Tuesday, June 15, 2021

CoF blog is back!

CoF blog is back, starting today. Don't know for how much longer or how frequently it will be updated, but for now, it's back. CoF Twitter is still the place for all of the instant updates, but will keep this updated as often as possible.
Posted by Craig at 11:41 AM

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Strange As Angels' Friday I'm in Love video on Wednesday

Posted by Craig at 12:36 PM

Saturday, June 12, 2021

limited edition Faith picture disc released for Record Store Day Drop 1

A Wild Mood Swings pictue disc will be released for Record Store Day Drop #2 on July 17th.
Posted by Craig at 12:38 PM

When Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry met the Cure’s Robert Smith

Posted by Craig at 12:18 PM

Friday, June 11, 2021

Strange As Angels release Lullaby/Dressing Up 7" single

Posted by Craig at 12:50 PM

Wednesday, June 9, 2021

New French book about Seventeen Seconds

Posted by Craig at 1:13 PM

CHVRCHES and blink-182’s Mark Hoppus discuss their Robert Smith collaborations

From Brooklyn Vegan:

CHVRCHES recently released the song "How Not to Drown" off their upcoming album Screen Violence, which features The Cure frontman Robert Smith. The band now discussed the song with another Robert Smith collaborator, blink-182's Mark Hoppus, on Mark's Apple Music show After School Radio. Here's an excerpt: 

Mark Hoppus: Your second single is "How Not to Drown," who has Robert Smith on it. How did that come about? 

Lauren Mayberry: A man that you have known in your time.

Mark Hoppus: Yes, definitely. That's one of the highlights of my career was having Robert Smith on a Blink song, so I'm interested to see how it came about with you guys. 

Lauren Mayberry: Our manager called us one day and was like, "Guys, I don't know how I've done this, but I've accidentally over-hustled something I didn't mean to." And he'd been talking to a friend who mentioned Robert Smith and Campbell, our manager, had said, "Well, maybe you could give me... Put me in touch with the manager, I'd love to pitch the guys, trying to get them on a tour support or something, years down the line." 

Lauren Mayberry: And then he got an email from Robert Smith that was like, "Campbell, I heard you were looking for me." And he was like, "What? What's happening?" We're all like huge, huge Cure fans, our manager included, so we were like, "Oh, now, what do we ask? What do we say?" And then we just sent him some songs, and he's just so, as you know, so nice, and I was shocked... not shocked that he was so nice and open to stuff, but he has every right to be an ass, and a lot of his contemporaries are, and he has chosen to take the path to be just a really cool, nice guy who's still interested in music and still creating, and... If the band is over after this, I'm happy. I'm more than happy, I was- 

Mark Hoppus: Have you seen his guitar rig that he tours with? It is a tiny, tiny Rowland student practice amp and a pedal board with six BOSS pedals, like the most basic, Guitar Center, I just learned how to play guitar, and my parents said I could spend $500 at Guitar Center. That's his whole setup. No, seriously, I'll text you a photo that we took when Blink played a tour with The Cure. Well, it wasn't a tour, it was a festival show, but yeah, I was just amazed, this amazing guitar sound, huge, iconic guitar tone is literally just a Rowland practice amp and some BOSS pedals, which just goes to show, it's not the tool, it's the carpenter. 

Martin Doherty: He's a genius. I mean, I'm stating the obvious, but even now he was so... Every intricacy in the record, he stayed involved. Once he got involved, he stayed involved. He was... he had loads of comments on the mixes, loads of thoughts and loads of really great insight. And, of course he says, now that I've done the vocal, he could clearly hear that we had some tribute... Not... We're obsessed with The Cure. Disintegration is my favorite album. I wouldn't be in this band if it wasn't for his music. And we had this on "How Not to Drown," there was already this song... this guitar that sounded like Robert Smith, and he kind of sent a message and been like, "Do you want me to play on this? Do you want to just go to the source instead of trying to rip me off?" 

Martin Doherty: And of course I just about lost my mind at that point, but he... I think my overwhelming memory from the collaboration was that we asked him and then we didn't hear anything for a while, and we all just figured, it's over, at least Robert Smith emailed us. That's the level that I was on at that point. And then on Halloween, no joke, we just got this email being like, "Here's my vocal. Let me know what you think." I'm not like brave enough to admit that there was tears in my eyes that night, because it was quite emotional. And this felt like such a special moment. 

Lauren Mayberry: Like the dark lord has, has risen on this day. This is the most on-brand Robert Smith thing ever, to send a spooky demo just for the drama of it, is I've had this for a week, but they'll like it if I do it on this date. 

Mark Hoppus: He probably waited for Halloween.

