Japanese Whispers

Product Information

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. This new direction would earn the band their first two top 20 hits in both the UK and Ireland. Japanese Whispers would also be the band’s first album to chart in the US. Casbah, the cooling towers and Redgates: Things we took for granted in Sheffield that are gone forever There are versions of The Walk that are singles rather than EPs, and those include just Walk alongside this, this being the b-side. And boy is it the exact b-side of The Walk you might expect. In that it is cut from similar cloth, and is far far less impressive or interesting. That is all I have to say about it. This pressing will be the first time Japanese Whispers is ever released on picture disc, and made available exclusively at The Cure Store& Rhino Store.

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. 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. 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.Bonus 2: At the time, The Cure didn’t enjoy playing songs like “The Lovecats” in concert, so instead, here’s a clip of “One Hundred Years” featuring the 1983 lineup… 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. 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 albums that followed, Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982), did not receive any great commercial or critical success, but instead helped in developing a devoted cult following. However, there were tensions in the band and Gallup exited in 1982. When Smith joined the Banshees in 1983, The Cure were briefly inactive, with Smith also collaborating on an album with Banshees' Steve Severin under the name of The Glove. 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. Thrillseekers slam Lightwater Valley for 'only having baby rides' after shutting down favourite attractions 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)

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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. 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.

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’: 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.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. Yorkshire Pudding Pie company is officially a thing - and it might just be the most Yorkshire combo ever 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. 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.