The Cure: BBC Sessions 1979-1981 [DBQP]

Why you'll love it

This EU-pressed LP gathers 13 session recordings across the band's first three albums and beyond. It catches the Cure moving from the wiry post-punk of Three Imaginary Boys into the shadows of Seventeen Seconds and Faith.

This edition

• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Radio sessions were the Cure's practice room in public. Between 1979 and 1981 Robert Smith and company kept turning up at the BBC to cut quick, live-in-the-studio versions of whatever they were working on, and listening back now is like flicking through a sketchbook as the drawings get steadily darker. The sessions trace a young band finding its voice, one radio date at a time.

Side A starts in the nervy, angular Three Imaginary Boys era with "Accuracy," "Subway Song" and "Grinding Halt," next to the non-album "Plastic Passion," before the band slips into Seventeen Seconds territory with "17 Seconds," "Play for Today" and a taut "A Forest." Side B moves on to the Faith songs "All Cats Are Grey" and "The Holy Hour," plus "Forever," and closes with early runs at "Siamese Twins" and "One Hundred Years," which would anchor Pornography in 1982. Simon Gallup's bass carries a lot of the weight throughout.

Hearing these songs before the studio versions settled makes the band's progress sound startlingly quick. It's three years of growing up in 13 songs, which is roughly the pace most of us managed between the ages of 14 and 40.

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Tracklist

Listen

On DBQP (cat# DBQP61), the 2023 compilation.