The Alternative Number Ones: The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

"Friday I'm In Love" didn't make any sense to me. It didn't compute. I was 12 years old when "Friday I'm In Love" came out, and I thought I knew who the Cure were. They were the miserable guys, the ones who dressed like bats and wore mime makeup. But "Friday I'm In Love" is the first Cure song that I remember actively hearing, and it didn't square with that image at all. Why were these depressed wraiths singing this boppy bubblegum song about their favorite day of the week? The cognitive dissonance was too much. I decided that the song was stupid, the Cure were stupid, and I should invest all my emotional energy in bands that had stagedives in their videos.

People contain multitudes. I didn't get that yet. I didn't know that the Cure had plenty of fun, silly pop songs in their discography and that I'd come to love a lot of those songs. Later on, when I figured out that the Cure were not stupid, I learned that plenty of the band's devotees agreed with 12-year-old me about "Friday I'm In Love." Sometimes, Robert Smith agreed with me, too. It's a pretty common take: The Cure are great, but "Friday I'm In Love" is a goofy little pop song that's just for normies. There are plenty of Cure fans who actively resent "Friday I'm In Love," and there are presumably plenty of people who adore the song and who don't otherwise give a single fuck about the Cure.

So this is one of those stories about a band scoring a big hit with an atypical song and then both band and fanbase worrying that the song is going to give people the wrong idea about them. We've seen versions of that story again and again over the years. "Friday I'm In Love" was one of the Cure's biggest hits in its moment. Today, it just barely edges out "Boys Don't Cry," another sort of atypical song, as the Cure track with the most Spotify streams. The Cure were near their commercial peak when they released "Friday I'm In Love." The band didn't hold onto their central place in the alt-rock universe for too much longer, but "Friday I'm In Love" never went away. Maybe it's just a Stockholm-syndrome situation, but now I think the song is pretty good.

Here's what Robert Smith himself said about "Friday I'm In Love" when he was on the cover of SPIN in 1992: "'Friday I'm in Love' is a dumb pop song, but it's quite excellent actually, because it's so absurd. It's so out of character -- very optimistic and really out there in happy land. It's nice to get that counterbalance. People think we're supposed to be leaders of some sort of 'gloom movement.' I could sit and write gloomy songs all day long, but I just don't see the point." It's so funny how the Cure reinforce their public image even as they undermine it. In that moment, at least on paper, Smith even seems a little gloomy when talking about writing a non-gloomy song.

When Smith says that "Friday In Love" is "dumb," that's not just him being a typically self-effacing British pop star. "Friday I'm In Love" actually is a pretty stupid fucking song. I'm still not entirely clear whether it's a song about being in love with Friday or a song about being in love on Friday, but I do know that the man spends way too much of the track just naming the days of the week, like he's trying to put his own spin on the Happy Days theme music. There's no great literary metaphor at work on "Friday I'm In Love"; it's literally just a song about wishing it was the weekend.

The music came first, and it arrived on a Friday. The Cure were working on their Wish album at Richard Branson's very fancy Manor Studios, and I guess they were getting ready to take the weekend off, like regular working people. On Friday afternoon, Robert Smith was driving back home, and an idea for a chord sequence popped into his head. Smith was sure that he'd heard it somewhere else, and he didn't want to steal someone's idea, so he kept playing the chords for people, asking where they'd heard it. But nobody could think of another song with that riff, so Smith pulled off the rare feat of inventing a new riff that instantly sounded familiar. You have to be really, really good to do something like that almost by accident.

The Cure recorded an instrumental version of Smith's chord progression, and then they messed around with it, making it faster and faster. Eventually, Smith and the band's regular co-producer David Allen actually changed the pitch of the song by speeding up the recording slightly. In some interviews, Smith says that this was a mistake; he was messing around with the pitch-control doohickey and forgot to turn it off. In other versions of the story, Smith and Allen sped the track up on purpose, to give it a little more poppy immediacy. Whether it was an accident or an intentional decision, the trick worked. Plenty of the songs on Wish really are as gloomy as the Cure's gloom-rock reputation would have you think, but "Friday I'm In Love" doesn't sound like any of them.

Once the Cure had the music, Robert Smith had to write some words. He knew he had to come up with something happy, since that was how the music sounded, and that kind of thing has never come easily to him. Smith told SPIN, "Genuinely dumb pop lyrics are much more difficult to write than my usual outpourings through the heart. I went through hundreds of sheets of paper trying to get words for this record. You have to hit something that's not cringing -- a simplicity and naïveté that communicates. There's a dumbness that sort of cracks."

