Saturday, May 20, 2017

The Cure's 'Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me' Revisited

From The Quietus:

"It would have been at some point in late 1987, my senior year of high school, and it would have been in one of the two English literature courses I was taking that year. (Because I sure as hell didn’t want to do phys ed classes after I didn’t have to any more.) I had heard this song 'Just Like Heaven' on the radio and was randomly enthusing about it, because it was really good and all. I remember my classmate Susan Orozco - who regularly preferred to dress all in black, like a small coterie of people at our high school - saying in response “Yeah, but I think they sold out.” My reaction was essentially confusion - the class was about to start and I just wasn’t sure what to make of it. What was there to sell out from? And if it sounded this good, why complain?

A couple of years back I celebrated The Head On The Door’s 30th anniversary for tQ and so here I am again a couple of years later with the next album along the way. So I won’t try to add anything further to the potted band history I already gave in that feature, except to note an extension. After that album’s well-deserved success in the UK and elsewhere (especially on incipient alternative radio in the US) the temporarily stable lineup of Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Lol Tolhurst, Porl Thompson and Boris Williams, spent 1986 dealing with retrospection colliding with the present. The Standing On The Beach singles collection - easily one of the best of its era, hands down, a perfect illustration of just how Smith and company’s pop instincts had been on since the start - served as both a good reason to hit the road some more and create a great concert film in The Cure In Orange while they were at it. "

Read the rest at The Quietus.