Japanese Whispers

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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. 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. By now, O'Donnell had left and been replaced by Perry Bamonte and this was the line-up that recorded Wish in 1992.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.

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

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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. On December 6th 1983, The Cure released the singles collection Japanese Whispers, which for all intents and purposes can be considered to be a proper Cure album, despite it being for the most part unrepresentative of the sound Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst had set out to create—far removed from the previous effort, 1982’s masterpiece Pornography. 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. 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.

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. 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.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. Japanese 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. 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. 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.