Member-only story

41 Years Ago: The Cure play a round of Japanese Whispers

Giving American teens the completely wrong idea for 41 years

Stewart Mason
Three Imaginary Girls
10 min readDec 8, 2024

--

(Sire/Fiction cassette, 1983)

At the end of 1982, The Cure didn’t exist. They’d just released arguably their best album so far, Pornography, in May. But while it was their first Top 10 album in their native UK, its reviews were mixed at best due to its unrelentingly bleak vibe. The band were exhausted from the stress of recording and touring behind four albums in three years. In fact, bassist Simon Gallup had left the band in the time-honored tradition of a punch-up with bandleader Robert Smith in the pub following the last show of the Pornography tour.

And on top of everything else, their label, Fiction Records, absolutely hated the new single Smith had just recorded with his sole remaining bandmate, Lol Tolhurst, switching from drums to synthesizers. So when Smith’s friends Siouxsie and the Banshees lost their guitarist John McGeoch, he said fuck it and joined their band.

A year later, The Cure not only were having their first-ever hit singles in the UK, but they also had managed something that they’d had zero luck with before: finally cracking America. (With some help from MTV, naturally.) The US-only mini-album Japanese Whispers, their first 12" release on their new American label Sire Records, neatly sums up this period of…

--

--

Three Imaginary Girls
Three Imaginary Girls

Published in Three Imaginary Girls

Medium’s sparkly indie-pop press! Music discovery, memoir, mixtapes and more.

Stewart Mason
Stewart Mason

Written by Stewart Mason

From West Texas. In Boston. It’s mostly gonna be music, food, and cats.

Responses (14)