The Cure – Just Like Heaven

Miraval, 1987, the single that reached the American top 40

Fiction released Just Like Heaven on 5 October 1987, the third single from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the album that had come out in May. The song was recorded at Studio Miraval, in the south of France, during the 1987 sessions, and produced by David M. Allen and Robert Smith. Smith sang, played guitar and keyboards. Simon Gallup played bass. Porl Thompson played guitar and keyboards. Boris Williams played drums. Lol Tolhurst played keyboards. The lyric is Smith’s. The music is credited to the five of them. The B-side of the 7-inch was Snow in Summer.

Smith wrote the words about a night with Mary Poole, the woman he married in 1988. They had gone to the coast. The song puts that night into a bright, fast record: Williams’s drums push, the guitar line is open, and the keyboard answers in short figures. It is the pop side of a band that, two years earlier, had still been known for slower, darker singles. Tim Pope’s video takes the story back to Beachy Head. Smith is on the cliff. The band is behind him. Poole appears in the clip because she was the person in the lyric.

The single entered the British chart on 17 October 1987 at number 35 and peaked at number 29 the following week. It stayed five weeks. In the United States it reached number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 for one week in December 1987. That was the Cure’s first top 40 placing there. In Between Days, in 1985, had stopped at number 99. The same single also reached number 15 in Ireland and number 33 in France. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me was the band’s highest American album to that point.