When The Cure gets in? Yes.
That doesn’t mean The Cure aren’t any good. But HoF?
No. HELL no.
Just to frame this, you are talking ten years and eight records later. College radio station. Supports my point.
I wasn’t arguing a point with you by posting that. Just pointing out how its possible for people to have a different point of view.
At any rate, earlier today you believed their career started in 1989…so yeah.
The Cure were not an obscure or underground band, but I suppose it somewhat depends on where you lived in the US. Around Boston they certainly got played on the radio on WFNX and to a lesser degree on WBCN in the 80s and 90s. In fact Let’s Go to Bed was the first song FNX ever played.
Lullaby was all over MTV too, and Just Like Heaven certainly got play on MTV before that.
I first heard of them in high school when the cute art school girl I had a crush on in French class wouldn’t stop talking about how dreamy Robert Smith was…:)
Could someone start a thread in which we can determine once and for all who is lame stream, and who is unique?
I’ve got a set of ripped fishnets riding on it.
I think Simon and Garfunkel were considered “mainstream” by the folk community.
Also, who gives a shit about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Did not. Just refused to do the math from 1978 to 2019 correctly. Makes me feel old.
Yes, they got popular. But how long were they kicking around before they were popular in the US? It’s easy to compress 5 - 10 years in a forum post that says “Head on the Door sold great” and what about “love cats”. Totally undermined what I was trying to say, which was admittedly personal as music often is. This thread is for the Cure and they deserve it.
Again, second album, top 20 in the UK. Yeah, it took a while for Howie Klein to figure out how to market them in the US, but in the country where they lived they were decently well known.
The Cure were on BBC1 by 1978, and played Reading in 1979, for gosh sakes. :)
And it’s worth pointing out to the band’s own history. They weren’t exactly humming along under the radar the whole time. The Cure essentially stopped being a going concern at various points in '81, and stopped altogether by '82. That’s when Smith joined the Banshees for a spell and recorded that kind of neat Blue Sunshine record with them. And after a few fits and starts that resulted in the new iteration of The Cure starting up again in late '83, by the time they recorded The Head On The Door in '85 it was pretty much a new band again, excepting Smith and Tolhurst.
I’d say kudos to those two for sticking it out, until they found the right people to make up the rest of the band. Because that’s when they managed to find an audience outside the UK and Europe.
I really don’t. Thought it was interesting that this band made it in though. Mostly that Trent Resnor intro really touched me. He basically said fuck this venue because bands like the Cure don’t get included, yet here we are.
I used Simon and Garfunkle based on the movie “Almost Famous” where the girl brings in one of their records and her mom shits. Guess that wasn’t the norm.
@Triggercut I conceded the UK point way up thread. If you are going to quote me please don’t edit out the key bits.
Edit: A personal pet peeve of mine for forum posts. Selective editing to change meaning.
Trent Reznor’s speech seemed genuine and personal, which is cool, but for sheer enthusiasm I have to give the top honors for best Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech to Tom Morello when he inducted KISS a few years back. He can’t hide his excitement or his Harvard education.
That was fucking AWESOME.
I don’t know, I’ve never been interested or paid attention to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but seeing these inductions gives it some fucking worth just for that.
Um. K.
I’d argue from 1979 to 1985 in US they were underground. They weren’t played on the radio or on MTV. They did gain a youthful following through word of mouth, but these were “punks” and “death-rockers”. Definitely edge cases frowned upon by societal norms (which made it so much cooler).
Can’t think of another 40+ year band with the same type of trajectory. It’s fascinating to me.
You can’t think of any other bands that had their critical and commercial peak decades ago, yet still kept on despite declining new release record sales because they could sell out live shows to considerable crowds of nostalgic loyal fans?
I heard the cure regularly in the mid 80’s on WDRE in new york. They played all the bands that eventually became iconic if you were a fledgling goth kid (I was, many years before I even knew what it was.)
That station was a never ending supply of the cure, depeche mode, Bauhaus, siouxsie and the banshees, etc, etc etc.
Now, the cure is played is played at alarming frequency at my local whole foods. And not “it’s friday I’m in love” or bouncy stuff, but more like Fascination Street. That’s when I feel old as fuck.
Outside of the label manufactured bands, every band was underground until they weren’t. They’d start local build up get some buzz maybe get some label attention start to get local radio play (a completely alien concept now) get signed then get pushed or not.
To me the most interesting thing about the Cure from a career standpoint is in comparison to others of their ilk in the same class.
For instance, The Cure were fairly dark, but not nearly as dark and deathy as Bauhaus or (lordy) Joy Division, which had Ian Curtis fully (sadly) expressing the courage of their conviction.
They were danceable and a bit jagged, but not nearly so much as Gang of Four.
They expressed good post-punk pop sensibilities, but not nearly as well as XTC. (Robert Smith’s yelping vocal style does have more in common with Andy Partridge’s than you might first expect though.)
They did have a raw, punk-ish edge, at least originally, but not nearly so much as Wire.
Early on they embraced primitivism (within a week you and two mates can learn to play the bass, the guitar, and the drum parts for “Killing An Arab” in full), but not nearly so much as The Fall.
And yet it was the Robert Smith’s commercial, mass-market smarts to recognize that the music biz was circling back to him in the mid-1980s and make his own somewhat sanitized, radio-friendly version of that melange work out in huge ways.
And then he had the smarts to recognize that re-embracing the darker themes of the band when it had first formed would make Disintegration such a memorable, cornerstone work.
I love the Cure, but from a popularity point of view I’d lump them in with Depeche Mode, The Smith’s, and New Order. These were bands that all the freaks liked but also crossovered into the mainstream. Bands like Clan of Xymox or the Chameleons, or even Killing Joke were much more under the radar for that era and still are and played in similar sound spaces.