Update (03/10/15): Listen to the new version of 'Please' on the BBC Pete Tong show here. It starts at 2:07:30.(Thanks James and HolyItsaRaccoon)
"Premonition and Pitchfork have announced that Paul Hartnoll's new album, "8:58", to be released on March 30th, will feature Robert Smith. That album will include a reworking of the song "Please" that had already been released in 2007. It will also include a studio version of the cover version of A Forest by The Unthanks that you mentioned on CoF on Dec 20, 2013. Full track list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
From the Biography section on the '8:58' website:
"Elsewhere there are intriguing, twilit collaborations with Northumbrian folk clan The Unthanks, sepulchral singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt, folk singer Lisa Knapp, and Robert Smith of The Cure — the latter on a newly-rediscovered and superior version of Paul’s 2007 single ‘Please’.
“There are plenty of beats,” he adds, “But I wanted to exercise my more compositional side too, and bring in a witchy, ‘Wicker Man’ aspect.”
Key to the latter — and echoing Paul’s collaboration with Robert Smith — is The Unthanks’ astonishing ensemble performance on a cover of ‘A Forest’, one of Paul’s all-time favourite songs from the early days of The Cure. He’d always wanted to work with The Unthanks. “When listening to their song ‘I Wish’, was struck with the idea that ‘A Forest’ would suit The Unthanks’ unnerving pastoral-gothic voices if slowed down.” Paul thought of funeral marches and Kraftwerk’s ‘Looking Glass’, and techno’s hidden pagan undertow. After all, why do both ravers and Morrismen wave sticks in the air and dance in the summertime...?
After building the track he traveled up to record their voices among the unique acoustics of The Unthanks’ “folk barn” near Newcastle, just before Christmas 2013. “Big stone house in the middle of nowhere, pot of tea with a proper tea cosy, lovely warm welcome... it was everything I could have wished for,” he remembers. “They sat on the floor and sang the song for me in really low voices — I was nearly in tears. And the studio was like a Victorian museum of musical curiosities with weird instruments on display and bunting everywhere. I loved every moment of it.” (Thanks Barry)
