Japanese Whispers

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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. The Cure’s Japanese Whispers is coming to Picture Disc for the first time on 26th March 2021. The announcement follows the band auctioning off a signed guitar ampfor the Milk Crate Theatre. On December 6th 1983, The Cure released the singles collection Japanese Whispers, which for all intents and purposes can be considered to be a proper Cure album, despite it being for the most part unrepresentative of the sound Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst had set out to create—far removed from the previous effort, 1982’s masterpiece Pornography. 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.” Smith told Rolling Stone with a laugh that after spending time recovering at his parents' house after touring in support Pornography, he ‘decided to be a pop star’:

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. The band regrouped later in 1983, adding Andy Anderson on drums (as Tolhurst moved to keyboards) and Phil Thornalley on bass. That year they released a handful of singles, later compiled in Japanese Whispers, and a critically panned album, The Top, the following year. These releases showed the band pursuing a poppier sound, reflected in their chart success in the UK, with " The Lovecats" becoming their first top 10 hit.

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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. 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 Prior to the recording of their following album, growing tensions between Smith and an increasingly unreliable Tolhurst prompted the latter's exit from the band. He was replaced by Roger O'Donnell. 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.

In 1985, with a new line up featuring Boris Williams on drums, Porl Thompson as an additional guitarist and a returning Simon Gallup on bass, The Cure built on their commercial success with the album The Head on the Door, and its singles " In Between Days / The Exploding Boy" and " Close to Me / A Man Inside My Mouth", which also were their first minor hits in America.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. Biography In January 1976, guitarist Robert Smith and bassist Michael Dempsey formed Malice with guitarist Mark Ceccagno while at school together. They were joined by a drummer known as Graham and his brother on vocals. By April of that year the line-up had changed to feature Smith and Dempsey alongside drummer Lol Tolhurst, guitarist Porl Thompson and vocalist Martin Creasy. When Creasy left the group in January 1977 the remaining members changed the group name to Easy Cure, and after two vocalists, Gary X and Peter O'Toole, passed through the group, the group setted as a quartet in September 1977 with Smith stepping up to the vocalist role alongside his role as guitarist. Following Thompson's departure in April 1978 the group became The Cure. 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. The 10 best rated carveries in Yorkshire that diners are raving about - including one with gravy 'to die for' 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.