The Psychedelic Furs‘ frontman has revealed that John Hughes “got the wrong end of the stick” about his band’s 1981 single, which inspired a 1986 rom-com of the same name.

Richard Butler said that the US filmmaker took the meaning literally, and centred his Molly Ringwald-starring “brat pack” film Pretty In Pink on a beautiful girl in a pink dress. But Butler was using a metaphor for describing a naked, wayward girl.

“God rest his soul,” Butler told Sky News, ‘[Hughes] kind of got the wrong end of the stick with that song.

“He made it to be literally about a girl that was wearing a pink dress and it wasn’t about that at all. It was about a rather unfortunate girl. Me saying ‘pretty in pink’ meant somebody who is naked. It was a metaphor…given that, the movie did us a lot of good.”

Butler added that Hughes’ decision to write a movie off the back of the London band’s song was “a double-edged sword”.

“It increased our audience but a lot of people that were the darker set of our fans thought: ‘It’s a brat pack movie scene now and we are not really into that,’” he said.

Pretty In Pink is recognised as one of the “brat pack” films alongside The Breakfast Club (1985).

Butler was, however, more complimentary about the use of his band’s 1982 song ‘Love My Way’ in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) starring Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer.

“I thought that was great,” Butler told the publication. “It could have almost been a long-form video for that song in terms of paralleling the meaning of it.”

In other news, The Psychedelic Furs released ‘Made Of Rain’, their first studio album in nearly 30 years, last month.