Friday I'm in Love

The video for "Friday I'm in Love" won the European Viewer's Choice for Best Music Video at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. Directed by Tim Pope, it paid homage to the French silent filmmaker Georges Méliès, borrowing characters from his film The Eclipse, or the Courtship of the Sun and Moon. The band messed about with props and costumes on a soundstage while extras wandered through and eventually wrecked the set. Pope himself appeared at the start, riding a rocking horse and shouting directions through a plastic megaphone after inhaling helium from a balloon. The final shot showed bassist Simon Gallup in a bridal veil, crouching toward the camera with champagne in hand.

The single had come out in the United Kingdom on 15 May 1992 through Fiction Records, the second release from the album Wish. Unusually, two of its formats arrived on a Friday rather than a Monday, so it entered the UK chart at number 31 before climbing to number six in its third week. In the United States it reached number 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent four weeks at the top of the Modern Rock Tracks chart.

Robert Smith wrote the song as a slower number than the version that was finally released. He grew paranoid that he had stolen the chord progression, phoning everyone he could think of to play it to them. Nobody recognised it. A mixing mistake also left the record sounding a quarter-tone higher than intended, because Smith forgot to switch off the vari-speed function on the multi-track recorder.