The Cure “Charlotte Sometimes” 1981. 12″ single, Fiction Records. The Cure released “Charlotte Sometimes” as a non-album single about six months after the Faith LP and it went to #44 in the UK. The Cure included it on their 1986 comp Staring at the Sea: The Singles, an album that I listened to rather incessantly in the 80′s (this 12″ is a very recent acquisition, picked up at record store in London). Robert Smith’s inspiration for the song was the “children’s novel by English writer Penelope Farmer, published in 1969. According to 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.” [Wiki] “Charlotte Sometimes” is a great representation of my favorite Cure music: the early stuff. Rich, dark and gothic. Swirly. Mysterious. “Splintered in Her Head” is also dark, but more ominous with whispers of industrial goth. On the 12″ single, both of those tracks appear on the A side; side B is a very long live version of “Faith” which The Cure recorded in Australia in 1981.