A little research revealed that The Cure’s “Lullaby”, off of 1989’s Disintegration, is considered by many to be the band’s spookiest – or most Hallowe’enie – track. Not what I would have expected, but considering I’ve already posted the other usual suspects – “Burn” and “A Forest” – we’ll go with this for today’s holiday special.
And the official video is pretty creepy what with it featuring Robert Smith’s clown-fueled nightmares and lyrics about getting eaten by spiders; I guess I was thinking something a little more on the maniacal Bauhaus end of goth and not the Victorian ghost story type. But here we are. In bed. With Bob.
Technically, I already posted this one as part of their video series accompanying the Acoustic Hits release last Summer, but who’s that bother? No one! And if you’re like, “I’ve seen this”, just skip ahead to a near-infinite number of live recordings.
Last year, in addition to playing the whole of Songs Of A Lost World at the BBC Radio Theatre to mark that album’s release, they played a hits set that included this song:
This one comes from their 40th anniversary show at Hyde Park in London, released as part of Anniversary: 1978 – 2018 in 2019:
This comes from the same year, at Pinkpop festival in The Netherlands:
If those are a little too recent for you, here’s one from 2002 taken from the Trilogy live DVD collecting their performance of Pornography, Disintegration, and Bloodflowers in Berlin.
In May 1992 at London’s Kilburn National Ballroom:
On MTV Unplugged, recorded in 1991:
And an indeterminate date and location in 1990:
Somewhat surprisingly, there’s not that many noteworthy covers of the song. I mean, there’s probably plenty from sad goth types but not from artists I’d implicitly endorse with an embed. But there’s a couple! Here’s Editors with their predictably over the top version, which appeared as a b-side of An End Has A Start-era single “Push Your Head Towards The Air” in 2009. It also made its way into live sets – this vid comes from their March 2008 shows at Alexandra Palace in London.
Vancouver orch-folk outfit/guy Woodpigeon isn’t the most obvious artist to cover The Cure, but they contributed a quite nice version of the song for the 2016 indie artist tribute album Love Cats: A Tribute To The Cure.
And at this point, it’s not an omnibus post without a guitar cover/lesson video, so here’s one from Romain CNC.
