“Never had such a visceral reaction to a cover”: the band that influenced how The Cure perform their own songs
Few covers ever possess the power to be better than the original. Some might reinterpret the magic in a new light, creating a different feel and changing the entire tone. Even fewer, however, have the power to change how the original artist performs the song, delivering a reimagination so poignant that it changes the way they approach the track they originally created. But then again, The Cure never really did anything by the book.
While it’s incredibly difficult for any artist to cover a well-established, beloved song and do it well, something about The Cure’s music heightens these challenges further, making most interpretations seem wildly off the mark or poor versions of songs that are already perfect in their original form. Still, a select few have actually mastered the art, taking the band’s typically dark and melancholy demeanour and giving it a unique touch.
While it would be easy to separate the good from the bad, from Phoebe Bridgers’ enchanting cover of ‘Friday I’m In Love’ to The Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘A Night Like This’, one was so impactful it actually changed the way the band’s frontman, Robert Smith, approached their own performances. This was, of course, Dinosaur Jr’s famous cover of the band’s ‘Just Like Heaven’, which amplified the immediacy of the original with an unmistakably neo-blues sound.
Smith immediately fell in love with this version, saying, “It was so passionate. It was fantastic. I’ve never had such a visceral reaction to a cover before or since.” In fact, he loved the song so much he even once admitted it altered the way they perform the song live, adding: “I love Dinosaur Jr’s version of the song, and they’ve influenced how we play it.” Interestingly, Smith also once described their version as “the best pop song The Cure has ever done”, which is a particularly interesting read considering how much Dinosaur Jr gave the track more weight, pushing it away from anything resembling pop.
Perhaps that’s what Smith was referring to, however, when he gave it such a label. After all, many would regard that statement as slightly off-kilter, given the many Cure songs that seem closer to adopting those conventions than ‘Just Like Heaven’. Still, the accessibility and ambiguity of the track itself might lean into those tropes more naturally than others, making other reimaginations feel akin to approaching a blank canvas.
While ‘Just Like Heaven’ isn’t the easiest song to sing or perform, it does also exude a certain simplicity, making it one of the safer options for other artists to choose a song to make their own. Dinosaur Jr would have likely taken anything in their discography and made it great, but staking their claim on something as sound-defining as ‘Just Like Heaven’ felt like low-hanging fruit and a quick win for a band trying to prove they were great enough to take on The Cure—which, evidently, they were.
And this immediate enamourment on Smith’s part can no doubt be heard when they play the song during live performances. While it’s difficult to capture the essence of the recorded version, the heaviness of their live interpretations centralises everything great about Dinosaur Jr’s copy, complete with everything that made the song so powerful in the first place, with Smith’s signature impassioned delivery giving it that overall feeling of raw intensity.