Posted by Craig at 12:56 PM

Monday, June 7, 2021

Robert Smith reflects on The Cure

From Noise11:

CHVRCHES and Robert Smith join Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 to discuss their new collaboration “How Not To Drown”.

CHVRCHES tell Zane how the collaboration came to be, what it was like to work with one of their major musical influences, and the emotional experience of hearing Robert Smith on a CHVRCHES song.

Robert Smith talks to Zane about how he approaches collaborations, and provides an update on when fans can expect new music from The Cure.

Robert Smith Tells Apple Music About Collaborating With Other Artists Like CHVRCHES and Gorillaz…

I mean, I’m not quite sure now how many years I’ve… There’s not that many over the years, but I think once you do one, people sort of think, “Ooh, hang on.” I went through a period of just listening to a lot of different kinds of music, and I was really intrigued by the idea of me trying something else without taking the band with me, just doing something. I’ve never liked the idea of doing things on my own, like a solo artist. I’ve always railed against it because I like the idea of a band. I think it kind of suits my character and it’s much more comfortable to have… It’s like, “Us against the world.” That sort of mentality. I’ve never wanted to kind of step away from that. But as I got more confident, I suppose, maybe starting about 10 years ago, I just thought, “Well, rather than take the band with me whenever we do these kind of weird things…” I started doing some weird things. This isn’t one of them, obviously. This is not a weird thing by any means. But yeah, it allows me just to kind of try other things. And I mean, I’ve only done things with people that I really like a lot. So, unfortunately, it’s one of the hardest things saying no to people, because sometimes there are people send me stuff and I do really like it and I like them, but I think, “This isn’t going to work.” I think the collaborations that I’ve done in the past, very few of them, I can’t really think off the top of my head, have been collaborative in the sense that there’s someone else singing with me. I think that’s what made the difference. I mean, with Damon, he was just kind of burbling away in the background. I didn’t know he was there. This is very different because, I mean, it’s Lauren singing and then I’m kind of like… So it’s more of a duet. It’s a kind of old fashioned sort of way of doing things.

Robert Smith Previews Forthcoming Music…

Probably in about six weeks time I’ll be able to say when everything’s coming out and what we’re doing next year and everything. So it’s at that point where I’m finishing up stuff. The reason I was doing something on my own was for exactly the same reason I was doing collaborations; I’ve always wanted to do an hour’s worth of noise, and I didn’t want it… The Cure, you wait 10 years and then we bring out an album that’s just noise. So it was just like, “No.” I mean, apart from the… That was me doing the rest of the band. That, “No,” was a band no. So I’ve been just having fun with that really. And so we were doing two albums and one of them’s very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn’t. And they’re both very close to being done. I just have to decide who’s going to mix them. That’s really all I’ve got left to do. So yeah.

Robert Smith Tells Apple Music About Nearly Not Showing Up For The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ceremony…

I mean, we did actually discuss it for weeks and weeks and weeks when it came up. I mean, I always… At the start of the process, I was completely against the idea of us accepting. I thought, “I want to be the…” I thought, “No, I don’t want that admiration from people that I don’t know.” It doesn’t really matter to me. But then I was kind of like… And we talked it through, and I came around and I thought… Well, honestly, the ex-members of the band were going to go anyway, and I thought, “Well, they’re going to turn up, I may as well turn up, and we may as well play, and we may as well make a point. It’s why we’re there.” And we actually turned it into something which I was really proud of. I thought we did really well, actually, on the night. And so I was pleased about the whole thing. There’s something about it which is kind of silly. But it’s okay. I don’t think I aspired to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when I started with The Cure. The fact that other artists reference us a lot, and particularly artists that I enjoy, is by far and away the best thing that can happen to you as an artist is that other people doing what you do appreciating what you do, and in turn inspiring them.Because for me, when I look back to when I started and the people that I was inspired by, I was lucky enough to meet a couple of them. And it meant everything to me. So I still have that in me. I still feel that I’m responsible in some way to kind of keep this going.And it’s always, in the main, The Cure have kind of… Even though we’ve done really well, we’ve kind of existed outside of the mainstream as much as possible, which has been a choice, because I’ve never really wanted to… We’ve played the game when we needed to, but we’ve never really kind of whole-heartedly gone for it. But I like the idea of people succeeding on their own terms. That’s always been the thing that I admire most about other artists, regardless of what they do or how they do it. I think if they do it and they really mean it, then that’s everything.

