It's tough, the life of a rocker. Between all the drug-taking and the shagging, one has to squeeze in copious amounts of time being interviewed by doltish journalists, making sure makeup is carefully applied, mincing about for videos, etc. Oh, right and making some music, too. Anyway, shit gets stressful. So what do you do?
Well if you're Robert Smith of the Cure and Steve Severin of the Banshees you rent a hotel room, take copious amounts of LSD, watch a million bad horror flicks, book some studio time and hack out an album's worth of psychedelic exotica with an untested ex-TOTP dancer singing lead. In the Spring of '83, Smith & Severin recorded the one and only album by The Glove (named after the baddy in Yellow Submarine), Blue Sunshine. It's long been a fan curio and widely regarded as, well as what it is, which is about 50,000 times better than The Top.
As part of their ambitious and somewhat over-stuffed Cure reissue campaign, Rhino wheels out a ridiculously enormous 2 disc version of the album today, along with the next batch of Cure reissues - the aformentioned The Top, The Head On the Door and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, which was already too freaking long, but whatever.
The point, though - right - the point kids is that this one is really worth it. Why? Well, if you don't have the Glove album yet (which you really should), then you need it and if you DO then you still need it - unlike the half-baked and laughably bad demos and extras that watered down most of the earlier reissues, the second disc here is what we call "tit." Featuring the whole album sung by Robert instead of Landray, as well as some odds n' sods, the demos are high quality (drum machine a bit loud though) and worth a listen. Something like a strange Cure mini-album between "Let's Go to Bed" and the rest of the "Fantasy Trilogy" emerges, simple songs that show Smith working towards the perfect pop he would soon master.
Now, I'd love to share some of these with you, but I've been told that the promo copies of this set are encoded with a special device that enables the good folks at Polydorwarnerrhino to find me, come to my house and punish me for my temerity, most likely via hanging me upside down and flogging me. So instead you get this lovely video for the near-ambient instrumental "A Blues in Drag" :
Posted by Mallory
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Tuesday, August 08, 2006 at 3:46 PM |Permalink
