Japanese Whispers

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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.

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. 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.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. 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 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) The 10 best rated carveries in Yorkshire that diners are raving about - including one with gravy 'to die for' 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.

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 Japanese Whispers is a mini-album that collects previously-released songs on various singles from November 1982 to November 1983. It marks a significant change in the band’s sound. 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 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. 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 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. 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…

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. 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 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.When asked about The similarities between “The Walk” and “Blue Monday”, Robert Smith had this to say: Thrillseekers slam Lightwater Valley for 'only having baby rides' after shutting down favourite attractions 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. 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. 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.

Japanese Whispers is the second compilation album by British group The Cure. It was released in late 1983 by Fiction Records. The title is a pun on the children's game Chinese whispers. 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 songs were recorded when the band was in a transitional phase. In 1982, bassist Simon Gallup left following the Pornography tour and musician Lol Tolhurst switched from drums to the keyboards.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.