To come up with the right kind of dumbness for "Friday I'm In Love," Smith just started singing about days of the week. In 2004, he told Guitar World, "I thought, why don't I do a song about that Friday feeling? It's a thing you have at school, and lots of people work at jobs they don't really enjoy. So that Friday afternoon feeling is something you look forward to." Have you ever had a conversation about the best day of the week with someone in your office? Like: "Do you prefer Fridays or Saturdays?" That's the worst, most banal co-worker conversation that you could possibly ever have -- worse than politics, worse than the weather -- and here's Robert Smith using it to write the Cure's most enduringly popular song. That's crazy.

I never liked the central songwriting conceit of "Friday I'm In Love," but plenty of great songs have dumb central conceits. "Friday I'm In Love" mostly works in spite of its lyrics, not because of them. There's a bit on the bridge that I really like, just because the imagery is so fucking weird and specific: "Always take a bite! It's such a gorgeous sight to see you eat in the middle of the night!" If you can watch someone make a sandwich at 3AM and feel a sudden explosion of affection when watching them bite into it, then that's love, baby. But I don't need to hear about how Tuesday's grey and Wednesday too. That's baby talk.

The "Friday I'm In Love" lyrics work, I guess, because they get stuck in your head. And they really get stuck in your head. But the lyrics themselves are basically nothing. The song endures because the music absolutely sparkles. To this day, no other rock band has managed to equal the velvet-pillow-smash lushness of the Cure's production. The guitars on "Friday I'm In Love" shimmer and shine and crash into each other. The melody is sharp and linear, and all the sounds on the track just dance around it.

Ultimately, "Friday I'm In Love" is nowhere near the Cure's best song, and I really have to be in the right mood to enjoy it. But if "Friday I'm In Love" comes on at the right moment, it sounds like sunshine. It's the rare Cure song that could've easily been a Byrds song. With his vocal, Robert Smith conveys enormous fondness while also doing his usual moaning thing: "This Friday, I'm in lawwwve!" Smith himself has said that the song is "calculated," and you can kind of hear him holding his nose to bash out a catchy tune when he probably sometimes thinks that's beneath him. But he sounds like he's having fun, too.

The video probably pushed the "fun" thing a little too hard. Regular Cure collaborator Tim Pope directed the clip, and he gave cameos to lots of the people around the band: Himself, producer David Allen, manager Chris Parry. There are some allusions to silent-film history in the clip, but it's mostly the Cure guys, in full teased hair and makeup, jumping around and being wacky. They play with props and wigs and glitter, and then they eventually trash their set. I definitely thought the video was stupid when I was 12. I still think it's kind of stupid now, but I've got enough affection for the Cure that it doesn't bother me. If the "Friday I'm In Love" video is your first exposure to the Cure, you might discover that you're not really into it. It's a strange introduction to a strange band.

The Cure released "Friday I'm In Love" as a single in May 1992, after their Wish album had already been out for a month. Lead single "High" was a Modern Rock chart-topper, but "Friday I'm In Love" was a hit. The song went top-10 in the UK and a bunch of other countries. On the Hot 100, it climbed all the way to #18 -- the Cure's second-biggest hit behind "Lovesong." Wish went platinum, probably largely on the strength of "Friday I'm In Love." It also got a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album; it's one of the records that lost that award to Tom Waits' Bone Machine. These days, "Friday I'm In Love" pretty much towers over the rest of Wish.

"Friday I'm In Love" was the Cure's fourth #1 hit on the Billboard Modern Rock Songs chart, and it was also their last, though they came close a couple of times. The band followed "Friday I'm In Love" with the dizzily pretty "A Letter To Elise," and that one reached #2. (It's a 9.) A year later, the Cure recorded a pretty blah, vaguely trip-hop cover of "Purple Haze" for the Hendrix tribute album Stone Free, and their version also reached #2. (It's a 5.)

The Cure toured hard behind Wish, and they released two different live albums in 1993. Then a bunch of people left the band or got fired, and the Cure didn't make another album until 1996's Wild Mood Swings. That album got bad reviews and didn't sell well, and its reputation remains dismal today. Even alternative radio wasn't showing the Cure a lot of love. "Mint Car," the highest-charting of their Wild Mood Swings singles, only made it to #14. Pretty good song, though. Sounds a lot like "Friday I'm In Love." A year later, they released the compilation Galore, which gathered up all the big singles that came out after Staring At The Sea. That one had the new track "Wrong Number," which made it to #8. (It's an 8.)

