Cure

Between the late Seventies and the early Eighties, the Cure helped redefine the language of post-punk, standing alongside bands like Joy Division, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees in shaping a new musical aesthetic, darker, more introspective and experimental. A decisive role in this transformation was played by Robert Smith himself, who in 1979 temporarily joined the Banshees as guitarist during the British band's UK tour, stepping in for John McKay.
That experience profoundly changed his artistic outlook. "The first night on stage with the Banshees I was blown away by the sheer power of that kind of music. It was completely different from what we were doing with the Cure. Up until then I wanted us to be a sort of Buzzcocks or Elvis Costello, the Beatles of punk. But playing with the Banshees completely changed my perspective," Smith recalled.

After the albums “Seventeen Seconds” (1980) and “Faith” (1981), key works in defining the band's gothic sound, Robert Smith and co. released a standalone single titled “Charlotte Sometimes”. The track, released in October 1981, is a tribute to one of Robert Smith's favourite novels: “Charlotte Sometimes”, written by Penelope Farmer and published in 1969 (here's the Italian edition, Edizioni Agenzia Alcatraz, translated by Stefania Renzetti).
As the Cure's musical atmospheres grew progressively darker, Smith's lyrics also became increasingly influenced by literature. Rather than telling linear stories, the singer began exploring dreams, shifting identities, memory and reality, finding in books the same sense of emotional ambiguity he sought in music. Among his key literary touchstones were Albert Camus, the inspiration behind “Killing An Arab”, and Franz Kafka, but Penelope Farmer's novel held a special place.
The story follows Charlotte, a young girl who, after her first night at boarding school, wakes up forty years in the past and in the body of another girl. The theme of the double, of a split identity and the blurring of past and present, struck Smith deeply, and he even worked into the lyrics phrases lifted almost verbatim from the novel's opening lines. The book's opening words, “By bedtime all the faces, the voices, had blurred for Charlotte to one face, one voice”, become in the song: “All the faces/ All the voices blur/ Change to one face/ Change to one voice”.

Robert Smith has repeatedly listed “Charlotte Sometimes” among his favourite books, explaining the reason for his bond with that work: “I was obsessed with 'Charlotte Sometimes', with that idea of time collapsing, of duality, of identity problems and the suffering that comes with it”. He then added: “Charlotte, after her first night at boarding school, wakes up forty years in the past and in someone else's body. That ties into the theme of twins, on which Penelope Farmer wrote a fascinating book, Two or the Book of Twins and Doubles. I always dreamed of having a twin, someone who can't be fooled, who is always there, like a mirror”.

The novel's protagonist is Charlotte Makepeace, a young girl who arrives at an English boarding school in 1958. On her first night she falls asleep in the dormitory and, upon waking, suddenly finds herself in 1918. The world around her has changed: the First World War is underway, her schoolmates are different, and everyone calls her Clare. The following day, however, Charlotte wakes up again in 1958. From that moment on, she keeps drifting back and forth between the two eras every night.

As the days go by, Charlotte realises that she and Clare are somehow swapping places in time. Since she has only just arrived at the school, no one in 1958 notices anything odd, while in 1918 it is Emily, Clare's sister, who immediately senses that this girl is not really her sister. Charlotte cannot explain what is happening, but suspects it all has something to do with the bed she and Clare share in their respective eras.
The balance is broken when, during one of her stays in 1918, Charlotte is moved to another dormitory. Deprived of the bed that served as the mysterious link between past and present, she risks being trapped in the wrong time for good. This sets off a chain of increasingly unsettling events, forcing her to question her own identity and the very meaning of her relationship with Clare.

More than just a time-travel novel, "Charlotte Sometimes" uses the fantastical device to tell the story of the identity crisis typical of adolescence. The constant shifting between two eras becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of recognizing oneself, the fear of losing one's own personality, and the delicate passage from childhood to adulthood. Penelope Farmer thus builds a story suspended between dream and reality, able to combine fairy-tale atmospheres with deep psychological unease, turning time travel into an intimate exploration of growing up and the search for identity.

More than forty years after its release, "Charlotte Sometimes" remains one of the most evocative episodes of the early period of the Cure. A danceable, romantic track in which Smith seems to identify, not for the last time, with a sweet, dreamlike feminine ideal, the only lifeline in the face of the genuine anguish that seems to grip him. A perfect example of how the Cure's frontman managed to fuse literature and music into a unique poetic universe, suspended between dream, melancholy and unease.

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19/07/2026