“Charlotte Sometimes” by The Cure

"Charlotte Sometimes" arrived in 1981 as a stand-alone single, the Cure's first move after their third album, Faith, and it's the sound of the band drifting deeper into the fog. Both sides of the single took their titles and much of their words from Penelope Farmer's 1969 children's novel of the same name, a borrowing Robert Smith later owned up to without fuss: images of faces and voices blurring into one, and of a lonely bedtime under harsh light, come almost straight off the page.

Mike Hedges produced it with Smith at his own Playground Studios. Smith's guitar and keyboards shimmer and smear, Simon Gallup's bass carries the tune's weight, and Lol Tolhurst keeps a steady, trancelike tread beneath a vocal that sounds half asleep and half haunted.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.