Boys Don’t Cry

Released June 12, 1979. Exactly 47 years ago today, Fiction Records pressed the first copies of a single that would go nowhere. “Boys Don’t Cry” sold modestly, missed the charts entirely, and by most commercial measures did not exist. Robert Smith was 19. The Cure had released their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, just five weeks earlier, to indifferent reviews and minimal sales. A follow-up single that also failed would not have been surprising. Most bands at that stage simply stop.

The subject is a man performing composure he does not feel. He pretends not to care. He walks away. He does not let himself cry. The title of the song is both the social command the narrator obeys and the trap Smith was examining: the instruction English culture hands boys early, and the damage it does over time. Smith did not endorse the instruction. He wrote it down so you could hear how it worked.

In 1986, Fiction reissued the song with a new vocal take and a new mix, promoted by a video that became the image most people carry: three children miming the words in a living room while Smith, Lol Tolhurst, and Andy Anderson appear as their shadows behind a curtain, eyes painted with fluorescent red. The video is strange in the right way. That re-release charted. That version is the one the world kept. The original 1979 pressing, which had been sitting unremarkably for seven years, was suddenly a discovery and a classic at the same time.

Smith later called the song “naive to the point of insanity.” He said it standing at Glastonbury in 2019, watching LGBTQ+ flags go up across the crowd when the opening chords hit, and understood why he had written it in the first place. A song that failed to chart in 1979, reissued in 1986, still moving a field of people four decades after that. The naivety, it turns out, was the whole point.