Pretty in Pink

On the surface, this song is a tender ode to a lovely girl, but a closer listen to the lyric reveals this is not the case: The one who insists he was the first in the line Is the last to remember her name In a Songfacts interview with lead singer Richard Butler, he explained the meaning: "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."

The song was first released in 1981 and included on the group's second album, Talk Talk Talk. It was revived in 1986 when the director John Hughes named his 1986 movie after this song. Starring Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, and Jon Cryer, Hughes wrote the plot around the song's lyrics, but according to The Psychedelic Furs, he muffed the meaning. Richard Butler recalled to Mojo how this song got co-opted onto the Pretty In Pink movie: "We did the song and were very pleased with it. It wasn't that we were disappointed it wasn't a hit to begin with - at that point, we didn't know what was going on, or whether any of them were singles or whether we were that kind of band. A few years later, Molly Ringwald took it to John Hughes and said, 'I love this song, we should use it for a movie.' He took it away, listened to it, and wrote Pretty In Pink, which totally got the whole thing wrong. It was nothing like the spirit of the song at all. It's really hard to say whether it was damaging for us. I suppose we got tied in with the story of the film, and if that's what people thought the story was about, and didn't look much further than that, they were getting a very false impression." It's possible John Hughes heard this song from Molly Ringwald, but a more likely connection is Keith Forsey, who co-wrote the song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" for Hughes' 1985 movie The Breakfast Club. Forsey produced the 1984 Psychedelic Furs album Mirror Moves.

The group recorded a new version of this song for the movie with producer Chris Kimsey. This version was re-released with the film in 1986 - five years after the original. When the song was first issued in 1981, it hit #43 in the UK and did not chart in the US; the re-release charted at #41 US and #18 UK, but its American impact was far greater as the movie became a classic of the generation. This new version was mixed to make the song more appealing to a pop music audience. The original includes much rougher, edgier guitar riffs, and the closing, barely audible lines are muttered by Furs lead singer Richard Butler as though he's ruminating in stream-of-consciousness style about Caroline while he's in a drunken haze. The remix has more polished, more upbeats riffs, and while the same lines are included in the trail-off, a louder riff plays over them to make them even less audible and make the overall effect more pop and less bitter.