The Cure went for a big swing with their next album, 2000's Bloodflowers, and Smith talked a lot of shit about how it was the third part of a trilogy with Pornography and Disintegration and how it might be the Cure's last record. I like Bloodflowers just fine, but it's not up there with those other two records, and it definitely wasn't the Cure's last. But Bloodflowers was the last Cure album to yield a top-10 Modern Rock hit. (The band's song "Maybe Someday" made it to #10. It's a 6.)

In the 21st century, the Cure have cruised along nicely as a legacy act. Longtime members keep leaving and coming back, with Robert Smith as the solo permanent figure. The Cure jumped over to Geffen for their 2004 self-titled album, and their single "The End Of The World" peaked at #19. When they were working that record, the Cure headlined Coachella and went out on a mini-festival tour with some of the younger bands -- Muse, Interpol, Thursday, the Rapture -- who counted them as an influence. A one-off 2008 single called "The Only One" was the last Cure track to make the Modern Rock chart; it peaked at #31. (By that point, the Modern Rock chart had more than 30 spots.) The Cure released an album called 4:13 Dream in 2008, and people weren't too into that one, but they still say rapturous things about the band's live shows.

Today, the Cure's place in history is fully secure. They've got a bulletproof catalog, and Robert Smith is the rare larger-than-life past-generation rock star who's still alive and who hasn't said or done anything so fucked-up that people can't feel the same way about him anymore. He continues to come off as a fundamentally decent human being. The Cure were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2019. Last year, they toured North America for the first time in a long while, and Smith earned tons of goodwill by taking a stand against inflated ticket and merch prices. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Cure announced their first album in 16 years.

In a recent column about the Sugarcubes, I wrote that Björk was "more likely to make vital music in 2024 than pretty much anyone else who’s appeared in this column." Please allow me to retract that statement right now. The Cure have a new single called "Alone" and it's fucking awesome. I'm trying not to overreact here, but "Alone" is that prime moody-twinkle Cure shit, with a slow-build intro that's as long as the rest of the song. I haven't heard the rest of the album yet, but I'm delighted to discover that the Cure are still capable of great things. My daughter is old enough to be in driver's ed, and "Alone" is the first new Cure song to come out during her lifetime. I cannot believe that it's as good as it is. So who knows? Maybe the Cure have another hit left in them. It's a real pleasure to write a column about a band's final #1 Modern Rock hit and to know that the book still isn't closed on them. We'll see what happens.

GRADE: 7/10

BONUS BEATS: One Dryden Mitchell covered "Friday I'm In Love" for the soundtrack of the 2004 motion picture 50 First Dates, and it plays during a montage of Adam Sandler trying to get Drew Barrymore to stop her Jeep and notice him. This ends with the gratifying sight of Barrymore beating the shit out of Rob Schneider with a baseball bat. Here's that scene:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=X6XhCWcavOU&ab_channel=Ricknee4Ever

(Adam Sandler's sole Modern Rock chart hit, 1995's "The Chanukah Song," peaked at #25 in 1998. Dryden Mitchell's band Alien Ant Farm will eventually appear in this column.)

BONUS BONUS BEATS: The great Yo La Tengo included a lilting, folky version of "Friday I'm In Love" on their 2015 album Stuff Like That There. Here's the video that future Borat Subsequent Moviefilm director Jason Woliner made for it:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's the very pretty take on "Friday I'm In Love" that Phoebe Bridgers recorded for a 2018 Spotify session:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Smashing Pumpkins, a band that will eventually appear in this column, cover "Friday I'm In Love" at live shows pretty often. Here's video of them doing it at a 2019 show in Oslo, with James Iha on lead vocals:

THE NUMBER TWOS: Morrissey is another British sad-boy forefather with his own hit song about days of the week, but that's not the one that peaked at #2 behind "Friday I'm In Love." Instead, the Morrissey track that just lost out to "Friday I'm In Love" is the sparkly-cynicism jangle jam "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful." It's a 9.

THE 10S: There are so many great Jesus And Mary Chain songs, but my favorite is the hip-swinging sha-la-la deadpan-garage freakout "Far Gone And Out," which peaked at #3 behind "Friday I'm In Love." Nothing stays forever, nothing's gonna last, but that song will always be a 10.