‘Wrong Number’: the forgotten song that signified The Cure’s change in direction
When you have been around for as long as The Cure have, 49 years and counting, you are bound to have taken a few twists and turns along the way in your career. They may be most famous for their post-punk, new-wave anthems like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, ‘The Lovecats’, and ‘Friday I’m in Love’, but not all of their work has followed the same path.
Though their more upbeat and popular numbers might have clear and direct descendants in the pop-punk movement, a lot of their output has had a darker edge as well, with gothic elements given to appear in both the music they make and the lyrics that frontman Robert Smith writes. Owing to his deep and abiding love of romantic poetry, gothic works, and ancient and classic literature, Smith has a rich poetic sensibility when writing about the human condition.
In 1997, the group showed off the full range of their output – emotionally, stylistically and musically – with their second greatest hits collection, Galore: The Singles 1987–1997. Comprising 17 singles from the last ten years, including ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’, ‘Lovesong’ and ‘Strange Attraction’, the collection culminated with a new single, recorded especially for the release.
‘Wrong Number’ saw the band breaking into new territory, or at least, parts of the band, anyway. Only Robert Smith and Jason Cooper contributed to the song, while long-time David Bowie guitarist Reeves Gabrels lent his guitar to the track. He would later go on to join the band full-time following some further session and live work with them in 2012.
Whilst ‘Wrong Number’ is still recognisably a Cure track, it dabbles with dance beats and trip-hop tropes which were popular at the time, and has plenty of electronic elements sparking away under the attack of Gabrels gnarling, grunging guitar and Smiths’ howling voice which takes it to a place the band hadn’t gone before. Gabrels’ full-time bandleader Bowie was travelling in a similar direction at the time, too, with his drum-and-bass-drenched tracks ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ and ‘Little Wonder’.
Speaking to Jam TV in 1997, Smith admitted: “I find a lot of dance music is cerebral in a funny way – just trying to use different combinations of sounds and loops and those kind of things. I got very into the hypnotic sound of seven or eight-minute dance tracks.”
“It’s very fluid”, he said of the new song ‘Wrong Number’. “It doesn’t have verse-chorus as much; the stuff we started off doing this summer with the band I’ve kind of since disregarded, and I’ve put in a studio at home. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff on my own just using loops, and samples and things. It’s taken quite a change in direction over the last two months and become very kind of ethereal. And it was very kind of rock about two or three months ago.”
When The Cure released their next album in 2000, Bloodflowers, they were not leaning as far into the dance and electronic sounds that they had incorporated into ‘Wrong Number’, but the hypnotic, looping, fluidity, repetitive and free-form, free-flowing aspects of those styles which had so taken Smith’s interest in the first place can be found all over the album. Thankfully, they blended them with the darker, more interesting and introspective, more atmospheric and adventurous Gothic styles that they are such masters of, and which they truly perfected on 2024’s Songs of a Lost World.
