The Cure: Classic or Dud?

I definitely preferred the back of Standing on a Beach to the front after a while. Weird cure beats poppy cure for me though both tulpas of the split personality are crucial. My pick was either Throw Your Foot or Exploding Boy, and love all the others especially Cold, Happy, Pink Eye and especially especially Splintered - so epic and what I was always disappointed not to find in bands like Killing Joke and Ministry.

Might be interesting to poll the 12 b-sides from Standing on a Beach. For comparison here are the b-sides' placements in the 2012 artist poll (parens denotes not on the cassette) - a surprising order I think:

(5 10:15 Saturday Night)
(33 Upstairs Room)
(38 Lament)
#50 Man Inside My Mouth
#53 Few Hours After This
#54 Exploding Boy
#64 Throw Your Foot
(65 Harold and Joe)
#73 New Day
(74 2 Late)
(75 Just One Kiss)
(78 Twilight Garden)
#89 Mr Pink Eye
#93 Stop Dead
#94 Splintered In Her Head
(98 Breathe)
(107 Plastic Passion)
(113 Chain of Flowers)
(115 Speak My Language)
(126 The Big Hand)
#133 I'm Cold
#137 Another Journey By Train
#144 Happy The Man
(145 Fear of Ghosts)
(149 Japanese Dream)
#151 Descent
(152 Babble)
(155 Foolish Arrangement)
(157 Snow In Summer)
(163 The Dream)

Not a great showing in some ways - probably the lowest average score if you compare it to the first 15 years of albums - but all 12 tracks placed, more consistent than The Top (which missed out Empty World), Kiss Me (missing Fight), and Wish (missing Trust! and Wendy Time)

co-sign re: "throw your foot" that song rules.

I also had that cassette in the late 80s and loved side B

yeah side b as the distorted funhouse mirror version of side a was such a great listening experience

other favourite parts of that comp - the way the tension on side a grows increasingly thick and evil until the hanging garden - then the pure pop relief of LGTB was always a moment - no other cure comp conveys this change so well

and finishing on close to me was crucial - always hated how the cd version ended with a night like this

Album with the best b-sides is Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

The Wish b-sides are also stellar

Anyone who had the Staring at the Sea VHS should remember this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKOdo_hD9k8

Oh yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQp3oWdS7cw

^^^^ exactly

wish also had the best extended mixes they ever did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JAlbcDerHQ

I remember being annoyed I had to get that CD single as an import when they did domestic for "High" and "Friday I'm In Love."

Album with the best b-sides is Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

― Jaime Pressly and America (f. hazel), Thursday, January 20, 2022 3:03 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm, "chain of flowers" being my favorite

brad otm again, "chain of flowers" is alltime. always been one of their very best songs to me. pretty sure it ranked top ten on my ballot when we polled them some years back.

"Snow in Summer"!

"to the sky" also a personal favorite and quite good — though not necessarily a proper b-side. came from the kiss me sessions.

I remember taping that off the radio and searching for a physical version of it for ages... lost interest in the Cure before I did.

I was at the height of my Cure fandom in high school when “to the sky” started getting play on the local radio. I pulled my hair out trying to find a physical copy. Definitely had a radio dub on cassette to get me through.

this has been amazing to hear about the Cure's B-sides and hearing how people heard some of them over the radio. i grew up on KROQ and they didn't play "To the Sky" on the radio they did play "A Man Inside My Mouth" all the time. one time Richard Blade and Lisa May were on the air trying to figure out what the song was about, they had no clue and went down a rabbit hole they should have never gone down.

I thought I had posted this on the Cure thread already, but this is kinda interesting, I was sure that A Man Inside My Mouth was included in the film Flight of the Navigator but it was a very close parody, maybe The band refused to give them the rights?

"When MAX and David stop behind the car to ask for directions, the song heard in the car is a fragment of "Trapped In My Mind", an obvious parody of The Cure's "A Man Inside My Mouth" composed by David Kitay and Guy Moon, and performed by Kitay himself specifically for the movie. A full version of the song does not exist."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCdLKYUIeno

Don't know why, but To the Sky got a TON of airplay on one of the Houston radio stations upon release.

I’m from Houston too f.hazel, and the local Q station really payed that song. I guess lullaby and lovesong really were big hits locally.

hahaha, along with I Beg Your Pardon by Kon Kan!

