Song of the Day 3/8: Psychedelic Furs, “Pretty in Pink”
Hey, Millennials, wanna feel old? The classic John Hughes Brat Pack movie, “Pretty in Pink,” was the No. 1 box office film 40 years ago last week. You’re welcome.
As everyone knows, the Psychedelic Furs song was the inspiration for the film. And as any fan of the song knows, Hughes totally misinterpreted it. Psy Furs’ singer and lyricist Richard Butler said years later, after Hughes’ death in 2009,
“John Hughes, God rest his soul, he 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. … Me saying ‘pretty in pink’ meant somebody who is naked. It was a metaphor.
The song is about a girl who sleeps around a lot and thinks that she’s popular because of it. It makes her feel empowered somehow and popular, and in fact, the people that she’s sleeping with are laughing about her behind her back and talking about her.
Given that, the movie did us a lot of good. It was a double-edged sword because 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.’
Released as a single from the band’s 1981 album “Talk Talk Talk,” it only reached No. 46 in the UK and didn’t chart at all in the U.S. But it caught the ear of Hughes’ favorite actress, Molly Ringwald, who told Hughes he should use it in a movie.
Fans of the film probably know that its conclusion, with poor girl Ringwald dating rich kid Andrew McCarthy, wasn’t the intended ending. In Hughes’ original script she dances with her dorky friend Duckie, played by Jon Cryer. But when test audiences saw it, they actually booed – they wanted the Cinderella story to end the way “Cinderella” does – so Hughes rewrote it.
In the same vein, the Psy Furs were asked to re-record the song in a more pop-oriented arrangement. The new version performed better, making it to No. 18 in the UK and just missing the U.S. Top 40 at No. 41. As with the script, it’s not as good as the original.
