Japanese Whispers

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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. 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) 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… When asked about The similarities between “The Walk” and “Blue Monday”, Robert Smith had this to say:

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. 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. 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. 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’: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. 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 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. 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. 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.

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. By now, O'Donnell had left and been replaced by Perry Bamonte and this was the line-up that recorded Wish in 1992. By this time, they were as close as ever to the mainstream audience, as the success of the single " Friday I'm in Love / Halo" evidenced. As a result, Wish was a commercial success, but it wasn't well received by the critics. 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. 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. Casbah, the cooling towers and Redgates: Things we took for granted in Sheffield that are gone foreverJapanese 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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.” 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. 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. Yorkshire Pudding Pie company is officially a thing - and it might just be the most Yorkshire combo everThe 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. 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.