Just Like Heaven
by The Cure
- 152
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 43
- Danceability
- 8
- Acousticness
To gather material for Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Robert Smith made himself write music for 15 days of every month. The chords and melody of "Just Like Heaven" came out of that routine. He took an instrumental demo to the Cure's sessions in southern France, where drummer Boris Williams sped it up and added an opening drum fill. That fill gave Smith the idea of bringing in each instrument one at a time.
When the French television show Les Enfants du Rock asked for a theme, Smith offered the instrumental. He reasoned that millions of Europeans would know the music before it was released. He finished the lyrics after the sessions moved to Studio Miraval in Provence. The band completed the song quickly during a two-week stay there. The words came from a trip to Beachy Head with his future wife, Mary Poole. The video, directed by Tim Pope, looks like it was shot there, but most of it was filmed at Pinewood Studios in October 1987, using cliff and sea footage from the 1985 video for "Close to Me". Poole dances with Smith in it.
The single reached number 29 in the UK. In December 1987 it hit number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, the Cure's first American hit.
Just Like Heaven runs at 152 BPM, the tempo of hard techno, punk and fast rock. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.58 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 395 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.