The Cure: their 20 best songs, ranked and rated
So the story goes, The Cure's frontman Robert Smith was watching Duran Duran play at Bestival in 2015, and was struck by a bona fide lightbulb moment. “Wouldn’t it be brilliant,” he thought, “if they just played all the hits and got off.” Suddenly, decades of glacial three-hour festival headline slots melted away and one of the finest greatest hits sets in alternative rock swam into focus.
Streamlining their setlist to ninety-odd minutes of pure indie-goth gold, The Cure instantly became the ultimate festival bill-toppers they always threatened to be, and they’ll be smearing the lipstick of Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage with their stupendous snog of hits this very weekend.
Which poses the question: which sort of Cure fan are you? There are lovers of the darker arts for whom The Cure just aren’t The Cure unless they’re subjecting us to eight-minute mood pieces ripped from the nightmares of anguished teens. They would have a very different run-down of the 20 best Cure songs than the one compiled here.
Those of us in awe of Robert Smith’s way with a dreamy alt-pop chorus, the band's Glastonbury set – which is likely to have much in common with this list – may well turn out to be the gig of the year. Just like heaven? Close enough…
20. Never Enough (1990)
The Cure’s underlying pop mentality was strong enough to justify a remix album, Mixed Up, in 1990, from which Never Enough was culled as a single. A sonic tribute to Ecstasy culture – Smith’s mini Screamadelica, if you will – The Cure’s baggiest song proved that when Smith wasn’t spinning his own new strands of underground music, he was happy to get tangled up in the zeitgeist.
19. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea (1992)
The Cure’s catalogue is awash with glowering atmospheric mood pieces which abandon structure and hook-line for sheer cathartic exorcism. The best example from the Nineties was this compulsive eight-minute scree-storm about the fragility of security and the fruitlessness of chasing pleasures long past. This was the sort of visceral art we used to get before people would get this sort of stuff out of their system in a drunken, self-pitying Facebook splurge.
18. Catch (1987)
Sometimes, the drugs worked. The mid-Eighties pop era began when Smith looked back at the dark and doom-laden Cure albums of the early Eighties and decided, actually, suicide wasn’t really for him. It culminated with the effervescent pop moments of 1987 album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me – and Catch, in particular, is the sort of frothy, gossamer tune your milkman might whistle. If your milkman happened to be a spider-haired cult genius.
17. The Walk (1983)
The kohl-eyed cult of The Cure was firmly rooted by the time Smith’s run of upbeat non-album pop singles kicked off after 1982's Pornography. But it was the synthetic freakery of The Walk, a hyperactive cousin of New Order’s Blue Monday, that marked their breakthrough; their first Top 20 hit and a hint that The Cure’s brand of twilit pop might have commercial (spider) legs.
16. Fascination Street (1989)
Fascination Street is actually the blues-and-voodoo bacchanal of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, where Smith had a “bad adventure” that inspired this intense, quasi-funk brooder, the sound of a horrifying hangover in the making. A breakthrough on the US Modern Rock chart, it opened America’s eyes to Smith’s brand of tremulous noir rock and paved the way for the Stateside success of 1989 album Disintegration.
15. The Caterpillar (1984)
1984’s scattergun psychedelic sprawl The Top is few fans’ favourite Cure album, but its only single deserves a spot in the pantheon of great mid-Eighties Cure pop songs, thanks to Smith’s wonderful way with a faux stutter and a backing vocal hook that sounds like something a hippy cult might sing between skinny-dips.
14. Let’s Go To Bed (1982)
The turning point. Emerging from a month-long detox in the Lake District, Smith handed his band his brightest song since Boys Don’t Cry and explained that, after three opressively bleak records (Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography), they were going to be sexy now. Cue a stand-alone single full of synth-pop snaps and crackles, new wave "doo-doo-doo"s worthy of the smartest new romantic and the slap bass of Mark King’s wildest dreams. Smith’s pop alter-ego was loose – next stop, the actual charts.
13. Friday, I’m In Love (1992)
Anathema to the gothier Cure fans, yet Friday, I’m In Love is an undeniable delight, a romantic pop ditty that was dropped by the gods of indie into Smith’s lap – he asked numerous friends who he’d stolen it off before realising that, remarkably, no-one had ever written it before. So lighten up and enjoy it, goths! At least it's frittered away another three-and-a-half minutes before death.
12. Charlotte Sometimes (1981)
Penelope Farmer’s haunting children’s novel about a time-travelling schoolgirl, Charlotte Sometimes, provided inspiration for several Cure songs; this most overt lift even borrowed many of its lyrics from the book. Its hallucinogenic haze of melody and dank, austere atmospherics would prove even more inspirational though, providing the burgeoning goth scene with a blueprint for charming the underground with sweet sounds from the tomb.
