Songfacts®:

• Like many Cure songs, this one finds lead singer Robert Smith singing about loneliness and despair. In the song, it's Saturday night and he's alone in his kitchen listening to a leaky faucet while he waits for the phone to ring. He wrote the tune at the age of 16 one miserable evening while sitting at the kitchen table feeling "utterly morose" and drinking his father's homemade beer.
• Early in their career, The Cure were trying to get a record deal. In the liner notes to the deluxe edition of Three Imaginary Boys, they explain that Chris Parry, the head of the record company Fiction, was doing paperwork while listening to some demos he received when he heard the "Drip Drip Drip Drip Drip Drip..." coming from this song and thought it sounded quite nice. He then found the band and gave them a record deal. Parry also produced the album. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Ali - Wine, CA
• The performance clip for this tune was the band's first music video. Directed by Piers Bedford, it gave us our first glimpse of a rather clean-cut Robert Smith before he developed his signature spooky style.
• Massive Attack sampled this on their 1998 cover of The Paragons' "Man Next Door."
• This was used in the movies C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) and Awaydays (2009).
• To tie in with the album title, Three Imaginary Boys, the band didn't appear on the cover but instead were represented by three household objects: a lamp, a small fridge, and a vacuum cleaner. Even the song titles were "imaginary," with various images used in place of a traditional track list. The band hated the idea, but their record label got the final say.