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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.

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. 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 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.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 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. 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. 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. 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.

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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.

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.

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. 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… 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.”

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