Songfacts®:

• A track from the first Bangles album, "Dover Beach" was written by their guitarists, Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson, and sung by Hoffs. The beach in question is the one at the bottom of the white cliffs in Dover, England, exalted in the 1940 song "The White Cliffs Of Dover."
  
  There is no mention of Dover in the lyric: the title comes from the poem Dover Beach, published by the Englishman Matthew Arnold in 1867.
• In a Songfacts interview with Vicki Peterson, she said: "Susanna and I were slightly geekish about opening the Norton Anthology of English Literature, flipping through that and going, 'Hey, this is a great line.' She had come across the Matthew Arnold poem Dover Beach at some point and that inspired that song, that idea of applying the fantasy of escape and the reality of what that would really mean. It was a really fun time to just mine the world for ideas."
• This is one of the songs the Bangles released when they were part of the Paisley Underground, a Los Angles movement that included similar-minded bands like The Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade. The Bangles were the only Paisley act to hit it big, and they hit it very big. Their next album shot them to stardom with the hits "Manic Monday" and "Walk Like An Egyptian." They made just one more album before breaking up in 1989, not because of flagging sales, but because of overwhelming pressure. "Dover Beach" is one of their few songs the was never a single to appear in their setlists before their split and after their 1998 return.