11. Plainsong (1989)
Depressed, increasingly solitary and on so many drugs he’d often play naked tennis with himself, Smith approached his magnum opus Disintegration intending to make a masterpiece before he hit 30 by harking back to the dense gloom of Pornography. Such a record needed a grand curtain-raiser, and the oceanic synth sparkles of Plainsong made for their most majestic mood-setter to date. It's at least partially responsible for shoegaze, too.
10. Why Can’t I Be You? (1987)
At the polar opposite point of The Cure’s canon from Plainsong is this infectious, upbeat blast of horns and horniness that led off the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me campaign. A descendant of The Love Cats (see below), this fidgety climax to The Cure’s Eighties pop era saw Smith shed his last shred of gloom-merchant the moment he donned a cuddly bear costume for the video.
9. The Love Cats (1983)
Alleycat screeches, Madness piano, jazz bass and lyrics about wonderfully pretty night-stalkers getting up to all manner of saucy feline frolics – could this really be the same band that made The Drowning Man? Indeed, this was Smith throwing his perkiest tendencies and catchiest “ba-ba-da-ba” melodies into The Cure’s new pop lifeline, and striking furry gold. The Love Cats went Top 10 and instantly reinvented The Cure.
8. A Letter To Elise (1992)
When Smith indulges his meandering angst in song, there’s often one pivotal point where the melody, having wandered around like a lost soul for four or five minutes, coheres in a moment of pure, shattering heartbreak. The quintessential example appears on this cut from Wish inspired by Kafka’s Letter To Felice, when a middle eight that seems to be heading nowhere tightens around the tragic lines “I thought you were the girl I’d always dreamed about, but I let the dream go/The promises broke, the make-believe ran out”, wrenching a tear from nowhere. Magnificent work, Bob.
7. Lovesong (1989)
In which Smith condensed a decade of pop exploration and existential agony into one eight-word hook – “however far away, I will always love you” – and broke America. Almost a precision-cut precis of The Cure’s career so far, when Lovesong hit the US Number Two spot it made them a kind of gloomy British REM; alt-radio friendly but with the credibility of an uncompromising underground catalogue behind them.
6. A Forest (1980)
It’s all in the roots. A Forest marks the point where Joy Division’s cavernous vibe crept into The Cure’s early new wave itchiness and, with Smith refusing to make the song cleaner for radio, launched their gothic reinvention. As such, it’s an intoxicating mix of angular post-punk and bad-trip atmospherics and, according to Smith himself “the archetypal Cure sound”.
5. Boys Don’t Cry (1979)
It seems incredible now that The Cure would perfect new wave on just their third single then so swiftly discard it as if to say “let Costello have it”, but it does make Boys Don’t Cry look all the more like a singular accomplishment. It’s a single that sounds like Smith has listened to The Jam and written the song they wished they were playing, and also an early dig at toxic masculinity which, for all their later differences, would kick down the door for Morrissey.
4. Just Like Heaven (1987)
The point where Smith mastered the romantic electro-pop swoop, Just Like Heaven seemed to fall straight out of a John Hughes credits sequence. The story of a trip Smith took with his future wife to Beachy Head and the dizzying effects of their moderate petting there, the song had much the same effect on America, where it became their first Top 40 breakthrough.
3. Close To Me (1985)
If The Love Cats had been brazen in its shift towards contemporary pop tropes, Close To Me was where The Cure struck the perfect balance between dungeon and dancefloor. The handclaps, understated horns and synth hooks seemed to cock a sly snook at Wham! while Smith’s breathy, mildly deranged vocals hinted at something faintly desperate and diabolic lurking behind his anxiety (“I pull my eyes out, hold my breath and wait until I shake”) and visions of his head nailed to a door. Panic pop, if you will.
2. Pictures Of You (1989)
Even before you hear that Pictures Of You was inspired by photographs of his wife that Smith found in the remains of a house fire, its glistening ode to a tear-stained Polaroid unbearably poignant, and universally relatable. The Cure at their glacial, lovelorn best.
1. In Between Days (1985)
The pinnacle of The Cure’s pop strain, In Between Days found Smith transcending the influence of early Eighties synth-pop and, by weaving in a little of The Smiths’ melancholic urgency and his own fear of aging (“yesterday I felt like I could die”), creating something entirely of its own cultural space. If A Forest epitomises what The Cure sound like, In Between Days epitomises what they mean – a unique band by turns dark and delirious, capable when it suits them of cutting to the core of alternative pop.
