Cyndi Lauper didn’t plan to write “Time after Time”at all. The New York-raised singer had already left the recording studio after — she thought — completing her first solo album, She’s So Unusual. Released in 1983, it went on to produce four top-five singles, and a Grammy in 1984 for best new artist. But before any of that, Lauper’s producer reckoned the album was coming in one number short, and could she please turn in another track?
She and her co-writer, keyboardist Rob Hyman, returned to the studio. Lauper flicked through a TV guide hoping that some title or other might jump out and kickstart a new song. One of them did: a listing for Time after Time, a 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, who has hijacked his time machine.
Lauper and Hyman dispensed with the film's plot, coming up instead with a 1980s-defining romantic ballad that distilled the contradictory emotions of an unwinding relationship into four minutes of brilliantly conceived narrative pop. Here, a young woman moves on — not dumped — from a relationship that she still treasures: “If you’re lost you can look — and you will find me / time after time / if you fall I will catch you, I’ll be waiting, time after time.”
Her record label wanted “Time After Time” as the album’s lead single, but Lauper feared being typecast as a balladeer. The proto-girl power anthem “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was released instead, catapulting Lauper into the charts and all over MTV. “Time After Time” and its semi-autobiographical video followed.
Lauper was perfect for the early years of MTV, or perhaps MTV was perfect for her. She wore her hair wild and crimson, or pink, or purple; her clothes were a mad era-hopping thrift store explosion of colour and defiant mismatch that didn’t need a fat wallet and a thin body. In 1984 she told Rolling Stone magazine: “People used throw rocks at me for my clothes. Now they wanna know where I buy them.”
Confident and iconoclastic, Lauper influenced a line of female singers, from Madonna to Alanis Morissette and Britney Spears. But it was about more than her look. She was a genuine musician, with a four-octave range that she sometimes deployed in seemingly casual near-cartoonish ways. The lyrics to “Time After Time” border on the poetic, and Lauper’s rhythmically delivered post-punk vocals, fitting with sparse drums, swirly keyboards and a light, slow-reggae beat, combine into a powerfully affecting force.
Artists queued up to perform the song, its dozens of covers ranging from Paul Anka’sbrassy swing band account to versions by Pink, Leona Lewis, and the London Symphony Orchestra. But the one that Lauper said made her happiest came from jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, whose then-wife, the actress Cicely Tyson, suggested the song to him.
Davis had lit on the idea of an album of covers of contemporary pop ballads, with arrangements by long-time associate Gil Evans. Davis recorded demos of 40 ballad covers, including “Time After Time”. But the project collapsed when he broke his hip and then succumbed to pneumonia.
By the time Davis returned to the recording studio his focus had radically shifted — 1985’s album You’re Under Arrest was an eclectic mix of pop, politics, heavy funk and reggae. But “Time After Time”was retained, becoming one of the first successful jazz covers of a new-wave pop song, foreshadowing a practice that took 20 years to become commonplace.
Davis’s wistful instrumental interpretation captured the bittersweet mood of Lauper’s lyrics. It became a repertory highlight through to his final public performance, at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1991. The Complete Miles Davis at Montreux 1973-1991 CD set, showcasing his appearances at the Swiss festival, contains no fewer than nine versions of “Time after Time”, none of them under eight minutes long.
Lauper’s hit now stands as a kind of aural shorthand for the 1980s. The Netflix series Stranger Things concluded its second season with a school dance: it’s 1984 and — of course — “Time after Time” is the smoochy number.
But Stranger Things is not the only weird-goings-on outing for the Lauper classic. The original Malcolm McDowell film was remade as a television series and shown in the US in 2017, until ABC axed it mid-run. A plaintive Change.Org online petition currently pleads for Netflix to pick the season up and revive it — perhaps with a view to making it through to the end of the song, for the series uses lines from the titular single as episode titles. It was dumped at episode five: “Picture fades”.
Has anyone bettered Cyndi Lauper’s version of ‘Time After Time’? Do you have particular memories of the song? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Portrait, UMC (Universal Music Catalogue), Columbia, Columbia
Picture credit: Bill Marino/Sygma via Getty Images