A Dose Of The Cure

To cover more songs from The Cure has been a desire long overdue. So when the opportunity presented itself, we were more than happy to indulge. The pop sensibility of the 80’s icon has influenced my songwriting for more than a decade – in doses big and small – but not as heavily as The Smiths and The Beatles.

It was an awesome event.  The place was packed and everyone was looking forward to each band’s rendition of a Cure classic. We were favored to cover “Just Like Heaven” while I personally chose “A Letter To Elise” – one of my all time favorite Cure single. Here is a clip our friend Antonette manage to acquire with her digital camera. Please excuse the audio and video quality. First time we ever jammed “A Letter To Elise.”

I read in wiki that Letters to Felice by Kafka was a huge influence when Robert Smith wrote the lyrics of the track. Franz Kafka is a Jewish-Bohemian major fiction writer and “Letters To Felice” is a book collecting some of Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer from 1912 to 1917. During the correspondence they were engaged twice. Must be something worth reading.

"A Letter to Elise" is the third and final single taken from the album Wish from The Cure in 1992.

To listen to the original track of “Letter To Elise:, click Here.
Below is our minimal live performance of “Just Like Heaven” from the same night. It would’ve been nicer having an electric guitarist to session. It’s fun to spin around with.

The group largely wrote the song during recording sessions in Southern France in 1987.  Robert Smith  drew inspiration from a past trip to the sea shore with his future wife. Do not be fooled to thinking that “Just Like Heaven” is a happy heartwarming song. Beneath the sunny-day-holding-hands-together-on-grassy-fields trance the music exude lies an incredibly sad ending. Wait till you hear the third verse. Click Here to watch the music video.

"Just Like Heaven" was the third single released from the band's 1987 album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.

Never mind the big, towering hair and smeared lipstick on their faces (a signature look) the musical styling is great and offers a mix of records wallowing in melancholia to ear-candy-pop madness.

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The Cure are an English rock band formed in Crawley, West Sussex in 1976 by Robert Smith, Lawrence Tolhurst and Michael Dempsey. The band has experienced several line-up changes, with frontman, vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter Robert Smith being the only constant member. The Cure first began releasing music in the late 1970s with their debut album Three Imaginary Boys (1979); this, along with several early singles, placed the band as part of the post-punk and New Wave movements that had sprung up in the wake of the punk rock revolution in the United Kingdom. During the early 1980s, the band’s increasingly dark and tormented music helped form the gothic rock genre.

After the release of Pornography (1982), the band’s future was uncertain and Smith was keen to move past the gloomy reputation his band had acquired. With the 1982 single “Let’s Go to Bed” Smith began to inject more of a pop sensibility into the band’s music. The Cure’s popularity increased as the decade wore on, especially in the United States where the songs “Just Like Heaven“, “Lovesong” and “Friday I’m in Love” entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart. By the start of the 1990s, The Cure were one of the most popular alternative rock bands in the world. The band is estimated to have sold 27 million albums as of 2004. The Cure have released thirteen studio albums and over thirty singles during the course of their career. (source: Wikipedia)