Ahead his of interview at Curepedia: An A-Z of The Cure at the Sugar Club, Dublin on 11 April, the band's biographer Simon Price rounds up his choice of the finest Cure B-sides
"The first thing I always did when I got a new single, was flip it over and play the other side," wrote Robert Smith in the sleeve notes to The Cure's B-sides compilation, Join The Dots. "I always hoped the B-side would give me another version of the artist. Something as good as the A-side but somehow different. I expected great B-sides from the artists I loved . . ."
In the age of streaming, the art of the great B-side has been lost. Back in the heyday of the 7-inch single, the flipside allowed bands space to experiment, to take risks with uncommercial material, and to shine a light on hitherto hidden aspects of their work, without the pressure of having to pander to radio programmers, and without the requirement to maintain the overall flow of an album.
Given that The Cure were no strangers to slapping very odd songs on their actual A-sides, nor to chucking jarringly incongruous tracks into the middle of their biggest albums, the freedom afforded by a B-side allowed them to get very strange indeed.
One of the privileges of writing my book Curepedia - An A-Z Of The Cure was that I got to listen to the deepest cuts in their catalogue, including every single B-side, and call it 'research'.
Here are five that stood out.
Do The Hansa (B-side of Boys Don't Cry, 1986)
In April 1977, Easy Cure - as they were then known - responded to a `search for a star' advert placed in the music press by German label Hansa and were one of eight bands selected to record for them. The relationship was a disaster. Hansa tried to coerce the band into becoming a cheesy teen-pop covers act and refused to release their original material. Less than a year later, Robert Smith wrested his band away from Hansa's clutches. At a Christmas 1978 gig at the Moonlight venue in West Hampstead in London, the band debuted Do The Hansa, a daft satirical dance tune which took a swipe at the German imprint. It became a staple of The Cure's encores, dedicated at the 1979 Reading Festival to "everyone who hates disco" (the `Disco Sucks’ sentiment being sadly prevalent in the post-punk era), and was one of the songs they recorded for a Kid Jensen session on BBC Radio, before lying dormant for seven years. Finally, in 1986, a studio version - a berserk piece of punk-funk which starts ‘Ein zwei drei vier!’ - saw the light of day when it appeared on the 12-inch B-side of the Boys Don't Cry remake. Ironically, it crept into the Billboard Disco Chart. But what sort of dance was 'The Hansa'? In official fanzine Cure News, Smith described it as "Get a fake tan, wear ill-fitting 'designer' clothes, gold, particularly on your little finger, and dance without feeling." The same publication once asked him which Cure songs he liked the least, and this disco folly was among them, on the grounds that it doesn't "have any real meaning". But that's entirely its charm.
Lament (B-side of The Walk, 1983)
The track that kept the Cure alive. Flexipop! was a rogue pop publication that was eventually shut down for obscenity, and to which Robert once submitted an inspirationally bizarre week-in-the-life diary. The mag's USP was the free flexi disc attached to the cover. In September 1982, it was The Cure's turn. One problem: there wasn't really a Cure to record it. In the aftermath of the ill-fated Fourteen Explicit Moments tour, drummer Lol Tolhurst was taking an extended sabbatical and bassist Simon Gallup had quit altogether (for the time being). Temporarily, Robert Smith was The Cure. He called upon the help of his friend Steven Severin from Siouxsie And The Banshees, with whom Smith had already served one stint as guitarist and would soon serve another. Together they recorded Lament, and a flimsy green disc, keeping The Cure's name alive, duly appeared on the front of Flexipop!. Built from drum machines, synths, spindly guitars and traumatised howling, it was an unsettling piece with a lyric about a man dying under a bridge. By the end of the year, the Smith/Severin collaboration became formalised as side-project The Glove, while The Cure had revived as a synth duo with the returning Lol Tolhurst switching to keyboards. In June 1983 that two man iteration of The Cure released breakthrough hit The Walk, and put a cleaned-up, more professional version of Lament on the 12 inch B-side. One of several Cure songs which references drowning (I list them all in Curepedia), Lament had done its job: it kept The Cure's head above water.
The Exploding Boy (B-side of In Between Days, 1985)
One game all Cure fans enjoy playing is "best line-up". There's no definitive answer to such a subjective question, but there can be no denying that the mid-Eighties incarnation of Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Lol Tolhurst, Porl Thompson and Boris Williams was a formidable unit. The first anyone heard of that unit, in July 1985, was the exuberantly forlorn single In Between Days (The Cure being the band who navigate the paradox of "exuberantly forlorn" better than anyone), driven by Williams' clattering drums. The main B-side was The Exploding Boy, a song about excess. Robert later explained "I drink too much, eat too much, think too much... ha! I’d like to explode. It would be a beautiful death." With similar high-speed strumming and thunderous tubthumping to the A-side, it felt like its sister song. Although it didn't figure on the album The Head On The Door, it wouldn't have been out of place. Indeed, when The Cure did their final John Peel Session shortly after the single came out, The Exploding Boy was one of four songs performed, the others all being album tracks. And a fan poll once voted it their highest-ranking B-side (that being another game Cure fans enjoy playing).
Harold And Joe (B-side of Never Enough, 1990)
By the start of the Nineties, any antipathy Robert Smith ever harboured towards disco had evidently evaporated. The Cure's response to the Madchester/Baggy movement was the remix album Mixed Up, and the lead single, released in September 1990, was the marvellously mangled indie-dance beast Never Enough. If you flipped it over, you'd find an equally danceable, but far more chilled Harold And Joe. A Simon Gallup-led composition, involving a harmonium and cheery whistling, it was named, depending on who you believe, after Messrs Bishop and Mangel from Australian soap series Neighbours (which the bassist watched) or, according to Robert, "creatures in Simon Gallup's mind". With Smith singing in an unusually deep voice, compared by one fanzine to Lloyd Cole (though Robert claimed he was trying to sound like Frank Sinatra), the normally unmistakable frontman was... mistakeable. Even the lyrics are unusually serene: "nothing ever gets on my mind... nothing ever loses me sleep... nothing ever puts me out..." Smith once named it as one of his personal favourite Cure B-sides, and it's hard to disagree.
Adonais (B-side of The 13th, 1996)
Already, some readers will be spitting cockatoo feathers in fury at the B-sides I've missed out. I can hear your voices now. Where are Happy The Man, 2 Late and This Twilight Garden (Robert's other favs)? Where are Babble and Fear Of Ghosts (Gallup's choices)? What about A Foolish Arrangement or Splintered In My Head? And does 10.15 Saturday Night not count? It's arguable that Adonais doesn't count either: it's not strictly a B-side as it never came out on vinyl (being from the Nineties, when CD was king). An extra track on CD2 of 1996 single The 13th, Adonais is one of many Cure songs inspired by poetry (I list these in Curepedia too), specifically Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem of that name, written upon the death of John Keats. The person Smith had in mind, he later revealed, was the actor Brandon Lee, star of The Crow (to whose soundtrack The Cure had contributed a song), who died during its production. Elegant and understated, with suitably cinematic strings, Adonais is a fitting tribute, worthy of inclusion in any Cure B-sides list. If you feel like choosing your own, get yourself a copy of Join The Dots. And if you need a book to guide you through it, I know just the thing . . .
More information on Curepedia: An A-Z of The Cure at the Sugar Club can be found here.
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