Japanese Whispers: How The Cure Abandoned Goth for Synth Pop
Happy 40th to the comp documenting the band’s holiday in the sun
Japanese Whispers documents the period when goth’s gloomiest poster boy shockingly reinvented himself a swinging synth-pop party animal.
In The Cure’s first four years of recording, starting with their 1978 existentialism-on-a-platter single, “Killing an Arab,” Robert Smith led the band through so many increasingly dark nights of the soul he had to start packing a flashlight. By the time they got to the wailing wall of sound that was their fourth album, 1982’s Pornography, concerned bystanders already had the first six digits of the suicide hotline dialed. But a funny thing happened to The Cure coming off one of the post-punk era’s most psychologically harrowing musical statements (no mean feat in a movement spearheaded by Joy Divison)—they nearly disintegrated.
Having taken the band about as far down the dark path as they could go, Smith sought refuge in a busman’s holiday as a guitarist for his buddies Siouxsie & The Banshees, and his psychedelic-tinged side project with The Banshees’ Steve Severin, The Glove. By the time Smith reconvened The Cure, they had dwindled down to a duo, sans bassist Simon Gallup. But Smith and drummer/keyboardist Lol Tolhurst pretty much pulled a 180 on the string of non-LP singles they released from late ‘82 through 1983.
The first of these, “Let’s Go to Bed,” was a bit like the musical equivalent of watching Ingmar Bergman turn into Blake Edwards (in a good way). In place of Pornography’s abject lamentations, we get a sprightly, catchy-as-hell synth-pop sex romp. Tolhurst was so busy with his electronics the band had to draft former Rumour/future Mekons drummer Steve Goulding, then playing with Cure labelmates The Associates.
In October of ‘83 Smith would tell the BBC’s Kid Jensen, “Late last year, rather than continue in the vein that The Cure had been pursuing last year, we decided to have a complete break and just make some singles, just for the fun of it really.” But the fun brought a financial windfall with it, as “The Walk” and “The Lovecats” became the band’s biggest UK hits up to that point, with the latter marking their first trip to the Top 10.
Another synth-focused track, “The Walk” was a danceable club banger that had some cynics suggesting The Cure had ripped off New Order’s game-changing single “Blue Monday,” which had come out about a month earlier. But Smith brushed such concerns aside, stating that The Cure’s tune had actually been recorded first.
Smith and Tolhurst mostly dropped the electronics for “The Lovecats” but amped up the pop quotient even further. Instead of slinky synth pop, they opted for an acoustic-based jazzy jump, complete with a walking standup bass line and Tolhurst plunking a vibraphone. Smith addresses his objet du desir as if they were both sexy cartoon kitties, and it all works way better than it should’ve had any right to. You can almost hear Nora Ephron concocting a rom-com in her mind just so she can use this to soundtrack the closing credits. (How the hell did that never happen, by the way?)
The Cure didn’t really stick with their new schtick, nor with their two-man lineup. Gallup would return in time for 1985’s The Head on the Door. And they were soon busily swathing themselves in shadow again, but they would continue to turn out the occasional pop nugget (“In Between Days,” “Just Like Heaven”) whenever the mood struck, often finding chart success in the process.
But at the tail end of ‘83, before moving on to the more downcast environs of 1984’s The Top, The Cure bid a farewell smooch to this short but satisfying period by releasing Japanese Whispers. It compiled the three singles along with all the B-sides that had been included on various formats, making for the definitive document of the band’s sunny, synthy alter ego.
Today it stands as a sharp rebuke to those who would seek to paint Smith and company with a black, goth-centric brush, proving that the Cure catalog is much more than a monochrome affair.
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