Japanese Whispers

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One of the most iconic bands of the '80s goth/dark scene (and probably one of the most iconic bands overall), The Cure's career has suffered a bit for having absolutely amazing singles within sometimes merely just good albums (with a few exceptions, of course - mainly in the early and mid years of their career). Despite it all, they have been extremely influential and theirs is one of the most devoted and certainly one of the most 'peculiar' fan bases (palm tree bushy haircuts, anyone?). They've been around for 30 years and although their last two albums have been very patchy and not as relevant as before, their '80s legacy still sounds loud and clear today." - dmpulp

The end result was a more effervescent synth-based pop with cheeky nods to classic jazz. The creative gamble paid off in the end. Japanese Whispers was the first Cure album to enter the US Billboard charts in early 1984 and opened the gate for The Cure to explore wider pastures.

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In the video for The Lovecats, on the doublebass is Phil Thornalley, who produced The Cure’s Pornography. Thornalley would perform live with The Cure off and on until Simon Gallup rejoined the band for 1985’s The Head on The Door. Andy Anderson would round up the live lineup on drums, and also contributed to The Glove’s Blue Sunshine LP. Here is some footage of the The Cure in Paris recording Lovecats I suggested that we were going to do something that’s kind of like a Disney take on jazz, based around the Aristocats. And suddenly everything we did started to sell.” Their crossover success was solidified by their 1986 singles compilation Staring at the Sea: The Singles, and by their first US top 40 single, " Just Like Heaven / Snow in Summer", still one of the band's most popular tunes, which also appeared on the successful 1987 double album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. The major factor in which this release points the way to later developments, is an increasing in expressive range, both instrumentally and especially vocally. In particular, listen to Smith's vocals on the three wholly new songs, The Upstairs Room, The Dream and The Walk - while often typically melancholy, anguished, even despairing at times, he's also more energized, resonant and thoroughly engaging with a playful and whimsical element thrown in - his delivery is beautifully nuanced, dynamically and tonally wide-ranging without ever being overblown, with every syllable and word combination given emotional weight and meaning even during the most upbeat moments, complementing the ever varied and inventive synth-dominated textures beautifully, thus making even the poppiest song The Walk far more than a vapid synth-pop number. And speaking of which, the instrumental accompaniment is often wonderfully evocative with an attention to detail that's quite easy to overlook without following the lyrics - that sudden resounding keyboard swell during the line "With the first crash of thunder" and the soft and delicate sounding "The upstairs room is cool and bright" in The Upstairs Room, the synthesizer splashes accompanying "Dizzy, dizzy, dizzy" in The Dream, that floating, ringing synth line illustrating the verse starting "I kissed you in the water", the wailing counter-melody during "I passed the howling woman" and the slight oriental flavour befitting the "I saw you look like a Japanese baby" in The Walk. This is pop music yes; but all this means it's pop with depth, intelligence and substance.

