The Cure – Close To Me

A wardrobe on Beachy Head, and brass the album left off

On 13 September 1985 Fiction released Close to Me, the second single from The Head on the Door. The album had come out in August, recorded at Angel Recording Studios in London and produced by Robert Smith and Dave Allen. Smith sang. Simon Gallup played bass. Porl Thompson played guitar and keyboards. Boris Williams played drums. Lol Tolhurst, who had been the drummer on the early records, played keyboards. The B-side of the single was Stop Dead.

On the album the song is a small, close arrangement: a keyboard figure played with one finger, a bass that stays simple, Williams keeping a light beat, and Smith singing as if he is in the next room. The single is not that recording left as it was. A brass section, the British swing band Rent Party, plays a line taken from an old New Orleans funeral march. That brass is not on the album version. The 7-inch also opens with the creak of a door, a sound taken from the video. Listeners who know the song from the radio are often hearing the brass version, not the album track.

Tim Pope directed the video at Beachy Head, on the Sussex cliffs. The whole band is inside a wardrobe at the edge. They do not play their real instruments. Williams claps the beat. Tolhurst holds a tiny keyboard. Thompson, on the top shelf, plucks a comb for the high notes. Gallup looks tied up. Pope later said there was a light bulb in Gallup’s mouth so his face would seem lit from inside, and the cloth hid the wire. Smith comes from the back of the cupboard with finger puppets. When he shakes them, the others hit the walls. The wardrobe tips off the cliff and fills with water while they keep moving.