After recording one of their darkest albums, 1983's The Top, the Cure regrouped and shuffled their lineup in 1984 and ended up changing their musical direction rather radically. While the band always had a pop element in their sound and even recorded one of the lightest songs of the '80s, "The Lovecats," The Head on the Door is where they become a hitmaking machine. The shiny, sleek production and laser-sharp melodies of "Inbetween Days" and "Close to Me" helped them become modern ock radio staples and the inspired videos had them in heavy rotation on MTV. The rest of the record didn't suffer for hooks and inventive arrangements either, making even the gloomiest songs like "Screw" and "Kyoto Song" sound radio-ready, and the inventive arrangements (the flamenco guitars and castanets of "The Blood," the lengthy and majestic intro to "Push," the swirling vocals on "The Baby Screams") give the album a musical depth previous efforts lacked. All without sacrificing an ounce of the emotion of the past, which songs as quietly desperate as "A Night Like This" and "Sinking" illustrate. With The Head on the Door, Robert Smith figured out how to make gloom and doom danceable and popular to both alternative and mainstream ock audiences. It was a feat the band managed to pull off for many years afterward, but never as concisely or as impressively as they did here.
Close To Me [Original 12" Extended Mix] - The CureThere are many versions of this classic little tune around. There is the album version available on The Head On The Door. The remix edit on Standing On A Beach and The Greatest Hits, then there's a live version on Paris, the Closer Remix on Mixed Up and also a studio demo of the song on The Head On The Door - Deluxe Edition.However, the best ver...
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I just have a thing for extended mixes for some reason, so here's another one.This is off the North American 12" release for In Between Days by The Cure (yea I'm a massive Cure fan too). The N. American release had an extended mix of this song, while the rest of the world just got the short mix plus two different songs on the B-side (The Exploding Boy and A few Hours After This; the B-side of t...
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I always love stumbling across cool and interesting stuff that you'd probably otherwise never hear about. The chains of links that make up modern life are extraordinarily convoluted. Are they not.So why am I writing about an oak tree? And not even a physically present one at that, as far as appearances are concerned, but one present in substance, though really present. (Dedicated Roman Catholic...
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The cure has always had this great Pop music touch about them. I like them lots.
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Is anyone with me when I say that "Close to Me" by the Cure is quite possibly the greatest pop song ever written?
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World Cafe Live hosted Robert Smith and The Cure, played on air today on WXPN locally, but available here on NPR's website. Alas, I was only able to hear a few minutes of it while driving back to the office, for in our new digs the radio reception is terrible. And then IT blocked access to radio station's online streaming sites (hey, that makes sense, we have 2000 high school kids who would q...
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The cure has always had this great Pop music touch about them. I like them lots.
More >
I always love stumbling across cool and interesting stuff that you'd probably otherwise never hear about. The chains of links that make up modern life are extraordinarily convoluted. Are they not.So why am I writing about an oak tree? And not even a physically present one at that, as far as appearances are concerned, but one present in substance, though really present. (Dedicated Roman Catholic...
More >
Close To Me [Original 12" Extended Mix] - The CureThere are many versions of this classic little tune around. There is the album version available on The Head On The Door. The remix edit on Standing On A Beach and The Greatest Hits, then there's a live version on Paris, the Closer Remix on Mixed Up and also a studio demo of the song on The Head On The Door - Deluxe Edition.However, the best ver...
More >
I just have a thing for extended mixes for some reason, so here's another one.This is off the North American 12" release for In Between Days by The Cure (yea I'm a massive Cure fan too). The N. American release had an extended mix of this song, while the rest of the world just got the short mix plus two different songs on the B-side (The Exploding Boy and A few Hours After This; the B-side of t...
More >
Perhaps only Jane's Addiction rivals The Cure's position on my lifelong love/hate list, in part because their frontmen - heck, all of 'em - are such wankers in interviews and photos and videos. Both have released albums that I found myself buying and then selling several times back in the days before eternal MP3s came along to ensure that we could have our music and sell it too. Both, too - but...
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A few nights ago, me and the Mrs were roused from our slumber at 4 in the morning by the sound of riotous giggling coming from our 4 year old son's bedroom.When we got up in the morning, I asked him what he'd been dreaming about."The song where Wobert Smif gets kicked up the bum wiv the socks!" he screamed. More giggling.He was, of course, referring to this.Watch till near the end to see what caus
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Is anyone with me when I say that "Close to Me" by the Cure is quite possibly the greatest pop song ever written?
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And I don't just mean the song.What are inbetween days anyway? Perhaps they are days when you've so much shit to deal with that you forget which day of the week it is. Or how time works, for that matter. Maybe inbetween days are days which seamlessly flow into one another, without end, precisely because "rest" is no longer part of your vocabulary.Or maybe - just maybe - "inbetween days" refers ...
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 "The Head on the Door")