After the band had imploded (and dropped down to only two permanent members) from their increasingly depressing albums Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography, upbeat pop songs like “Let’s Go To Bed”, “The Walk” and “The Lovecats” reinvented the band from gloomy doomsters to pop sensations seemingly overnight. When asked about The similarities between “The Walk” and “Blue Monday”, Robert Smith had this to say: After the fallout both psychologically and physically of Pornography, it looked unlikely that anyone would hear from the Cure ever again. Surprisingly, from 1982-1983 Robert Smith and (now keyboardist) Lol Tolhurst put out some of the catchiest singles of their career. "Let's Go to Bed," "The Walk," and "The Lovecats" were not only singles that got the Cure radio play and made them a household name, but more importantly marked the next phase in the music of the Cure, which would reach its peak with albums like Head on the Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Dropping the stripped-down darkness of Faith and Pornography, the songs on Japanese Whispers (the aforementioned singles from that era, including all the B-sides) are light, dancy, and at times jazzy. Adding new keyboard sounds, old-timey percussion, standup bass, and some damn silly lyrics rejuvenated Robert Smith and sent him on a course that would cement his role as one of the most interesting musicians to emerge from the '80s underground. Japanese Whispers is one of those rare releases when a singles collection works just as well as a standard-issue album. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Japanese Whispers is the third compilation album of Cure singles and B-sides released between Nov 1982 and Nov 1983, originally released by Fiction Records. Recorded during a transitional phase after bassist Simon Gallup left following the Pornography promo tour, Andy Anderson joined the band on drums, while former drummer Lol Tolhurst switched to keyboard duties, and Phil Thornalley played bass. The album includes Cure standbys such as Let’s Go to Bed, The Walk, and The Lovecats, as well as the fantastic b-side Just One Kiss.I tend to call this release The Fly - a gander at the cover should explain why. But that's not the title - when The Cure tied together this collection of singles and b-sides, they ( he morelike) listlessly titled it The Walk, which of course was the title of one of the singles. Which is fine. I'll call this The Fly if i want to, and you can't stop me. You know that would be a better name for it anyway. The following year, two additional (and even more successful, as it turned out) poppy singles were made available to the public - a grateful public, it seemed, with ‘The Walk’ reaching #12, and ‘The Lovecats’ faring even better, hitting an impressive #7 position in 1983 on the reformed-goths home turf. The singles marked a change of direction in The Cure’s sound, so it’s convenient then, that fans were offered an opportunity to collect the aforementioned singles (and their respective b-sides) in one, neat bundle entitled ‘Japanese Whispers’, to investigate this unassumingly important chapter in the bands eclectic catalogue. THE LOVECATS: sergegrone, jshopa, ivank79, dmpulp, JusticeShades, assasass, Anscules, musictoad, jdizzle777, dubstar, bazman, JICAMARCA, King Fahtah, Axver, mfl, metalbrain, Tairo, Altair82, sosadixon, montezuma, pczyzyk, MicrophoneFiend, ziggy32001, troutmask, CurtisLoew, Alfred Pok, steinib, Ben V, wretlinfu, jeliusbeanus, VirtualPope, kabouter, Usurping Python, SvetlanaMonsoon, ben007, Rube, bones r, sk8erboss94, Tezcatlipoca, elayblooze, flyers811, warpig01, TalkBoxist) In a 2004 interview with Rolling Stone, Smith detailed what contributed to the shift in style. “I didn’t want that side of life anymore; I wanted to do something that’s really kind of cheerful. I thought, “This isn’t going to work. No one’s ever gonna buy into this. It’s so ludicrous that I’m gonna go from a goth idol to a pop star in three easy lessons. Considerably more ear catching than The Dream, but not by enough for my hopes. It benefits from a catchy guitar hook, and that goes a ways I suppose. Ultimately that makes it respectable filler. All else I can say is that it's more guitar based than synth based.

Casbah, the cooling towers and Redgates: Things we took for granted in Sheffield that are gone forever Disintegration, released in 1989, made them almost superstars on the strength of their single " Lovesong / 2 Late", even if the album was dark and not as catchy as their previous "mainstream" albums. They tried to capitalize that success releasing the mix album Mixed Up, and an accompanying new single, " Never Enough / Harold and Joe", which showed prevailing dancefloor influences. However, even if it sold respectably, it wasn't well received. On its original release, Japanese Whispers charted in the UK Album charts on December 24 in 1983, and was the first album by the band to enter the Billboard 200 in the US in early 1984.

8 Issues

Additionally, below is an interesting interview with Robert Smith from October 17th, 1983. Recorded later on the day Play at Home was done at the Riverside, Mr. Smith discusses The Walk EP, the Banshee’s Nocturne live LP, and recording demos for The Top. A nice touch is Lol Tolhurst’s shout-out for producing Baroque Bordello and And Also the Trees. in many ways was quite an unusual year for The Cure - quite apart from what relatively few new songs they produced being strikingly different in style and sound from anything they'd previously released this decade (Let's Go to Bed and Just One Kiss from the tail end of 1982 apart), this was the first full year of their career in which no full length album was released (Smith did produce one with Steve Severin as The Glove, which is well worth a listen, but that's for another review!). The Cure were still in limbo, with Smith and Gallup, who'd quit the band in June 1982, not even on speaking terms, and without a regular drummer with Tolhurst having switched to keyboards the previous year. And Smith himself was unrelentingly busy with a number of side projects, including recording and touring with Siouxsie and the Banshees, his studio work with The Glove and a few other smaller assignments that added up to a hectic and not exactly stress-free schedule.