The Psychedelic Furs
Pretty in Pink
We’ve all come to associate the song “Pretty in Pink” with the film of the same name starring Molly Ringwald. The Psychadelic Furs, the band who sang the song, admitted that the phrase “pretty in pink” is a euphemism for being pretty naked.
The song was about a girl who kinda sleeps around, and thinks it’s really cool and thinks everybody really likes her, but they really don’t,” vocalist Richard Butler told Mojo Magazine in 2010 “She’s just being used. It’s quite scathing. The song is about a girl who sleeps around a lot and thinks that she's popular because of it. It makes her feel empowered somehow and popular, and in fact, the people that she's sleeping with are laughing about her behind her back and talking about her."
The song was first released in 1981 and included on the group's second album, Talk Talk Talk. It was revived in 1986 when the director John Hughes named his 1986 movie after this song. Starring Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, and Jon Cryer, Hughes wrote the plot around the song's lyrics, but according to The Psychedelic Furs, he muffed the meaning.
Richard Butler recalled to Mojo how this song got co-opted onto the Pretty In Pink movie: "We did the song and were very pleased with it. It wasn't that we were disappointed it wasn't a hit to begin with - at that point, we didn't know what was going on, or whether any of them were singles or whether we were that kind of band. A few years later, Molly Ringwald took it to John Hughes and said, 'I love this song, we should use it for a movie.' He took it away, listened to it, and wrote Pretty In Pink, which totally got the whole thing wrong. It was nothing like the spirit of the song at all. It's really hard to say whether it was damaging for us. I suppose we got tied in with the story of the film, and if that's what people thought the story was about, and didn't look much further than that, they were getting a very false impression."