Charlotte Sometimes (song)
1981 single by The Cure
"Charlotte Sometimes" is a song by English rock band the Cure, recorded at producer Mike Hedges' Playground Studios and released as a non-album single on 9 October 1981 by Polydor Records, following the band's third studio album Faith. The titles and lyrics to both sides were based on the book Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer.
The single reached No. 44 on the UK Singles Chart.
Content
The song "Charlotte Sometimes" was based on Charlotte Sometimes, a children's novel by English writer Penelope Farmer, published in 1969. According to Cure frontman Robert Smith: "There have been a lot of literary influences through the years; 'Charlotte Sometimes' was a very straight lift." Many lines in the song reflect lines directly from the book, such as "All the faces/All the voices blur/Change to one face/Change to one voice" from the song, compared to the first sentence of the book, "By bedtime all the faces, the voices, had blurred for Charlotte to one face, one voice". The song continues: "Prepare yourself for bed/The light seems bright/And glares on white walls", and the book continues, "She prepared herself for bed... The light seemed too bright for them, glaring on white walls". The title of the single's B-side, "Splintered in Her Head", was also taken from a line in the novel. The Cure later released another song based on the novel, "The Empty World", from their 1984 album The Top.
“Charlotte Sometimes (song)” enters the record as 1981 single by The Cure. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Charlotte, Sometimes and song can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1910089. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1969 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charlotte Sometimes (song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.