The Wish b-sides are also stellar

Yes, but I would say that, "Halo" was our first dance song at our wedding.

Maresn3st, that's hilarious. i love that movie.

semi-related, but i seem to have vague memories of hearing "the big hand" on college radio in the pacific northwest. can't say for sure. i only recorded the hiphop shows back then, so who knows i could be confusing it with a different wish track (probably "letter to elise" in that case).

x-post

Kon Kan! hadn’t thought about that one in a while

The recent posts inspired me to listen thru the first chunk of Join The Dots the other morning. I was hearing almost every one of these for the first time, and without much warning I was immediately affected by "Man Inside My Mouth." Makes sense that it would place #50 on The Cure poll and that it received some heavy KROQ spins.

For context, this is from their top 106.7 of 1986:
61. Bananarama - Venus
62. The Smithereens - Behind the Wall of Sleep
63. Eurythmics - Missionary Man
64. The Psychedelic Furs - Pretty in Pink
65. Wang Chung - Everybody Have Fun Tonight
66. The Cure - A Man Inside My Mouth

Lol still in his stone-face phase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5IJkf-msCE

Lol airdrumming, lol

Lol is not on board

Lol is not on board bored.

There's a passage in Ten Imaginary Years where someone (could have been Robert, don't accurately remember right now) says that they look bored in all of their old promos and TV performances because, well, they were.

I have the close-up of Simon's big exaggerated sigh from the "Forest" video permanently burned into my memory. Very classic.

I'd never heard this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw7wJ8vEe20

no offense but that was pretty ghastly to me

Can a drummer explain to me why Lol was deemed sub-par? I (someone who knows nothing about drums) quite liked his drumming up to Pornography

As a drummer, or former drummer, myself, I think he was perfectly fine for the early stuff. Good, even. But of course he wasn't capable of doing the more intricate stuff that Boris eventually added to the band. Also, as I understand it Lol had an alcohol problem, which probably didn't help.

I haven’t read Lol’s book, but aiui all parties agree that his consumption did not impact his performance until several years after he was moved to keyboards, at which point he was self-medicating over being further sidelined as a social and contributing member of the group

(this vicious circle also being exacerbated by the other members continuing to socially bond via alcohol)

The book is very good -- was just talking about it earlier today on FB. It's definitely written from someone who realized the depths of the problem, took accountability for it in the end while also noting how environment and family shaped him in that regard. I found it very well considered, and that it ended with he and Robert reestablishing their friendship and working a bit together again was a lovely conclusion.

Others like Ned can correct me, but Smith among rock autocrats doesn't strike me as vindictive or mean?

I mean, he's griped about others he's not fond of, especially if he gets associated with them -- his long standing antipathy for Morrissey being a good example -- and I suspect there's more going on in those opaque intraband dynamics than we know about. I'm sure he's no plaster saint, no less than any of us. But I think it's a sign of something that when they got the Rock Hall nod just about every member past or present was there, and they specifically shouted out Andy Anderson, who had either just passed or had announced he was ill.

Smith among rock autocrats doesn't strike me as vindictive or mean?

the stories about how the whole band bullied lol in the midst of his alcoholism are pretty unpleasant so i think smith is quite capable of being mean

That's true. Never mind.

Again, though, Lol is pretty clear about seeing it otherwise in his book! It's not a sense of "I deserved it," but of "I was really being fucking awful!" That he might want to put his own frame on it is clear enough, combined with the fact that they're all not a bunch of guys in their twenties any more.

Allegedly we have a formal album title

NEW ALBUM TITLE: SONGS OF THE LOST WORLD #thecure #robertsmith https://t.co/nAZvD7A0Rm

— curefandocumentary (@curefandoc) March 3, 2022

I look forward to hearing this either by the end of the year or never

otm

don't really believe a single word of this statement, but Robert Smith making amorphous vaporware album pronouncements has in itself become a welcome and soothing event within the CureSpace

i like the title better than Live from the Moom

Hoping it’ll stand up to 4:13 Scream

Hoping it's actually his unused film score from the Jurassic Park sequel.

But seriously—
Recently dove into the Mixed Up super duper expanded edition and was pleasantly surprised by the more recent remixes (for the most part; some were meh). I just wrote it off when it was new because it seemed silly. Still kind of unnecessary, but not a total waste of time. If nothing else, it all definitely fits in with the spirit of the original album.