The Story Behind The Song: ‘In Between Days’ by The Cure

Posted On September 28, 2025September 28, 2025

As the lead single from their 1985 album The Head on the Door, ‘In Between Days’ represents a clear pivot point in the career of The Cure, even if it might have seemed like business as usual at the time, their fourth straight single to reach the UK top 20. 

Robert Smith was only 25 at the time of the song’s release, but he’d been in the “biz” for his entire adult life and, despite a substantial amount of success across five previous albums, he was coming to a lot of fresh realisations about himself and his creative process. The less famous among us would simply call this “maturing into adulthood.”

“Realising I had outgrown a lot of my musical prejudices was a big part of the change,” Smith later wrote in the liner notes to a reissue of The Head On The Door. “The demo of ‘In Between Days’ is a good example of this. Up until then, I’d always thought of the acoustic guitar as a bit of a hippy instrument, not really something The Cure should use… But now I was determined to explore every possibility.”

Smith wrote most of the lyrics for the songs on The Head on the Door while The Cure were touring America in 1984. At the time, the band had yet to figure the US market out, still pigeon-holed into a college radio and goth-adjacent cul-de-sac. But Smith had the sense that a breakout was inevitable, and after signing with Elektra Records, he set forth to continue the band’s evolution beyond the gloomier limitations of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography.

Sure enough, the bouncy ‘In Between Days’ notched The Cure its first chart hit in America, albeit with a meagre peak position of number 99. More importantly, its accompanying music video, directed by Tim Pope, introduced the uninitiated to a band that seemed quite playful and self-deprecating rather than morbid and posturing.

The lyrics, which Smith has described as “a very obvious boy/girl, go-away-and-come-back” story, betray the happy vibes of the swirling keyboard and strumming guitar a little bit. It is, after all, a standard issue Cure song about regret, self-pity, and romantic yearning. “Go on, go on, just walk away,” Smith sings at his beloved, clearly hoping she’ll do the opposite. “Go on, go on, your choice is made.”

Producing the song and most of The Head on the Door album himself, with an expanded ensemble thanks to the returns of guitarists Porl Thompson and Simon Gallup, Smith aimed to liberate himself from any further concerns about outside expectations from the dreaded music press.

“After we did Seventeen Seconds,” Smith told the Daily Illini newspaper in Illinois in 1985, “People in the music press and in general were like, ‘There goes a great pop band playing crap. And then after we did ‘Let’s Go to Bed’, these same people were saying, ‘There goes a great gloom band selling out’…. The music press is really very shitty in England. I think about 90% of the people that interview me in England are assholes. But that’s OK, ‘cause about 90% of the people that meet me think I’m an asshole, too.”

Basically, ‘In Between Days’ was the single where Smith and The Cure finally broke free of their genre restraints and found a happy medium. The balance of doom and pop that would keep them not only critically and commercially viable, but happier in their own shoes.

“I think that now with this album and on this tour, things are much more balanced,” Smith said after playing a sold-out gig in Chicago on the ‘85 US tour—during which fans surprised the band by dancing happily through much of their set.

Concluding, “There was a time we used to just go at each other’s throats, but now we get along… We’re also starting to really think about our audience for the first time. We try to give the crowd a combination of what they want and what they would never expect.”

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