If he were to perform “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me” live in its entirety, Robert Smith said a few years ago, then Barcelona would be the most harmonious place in summer: red, hot, loud, fiery. The Cure singer knows the image of the record, the seventh, with which he and his bandmates almost became stars (it was “Disintegration” in 1989 that made them really big).
The pre-release single “Why Can’t I Be You?”, with THE drum intro, the following Motown beat, brass fanfares and a completely enthralled 28-year-old singing “I Kiss You From Your Feet To Where Your Head Begins”. The year-old, who appeared as a teddy bear in the video, set the new, playful direction.
I want to eat you
Everything should have turned out completely differently, and the general perception of “Kiss Me” might be different today – Smith had planned to release “How Beautiful You Are” as the first release. The song begins with the line “You Want To Know Why I Hate You” and opens the last paragraph with “This Is Why I Hate You.” In between there is a gently rising and falling melody that is more narrative than heading towards a chorus climax, descriptions like in a diary – “You Remember That Day In Paris, When We Wandered Through The Rain”. The record company intervened at the time, a single mix of “How Beautiful You Are” remained unreleased, and in April 1987 “Why Can’t I Be You?” was released as a starter.
The album cover showed Smith’s lips in close-up: he did not understand the work as a flirtatious offer, especially not in the sense of equal opportunities. The singer wanted to eat his beloved. The working title of the double album seemed similarly neuroses-plagued: “1,000,000 Virgins”. But as much as pop numbers like “Hey You!!!” or “The Perfect Girl” shaped The Cure’s image that year, the singer had built up a lot of frustration.
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Tensions increased with the alcoholic founding member Lol Tolhurst. At some point, Smith even took pity on listing the ailing keyboard player as the song’s author simply so that the poor guy could still earn something. Before Tolhurst had to leave for good in 1989, Smith used him as inspiration for one of the most hateful songs he ever wrote. Legend has it that he placed the studio mic directly in front of his former friend as he sang the lines of “Shiver and Shake”: “You’re just a waste of time / You’re just a babbling face”, “You’re a fucking waste (…) “You’re useless and ugly (…) When I think of how you make me hate/ I want to smash you to pieces”.
With all the Barcelona feeling, bad blood couldn’t be averted, and even if songs like “Torture”, “Icing Sugar” (line: “I’ll Empty You As Empty As A Boy Can Be”) or “All I Want ” were not about Tolhurst, they reflected a frustration that Robert Smith no longer wanted to carry with him after all these years of friendship. “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me” finally ended the longest album break of two years. The 18 songs on the record were joined by a total of five single B-sides as well as the “Stranger Than Fiction” sampler contribution “To The Sky”: 24 intoxicating songs. Smith moved masses of material and now wanted the effort to pay off. The staggering Tolhurst stood in the way.
The album’s predecessor “The Head On The Door” from 1985 already established The Cure as a chart-topping band, and the releases “In Between Days” and “Close To Me” were among the most beautiful pop singles of the decade. Smith released four from the new work: “Why Can’t I Be You?” was followed by “Catch” (while filming the video, Lol Tolhurst is said to have needed several takes in order to be able to run down the spiral staircase playing the violin), “Just Like Heaven” and “Hot Hot Hot!!”.
Released as a single in February 1988, “Hot Hot Hot!!!” was a perfect fit for Ibiza, where it was going up and down in the clubs and was once again competing with the New Order, which was strong in the Balearic Islands. The song was a funk excursion that wasn’t really popular with hardcore fans at the time; here, too, there were horns and a loudly cheering Smith who raised his index finger three times in the chorus (“Hey Hey Hey!”). The video showed the band members on show stage podiums, wearing sunglasses and dressed in black and white sixties as a fake TV appearance. “Hot Hot Hot!!” was a song-like video experiment – and of course a bit stupid. But there was also no reason to accuse The Cure of “selling out”, which indie and goth fans were always quick to unpack, especially in the 1980s. Now summer island partygoers in shorts were dancing to Cure.
“Just Like Heaven” became perhaps the band’s most popular song today. Even Smith cautiously suggested it might have come close to being the “perfect pop song” it was aiming for. How the instruments, first drums and bass, then lead guitar, rhythm guitar, keyboard, lead guitar again, gradually fit in is simply stunning. You should fall in love all over again in these first 30 seconds, and the lyrics to the song are pure Smith: romance with an angelic presence that leaves him alone again in the end. In any case, “Just Like Heaven” shares songs like “One” and “Where The Streets Have No Name” by U2, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’Roses, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” or Prince’ “Purple Rain” is perhaps the best third single from an album (please email the reviewer for further “best third single releases”).
The nice thing about “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me”: You can hear the 18 songs from front to back just as well as from back to front. It was only in later works that Smith’s tendency to become longer, heavier and more “epic” towards the end developed. Here the two pointed final pieces “Shiver and Shake” and “Fight” could have opened the record just as well. “The Kiss” and “The Snakepit” perhaps anticipate the more hypnotic, voodoo-like long-minute hard rock of “Wish” (1992) or the instrumental excesses of “Disintegration.” Otherwise there is mostly single material on this record. The title track was definitely placed at number one in the tracklist – otherwise the positioning seems like a dice, and there are probably few albums where this seems so refreshing.
In the end, none of the four single releases made it into the UK Top 20, and sixth place in the album charts can only be considered a success for “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me” because there is no Cure record there previously rose higher (in France the work landed at number two, which is confirmation: in 1987 Cure were the more successful the further south you looked for them).
But the path was paved: “Disintegration” would become the band’s most beloved release two years later. “Wish” later gave them their breakthrough in the USA.
But the best songs were in this double album, which has been shining for 30 years now.