50 years into their career, it can be argued that the Cure have never been a hotter commodity.
Pop giga-star of the moment Olivia Rodrigo has gone far beyond merely citing the goth-rock pioneers as a major influence – she brought Cure frontman Robert Smith out onstage for a pair of duets at her triumphant Glastonbury headlining set last year, and recruited Smith for a guest appearance on What's Wrong with Me, a banner track from her chart-topping new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.
One of the tunes Rodrigo and Smith sang together onstage at Glastonbury was Friday I'm in Love, the swooning charmer of a love song that became the band's biggest hit upon its release in 1992.
Proving beyond doubt that the band's range extended far beyond dense, brooding epics, it remains the Cure song to reference for those who know of only the band's name and maybe their frontman's inimitable hairdo – as Smith told Mojo in 2004, “To taxi drivers, I'm the bloke that sings Friday I'm in Love.”
Sometimes, it seems like the music-biopic-friendly, it-came-out-of-the-sky stories behind classic songs seem improbable, but Friday I'm in Love indeed sprang from one of those sudden flashes of inspiration.
Asked about the genesis of the song in a 2004 interview with Guitar World, Smith recalled, “We were recording the [1992] Wish album in the Manor studio, which is about an hour west of London. I remember driving home one Friday afternoon to have the weekend off. And I started to think of this really great chord sequence.
“I was about 20 minutes away from the studio. So I turned around, went back to the studio and everyone was still there. We actually recorded it that Friday night.”
When the band first laid the song down, Smith felt the guitar tracks needed a bit more jangle to fit how upbeat it was (“It's about that Friday afternoon feeling,” he told GW at the time).
Some studio trickery was just the fix.
“It was recorded in D, and then the tape was sped up slightly using the Varispeed control, so it's kind of between D and D sharp,” Smith told GW.
“It didn't seem to sparkle enough the way we recorded it, so [producer] Dave Allen and I thought, ‘What if we just ramp the tape up a little with the Varispeed?’ Suddenly, everything got brighter and sounded a little more sparkly and poppy.”
Smith confirmed that – though he primarily played a Gibson Chet Atkins model on the Wish album – the hit single's solos were played on an ES-335.
Asked by Guitar World who was playing on each of the song's guitar tracks, Smith explained, “One of them is Pearl [Thompson, the Cure's then-second guitarist], and the rest are me.
“I know I played the acoustic, the solos, and the guitar that plays that signature riff. There's a lot more of me on Cure albums than people probably expect.”
