Fact #156295
When:
Short story:
Let's Go To Bed by The Cure enters the UK singles chart, where it will peak at No44.
Full article:
Robert Smith (The Cure) : I wanted to get away from the kind of thing we were doing on Pornography, 'cause I was developing severe mental problems. I was doing too much of everything, really. There's a whole tour of the west coast of America that I have absolutely no memory of at all. After I'd spent three years breaking my heart trying to get people to understand what we were doing, the most throwaway idiot thing I've ever done, Let's Go to Bed, turned us into a successful group.
Robert Smith (The Cure) : It’s a foolish title, and the lyrics don’t mean a thing. Musically, I mixed in everything bad I’d heard for years but, even when we’d recorded it, I didn’t think it was horrible enough.
Robert Smith (The Cure) : When I wrote Let’s Go To Bed, I thought it was stupid. All pop songs are basically going, ‘Please go to bed with me’, so I’m going to make it as blatant as possible, set it to this cheesy synth riff – everything I hated about music at that time.
Robert Smith (The Cure) : For me, Just One Kiss is the first great Cure b-side. In my mind it was always the A-side.
Just like 10:15 Saturday Night and Killing An Arab, Just One Kiss was supposed to be a double A-side with Let’s Go To Bed. The tape box actually has Art Under The Hammer written on it in my handwriting across the top. I had a meeting with our manager, Chris Parry, where I said, ‘OK, what do you want for the next single? I’ve got Let’s Go To Bed which is crass and stupid, and I’ve got Just One Kiss which is a lovely emotional song.’ And, of course, he wanted Let’s Go To Bed.
The deal with Chris Parry was that he said it had to be a single A-side because double A-sides confuse people. He said, ‘If Let’s Go To Bed doesn’t get into the Top 20 in at least four major territories, then our deal is off. You can leave Fiction, do what the hell you want.’ We’d reached crisis point. I thought he was a complete arsehole by this time. All he was trying to do was stop me playing with The Banshees, stop doing The Glove, stop playing with Tim Pope, stop everything other than making The Cure into a successful pop group.
It was only a few months since Simon had left and it was much too fast for me, this idea that The Cure could go on and get back to Boys Don’t Cry kind of things, and be a pop band. I was happy to do it as long as I had The Banshees as another way of making emotional music.
So with Just One Kiss I agreed to what Chris wanted and then Let’s Go To Bed didn’t even do all that well. I only decided to stick with Fiction because it seemed too much of a change to leave at that point.
Let’s Go To Bed didn’t do well in the charts, but it got a huge amount of radio play on the West Coast of America. It was our breakthrough song. We did a tour in 83 – which I have no recollection of at all – on the back of Let’s Go To Bed being so successful. It was the first thing K-Rock picked up on, and they played it all the time to such an extent that we became the cult underground pop group in California.
The really annoying thing was that Chris would always take the credit for our success, yet if we’d released Just One Kiss instead of Let’s Go To Bed, it wouldn’t have made that much difference to The Cure story in the long run.
He would say, “You see, I called it right”. But I’d be thinking, “Hang on, we’re writing the songs, we’re playing the gigs, it must have something to do with us.” But he presented it as if he was guiding us through this minefield of contemporary culture. It was fair enough when we were just starting, but by this time we were into our thirties and we knew what was going on. We knew what we were doing.
Steve Severin : I always found Chris Parry the most uninspiring person. When you were doing Let’s Go To Bed, you asked me my opinion on something and I gave it and Chris turned round and said, ‘Oh, that’s Mr Pop talking is it?’ Bloody cheek! I just remember him being very down.
Robert Smith : We generally refused to have him in the studio. The only reason he was there for Let’s Go To Bed was that I thought it was such a stupid song that he might as well be the fall guy to take the blame when it all went wrong.
(Source : not known)
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Robert Smith (The Cure) : It’s a foolish title, and the lyrics don’t mean a thing. Musically, I mixed in everything bad I’d heard for years but, even when we’d recorded it, I didn’t think it was horrible enough.
Robert Smith (The Cure) : When I wrote Let’s Go To Bed, I thought it was stupid. All pop songs are basically going, ‘Please go to bed with me’, so I’m going to make it as blatant as possible, set it to this cheesy synth riff – everything I hated about music at that time.
Robert Smith (The Cure) : For me, Just One Kiss is the first great Cure b-side. In my mind it was always the A-side.
Just like 10:15 Saturday Night and Killing An Arab, Just One Kiss was supposed to be a double A-side with Let’s Go To Bed. The tape box actually has Art Under The Hammer written on it in my handwriting across the top. I had a meeting with our manager, Chris Parry, where I said, ‘OK, what do you want for the next single? I’ve got Let’s Go To Bed which is crass and stupid, and I’ve got Just One Kiss which is a lovely emotional song.’ And, of course, he wanted Let’s Go To Bed.
The deal with Chris Parry was that he said it had to be a single A-side because double A-sides confuse people. He said, ‘If Let’s Go To Bed doesn’t get into the Top 20 in at least four major territories, then our deal is off. You can leave Fiction, do what the hell you want.’ We’d reached crisis point. I thought he was a complete arsehole by this time. All he was trying to do was stop me playing with The Banshees, stop doing The Glove, stop playing with Tim Pope, stop everything other than making The Cure into a successful pop group.
It was only a few months since Simon had left and it was much too fast for me, this idea that The Cure could go on and get back to Boys Don’t Cry kind of things, and be a pop band. I was happy to do it as long as I had The Banshees as another way of making emotional music.
So with Just One Kiss I agreed to what Chris wanted and then Let’s Go To Bed didn’t even do all that well. I only decided to stick with Fiction because it seemed too much of a change to leave at that point.
Let’s Go To Bed didn’t do well in the charts, but it got a huge amount of radio play on the West Coast of America. It was our breakthrough song. We did a tour in 83 – which I have no recollection of at all – on the back of Let’s Go To Bed being so successful. It was the first thing K-Rock picked up on, and they played it all the time to such an extent that we became the cult underground pop group in California.
The really annoying thing was that Chris would always take the credit for our success, yet if we’d released Just One Kiss instead of Let’s Go To Bed, it wouldn’t have made that much difference to The Cure story in the long run.
He would say, “You see, I called it right”. But I’d be thinking, “Hang on, we’re writing the songs, we’re playing the gigs, it must have something to do with us.” But he presented it as if he was guiding us through this minefield of contemporary culture. It was fair enough when we were just starting, but by this time we were into our thirties and we knew what was going on. We knew what we were doing.
Steve Severin : I always found Chris Parry the most uninspiring person. When you were doing Let’s Go To Bed, you asked me my opinion on something and I gave it and Chris turned round and said, ‘Oh, that’s Mr Pop talking is it?’ Bloody cheek! I just remember him being very down.
Robert Smith : We generally refused to have him in the studio. The only reason he was there for Let’s Go To Bed was that I thought it was such a stupid song that he might as well be the fall guy to take the blame when it all went wrong.
(Source : not known)