As The Cure arrived at 1987’s seventh album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Robert Smith and the ever-revolving gang were a very different proposition to the band that had started the decade. Gone was the tightly-wound, bleak intensity of their early albums, the gothic gloom replaced by a more two-pronged MO that swayed between fizzy, indelible pop songs and intricately-layered and atmospheric rock.
You could argue that the former approach reached its peak on Kiss Me…, released on 26th May, 1987, with the album’s imperious standout Just Like Heaven. A song both weighted with pop perfection and one that feels light-as-a-feather, it is the ultimate distillation of a band everything that made them such outsider heroes into a mainstream sound. Robert Smith agrees. “It’s the best pop song The Cure have ever done,” he told Blender in 2003. “All the sounds meshed, it was one take and it was perfect.”
Given the sense of blissed-out euphoria the song evokes, its creation was a little more mundane. Smith was living in a two-bedroom flat in Maida Vale, north London, at the time he came up with its warm, strummed chord sequence and yearning melodic hook, a product of forcing himself to get to work every day. “Just about the only discipline I had in my life was self-imposed,” he stated. “I set myself of writing 15 days a month; otherwise I’d have just got up in mid-afternoon and watched TV until the pubs opened then gone out drinking.”
You imagine that the Cure leader certainly gave himself a pat on the back that day, feeling satisfied he’d written a catchy little number and telling Blender he only realised later that he’d crafted a nod to The Only Ones’ wiry 1978 hit Another Girl, Another Planet.
After being something of a songwriting despot in the early years of The Cure, though, Smith was determined that Kiss Me… would be a more collaborative affair and was intrigued to see where the song might go in the hands of his band, at that point featuring Lol Tolhurst on keyboards, Simon Gallup on bass, Porl Thompson on guitar and Boris Williams on drums.
What was originally a slower, more considered composition was immediately transformed into something else by the rhythmic punchiness of drummer Williams. “He introduced a drum fill that gave me the idea of introducing the instruments one by one before the vocal comes in,” Smith explained.
Having gotten the music to the track down at Studio Miraval in the south of France, Smith decided to hand over the as-yet-wordless song (because the singer hadn’t written the lyrics yet) to French TV show Les Enfants du Rock when they asked if The Cure could provide them with a theme tune. His reasoning was sound. “It meant the music would be familiar to millions of Europeans even before it was release,” he said.
Now Smith’s focus turned to the lyrics, the song’s meaning scattered with signposts to different parts of his adolescence. The iconic opening line – “Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick…” – refers to Smith’s love of bamboozling his pals with magic tricks as a kid, the rest of the words delving into a night he’d had as a teen when he and his friends had been drinking and decided to go for a nocturnal stroll. “It was something that happened on Beachy Head, on the south coast of England,” he told Blender. “The song is about hyper-ventilating – kissing and fainting to the floor.”
The reason that the song’s Tim Pope-video ended with Smith embracing wife Mary is because that’s what happened in real life, he said. “Mary dances with me in the video because she was the girl, so it had to be her. The idea is that one night like that it worth 1,000 hours of drudgery.”
A few months after its parent album arrived, Just Like Heaven was released as a single, in October, 1987. Its impact was modest at the time, becoming a Top 40 hit in the UK and reaching number 40 in the US but time has given Just Like Heaven the kudos it deserves, now regarded as a Cure classic. Covered by a range of artists including Dinosaur Jr. (whose version is Smith’s favourite Cure cover ever), Katie Melua, The Lumineers and LA’s Section String Quartet, it has become one of The Cure’s most well-known and best-loved songs. One a groggy winter morning in early 1987, Robert Smith had to force himself to get up and get to work on writing songs. We’ll be forever glad that he did.