CHVRCHES Tell Apple Music About Collaborating with Robert Smith on “How Not To Drown.”…

Lauren: Well, it was a song that we had already been writing for the record, and then our manager had been technically sniffing about trying to see if maybe The Cure were going to tour again and maybe we could try and get a support slot or something. So he was like, “I wonder if somebody could put me in touch? How this would happen? How would we ask for this?” And then he got in touch with Robert and the conversations kind of started from there. And then we sent a bunch of songs over and you were kind enough to listen to them, and we had to figure out where we might be able to collaborate and where there would be space to do something really interesting and special. And hopefully that’s what we did. I feel like that’s what we did.

Martin: Genuinely, please, close your ears, Robert, I wouldn’t be in a band if it wasn’t for Disintegration and Pornography. They’re the two greatest albums of all time. So when Robert got back to us and said that he was interested in collaborating, we thought that it would be… We never truly thought that it would come to fruition. And this is no word of a lie, after it had gone quiet for a little while, we get this demo out of the blue, on Halloween no less. From Robert. With him singing. And it was everything that we hoped it would be and more. And so the process continued.

Martin From CHVRCHES Tells Apple Music About His Emotional Reaction Hearing Robert Smith on a CHVRCHES Song…

It was like a more intense version of the electricity that I heard the first time I heard Lauren singing on one of our beats. It was like I’d gone right back to the first day of being in a band again. And it was that feeling bottled up and intensified. But I know it’s so hard for me to speak… I’m so embarrassed to say it in front of Robert, but I can’t overstate how much of an influence The Cure are on my music, on me as a producer and me as a writer. And so that one moment, it was emotional, and it was really intense. And then after a few listens, I was able to disconnect a little bit, but at first it wasn’t easy.

Lauren From CHVRCHES Tells Apple Music That The Title Of Their New Album Was A Band Name They Didn’t Use…

We were talking about this recently that we had the album title before we started writing, which we’ve never had before. And it’s weird to think… Because it was a band name that we didn’t use. We had a big list of band names, some really terrible. So every time someone complains about the actual band name, I’m like, “It could be f-king worse, guys. It could be a lot worse.”But yeah, so we had this idea to write off of that. And I do wonder what it would have sounded like if we hadn’t all lived through this thing that we’ve all had to live through. And I do think, yeah, being locked inside with your own thoughts and nowhere to go and nothing to distract you from that is a horrible thing, but a good writing workshop. Once you survive it, you’re like, “Oh, that was probably good to not be able to leave when I got uncomfortable.”But I don’t know. I think, for me, the thing that… The only thing I’ve ever regretted about anything we’ve ever done is if it doesn’t feel like it’s been fully honest or that you were performing something rather than doing it. And I think this one, it’s honest, for better or worse.

Posted by Craig at 1:39 PM

SUE's Top 100 Songs of 1989

 The Cure have 7 songs on Slicing Up Eyeballs list of the Top 100 Songs of 1989: 

#5 Pictures of You 

#18 Fascination Street

#28 Lovesong

#31 Plainsong 

#48 Lullaby 

#60 Disintegration 

#93 Untitled

Posted by Craig at 1:30 PM

Chvrches say Robert Smith was always their first-choice collaborator, “living or dead”

From NME: Chvrches have spoken about their new single collaboration with The Cure‘s Robert Smith, revealing that he was always their top choice among musicians alive or dead. 

The band, who are this week’s NME Big Read cover stars, said that the slim chance their hero would agree to sing on one of their songs was a pinch-me moment in their decade-long career. Singer Lauren Mayberry recalled to NME that she and bandmate Martin Doherty got drunk on wine one Halloween and received an email from Smith containing his vocal recordings for what would become their collaborative track, ‘How Not To Drown‘. 

She described the moment as “the most Cure-lore thing to ever happen”, since it fell on arguably the gothiest day of the year. Doherty said that he could have been offered “a collaboration with anyone living or dead – fucking Prince, fucking Beethoven” and he “would still choose Robert Smith”.

“It’s mental!” Mayberry continued of the band’s luck securing a feature by the goth rock icon, also enthusing about her band’s 10-year longevity. “When I have to fill in my job on a form, I think about this. I never thought I would get to do this,” she said. Doherty, meanwhile, said there are “occasional moments, like the Robert thing” or playing before New Order at Glastonbury in 2016, that “[make you] go: ‘Fucking hell! In 2012, I was so broke, I was ready to give up on being a professional musician’.” 

Elsewhere in the interview Mayberry said the lyrics of the collaboration are about “the only time I ever thought about quitting the band”.

Posted by Craig at 1:20 PM

New music from Daryl Bamonte

Posted by Craig at 1:17 PM

Friday, June 4, 2021

Robert Smith says The Cure have recorded two new albums

From Louder:

 As Robert Smith and Chvrches launch new collaboration How Not To Drown, Smith reveals there are two new albums from The Cure almost ready to go

Robert Smith has revealed that two new albums by The Cure have been recorded. Smith made the remarks during an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, where he was interviewed alongside Chvrches about their new collaboration, How Not To Drown, which was released yesterday.  

