In Between Days turns 40: the story behind The Cure's classic single

19 July 2025, 13:00

The Cure - In Between Days

How the evergreen 1985 single shook off Robert Smith's reputation for gloom, welcomed an old friend back into the fold and kick-started a new phase in The Cure's career.

"In Between Days is probably the simplest thing I've written since Boys Don't Cry. I did it on purpose."

In Between Days rmains one of The Cure's most popular singles. First released on 19th July 1985, there's something about that shimmering acoustic guitar, the memorable, piping keyboard line and frontman Robert Smith's playful yelp of a vocal that continues to appeal to people.

At the time, In Between Days only peaked at Number 15 on the UK charts, but the song's popularity has endured. The Cure were still performing it at their one-off show at London's Troxy in November 2024, and the track received the same delighted response it's had for the best part of four decades.

The single was accompanied by one of the band's most famous music videos, directed by Tim Pope. In it, Smith and the band are filmed by a camera that swoops, swings and dives towards them on a harness, sometimes missing the musicians by mere inches. Intended as a pastiche of 1960s music films like A Hard Day's Night, it's one of the most joyful clips in the band's video back catalogue.

But beneath the giddy video and bright music, there's a dark undercurrent to the lyrics of In Between Days. A song that opens with the line "Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die" is dealing with weightier topics than you'd find in your average 1980s pop hit.

Songwriter Robert Smith claimed that In Between Days is "a very obvious boy/girl, go-away-and-come-back song", and that the lyrics concern "trios - days, people, places, ages". Is it a song about a love triangle? Or something else? The early 1980s were, after all, something of a bleak time for the singer and lyricist, who was battling with a hard-living lifestyle, conflicting emotions and a lot of work responsibilities.

"I think I've come through my mid-life crisis," Smith told Smash Hits in July 1985. "It was the same as anybody's - about growing up. The worst part was getting close to [the age of] 25 because I'd always convinced myself that I'd be dead by then. It was a romantic idea but I had it for so long that it became truth. I even had the date and everything - February 14th last year.

"I used to have this recurring dream that I was falling through a window and I could feel all the glass going into me. It was only when I got into bed that night that I thought 'Bastards!' It didn't come true. I was quite disappointed in a way."

Attempting to break out of his negative mood Smith decided to take stock of his life and work. "Realising I had outgrown a lot of my musical prejudices was a big part of the change," he wrote in the sleeve notes to the reissue of the song's parent album The Head On The Door. "The demo of Inbetween Days is a good example of this. Up until then, I’d always thought of the acoustic guitar as a bit of a hippy instrument, not really something The Cure should use... But now I was determined to explore every possibility.”

Robert Smith (The Cure) Playing 'In Between Days' Solo - 1985 | 1986 'Staring At The Sea' VHS 🇬🇧

Behind the scenes, In Between Days signalled the start of a new phase in The Cure's career; one that would see them become one of the biggest alternative acts in the world. With the release of the The Head On The Door, The Cure's musical palette would broaden - and so would their appeal.

The band, which had been operating in one form or another since late 1976, had moved from adolescent punk to sophisticated new wave to pioneering gothic rock, issuing three gloomy but influential albums - Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982). However, a relentless schedule of touring this very downbeat material had taken its toll.

At the end of the Pornography tour in June 1982, the relationship between Smith and bassist Simon Gallup was at an all-time low. Robert later told The Face magazine: "We fell out because I thought he'd changed to much. He started pretending to be someone else I didn't really like. He thought I was being very selfish and ignoring everyone, which I probably was."

Smith was enlisted to join Siouxsie & The Banshees when their guitarist John McGeoch suddenly quit for health reasons, but Fiction Records boss Chris Parry kept niggling at Robert to keep the Cure's name alive.

To explore the possibilities, Smith recorded three one-off "fantasy" singles: Let's Go To Bed (November 1982), The Walk (July 1983) and The Love Cats (October 1983). Without Gallup in the band any more, The Cure was down to the core of Smith and drummer-turned-keyboard player Lol Tolhurst. The Walk got duo onto Top Of The Pops; The Love Cats got them into the Top 10.

Despite still being the official guitarist with the Banshees, Smith decided to make a full-length album as The Cure at the same time. This plan came undone when Robert found himself recording the Banshees' album Hyaena in London during the day and working on the new Cure album The Top through the night in a studio in Reading.

The stress of being in two bands at the same time soon caught up with the singer. After a lengthy European tour with The Cure, the musician was severely run down - so he bailed on the Banshees at the end of May 1984.

As the year wore on, the Cure's line-up remained in a state of flux. Original Cure guitarist Porl Thompson had been welcomed back into the fold, while drummer Andy Anderson was fired after some erratic behaviour on tour. By the end of 1984, bassist Phil Thornalley had gone back to his day job as a record producer and Boris Williams was taken on as The Cure's drummer - a role he'd keep for the next decade.

Without a full time bass player, it seemed like the final piece of the jigsaw was about to fall into place. It was time to make amends with Simon Gallup.

Smith told The Face: "After about 18 months of not seeing him, I thought, 'This is silly I can't not like him anymore', so one night I went to this pub where we all used to drink and I knew he'd be in there. I just walked up to him and started talking."

The singer invited Gallup to listen to his new demos - and the bassist was eased back into The Cure over a number of weeks. While the songs on the resulting album, The Head On The Door, were all credited to Smith alone, the band had interpreted his demos in a surprisingly fresh new way. It was the start of a successful era for the group, giving them the first in an unbroken run of seven Top 10 LPs.

For a great many fans, The Head On The Door was the ideal jumping-on point, the perfect mix of accessible material and the "old" Cure style. Alongside the quirky pop of tunes like Six Different Ways and Close To Me were deeper, more emotional tracks like Kyoto Song and Sinking.

Over the next seven years, the band would issue a series of albums that built their considerable fanbase across Europe and North America: Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (May 1987), the classic Disintegration (May 1989) and their first British Number 1 album Wish (April 1992)

"Two years ago I thought I'd have stopped being in a band by now" Smith told Record Mirror in September 1985. "But now we've got Simon back in the band, I feel like I did in the early days.

"If I wasn't in a band I'd start The Cure up now because I still detest the people in the Top 10 as much as I did when we started."