe is glittery and dreamlike, with Prince really slipping into balladeer mode. It’s fascinating to compare his delivery of the line "You want a perfect body" versus Thom Yorke’s original—we’re in a totally different universe here. The Artist also incorporates many of his signature touches, including that rabid, raspy scream and the kind of brazen, psychedelic guitar solo only he could pull off.

Luckily, this performance happened during the early age of camera phones and social media. After people started posting about the cover, people flocked to YouTube in hopes of glimpsing it second-hand. But as Time reported that May, "Prince and his team of copyright enforcers quickly took down any and all trace of the performance whenever [it] appeared online." Prince, it should be noted, was famously wary of certain tech companies, at one point even suing YouTube.

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Back online and preserved

But this was obviously not a typical copyright situation, given that the clips were filmed by fans and the song wasn’t even a Prince original. The Associated Press (via Billboard) notes that Yorke found the situation "hilarious," saying, “Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment...Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our … song.” Slate noted that other uploads of the performance appeared on YouTube "intermittently," but nothing appeared to stick until October 26, 2015, when a YouTube user re-uploaded "Creep" footage to their account, including a statement in the video from Prince’s publishing company, NPG, that reads in part, "Please except [sic] our apologies for the delay." (Diffuser reports that Prince—who, sadly, died the following April at age 57—even tweeted out a link to the footage.)

These days, your YouTube search results for "Creep Coachella 2008" will look entirely different than they did back in 2008—there are countless clips available, in varying degrees of quality. It may have taken a while to get there, but at least we wound up in this happy place: with yet another preserved reminder of Prince’s brilliance.

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