"Probably in about six weeks time I'll be able to say when everything's coming out and what we're doing next year and everything," said Smith. "So we were doing two albums and one of them's very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn't. And they're both very close to being done. I just have to decide who's going to mix them. That's really all I've got left to do."

In the interview, Chvrches reveal how the collaboration with Smith came about. "It was a song that we had already been writing for the record," said singer Lauren Mayberry, "and then our manager had been technically sniffing about trying to see if maybe The Cure were going to tour again and maybe we could try and get a support slot or something.

Posted by Craig at 1:51 PM 0 comments

Johnny Marr on Robert Smith

Posted by Craig at 1:48 PM

Thursday, June 3, 2021

The Cure’s Robert Smith says forthcoming ‘noise album’ will be a solo release

 From NME:

The Cure frontman Robert Smith has further alluded to the release of a noise album in a new interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe.

Smith featured in the interview alongside CHVRCHES, having just teamed up to release the single ‘How Not To Drown’, ahead of the band’s new album ‘Screen Violence’. Speaking to Lowe, the singer said he didn’t want to release an “hour’s worth of noise” as the band’s first record in more than a decade, so it will be a solo release.

 “I’ve always wanted to do an hour’s worth of noise, and I didn’t want it… The Cure, you wait ten years and then we bring out an album that’s just noise. So it was just like, ‘No’ – that was me doing the rest of the band. That ‘no’ was a band no. So I’ve been just having fun with that really,” Smith explained.

Smith had previously spoken to NME about the so-called “hour of noise”, along with the arrival of two new Cure albums. The singer reaffirmed these two albums elsewhere in the new interview, mentioning that one record is notably darker than the other.

Smith also told Lowe that he will have more updates soon. “Probably in about six weeks’ time I’ll be able to say when everything’s coming out and what we’re doing next year and everything … We were doing two albums and one of them’s very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn’t,” he said.

“And they’re both very close to being done. I just have to decide who’s going to mix them. That’s really all I’ve got left to do.”

In addition to his collaboration with CHVRCHES, over the past year Smith has also teamed up with Gorillaz for the track ‘Strange Timez’ and Deftones for a remix of their song ‘Teenager’.

Posted by Craig at 2:09 PM

Chvrches & Robert Smith - How Not To Drown

Before the video premiere, the band held a pre-party and called Robert on the phone (the call is around 11:10 in).
Posted by Craig at 11:42 AM

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

CURÆTION-25 is now streaming

From American Songwriter:

The Cure’s acclaimed 2018 performance in London is now available to stream, exclusively with The Coda Collection, through Amazon Prime Video. The performance, titled CURÆTION-25: From There to Here | From Here to There, is a more than 2 hour performance with 28 iconic The Cure songs.

The English gothic rock band became members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. They’ve released 13 albums and over 30 singles, as well as sold over 30 million albums worldwide, making them a staple in the rock and alternative punk scenes since the ’80s. 

 The film was captured on the final night of the 2018 Meltdown Festival, which is an arts festival curated by The Cure’s frontman Robert Smith. The set spans four decades of The Cure’s albums and songs from all 13 of the band’s studio albums. From 1979 to 2018, the band first performs songs in chronological order, and then a different set in reverse chronological order, hence the performance’s fitting name.

The Cure’s Robert Smith addressed the unique nature of this set, saying, “This Meltdown performance is memorable for many reasons. The format we chose gave the band a unique opportunity to illuminate and celebrate the kaleidoscopic musical trip we are all on, in a very special venue in a very special year.”

The setlist includes hits “Just Like Heaven,” “Lovesong,” “High,” “The End Of The World” and “The Hungry Ghost.”

The Coda Collection, launched earlier this year, is a subscription streaming service (coupled with Amazon Prime Video) that shows music documentaries and concert films that explore new perspectives on music.

Posted by Craig at 2:36 PM

Lauren & Martin on how much this project meant to them

Posted by Craig at 2:16 PM

Chvrches and Robert on the Zane Lowe show

Posted by Craig at 12:10 PM

Thursday, May 13, 2021

Reeves gives a Cure update

There are plans to do "something" later this year, and plans to do "something" all next year. They recorded enough material for two albums. Just gotta figure out what songs go with other songs.
Posted by Craig at 2:54 PM

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Robert performs a Faith set

"Robert Smith performed a 3-song 'Faith' set from his home for '24 Hour Improv' to benefit Poverty Alleviation Charities' Letters To Santa program."
Posted by Craig at 3:33 PM
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