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| "The Walk" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Single bythe Cure | ||||
| B-side |
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| Released | June 1983[1] | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 3:33 | |||
| Label | Fiction | |||
| Songwriters | ||||
| Producer | Steve Nye | |||
| The Cure singles chronology | ||||
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| Music video | ||||
| "The Walk" onYouTube | ||||
"The Walk" is a song by the English rock bandthe Cure, released as a stand-alone single in June 1983. It later appeared on their second compilation albumJapanese Whispers. It was recorded when the band was briefly reduced to the two founder membersRobert Smith andLol Tolhurst upon the departure of bassistSimon Gallup in mid-1982, following the end of the band's tour in support of their fourth studio album,Pornography (1982). According to Tolhurst, they choseSteve Nye as producer at the time due to his work on the fifth and final studio albumTin Drum (1981) by the Englishnew wave bandJapan.[5] Tolhurst later commented: "It was the first time we had worked with a 'proper' producer, as opposed to doing production with an engineer that we really liked. […] He was able to make electronic instruments sound more natural, and that's what we wanted."[5]
One of the threeB-sides of the single is "Lament", which is a re-recording of a promo single released in late 1982 for theFlexipop magazine. Unlike the earlier version which had been recorded withSiouxsie and the Banshees bassistSteven Severin, which was garbled and experimental, the lyrics are understandable and the music has a different composition.[6]
Released as a single in June 1983, "The Walk" was something of a commercial breakthrough for the group with regard to their singles output, peaking at number 12 and giving them their first entry into theUK top 20.[7] It was also the first of their 17 consecutive top 20 hits on the Irish chart between 1983 and 1992.[citation needed]
The Cure recorded a completely new version of "The Walk" for theirremix albumMixed Up (1990), as the original master tapes could not be located. They later recorded an acoustic version for their compilation album,Greatest Hits (2001).
In a retrospective review forAllMusic, Stewart Mason called the song "an anomaly in the Cure's career, their one true entry in the then-hotsynth pop sweepstakes based on sequenced keyboards and chattering drum machine fills and featuring a naggingly catchy synth hook in place of a traditional chorus." Though he called the single "enjoyable enough single on its own slightly dated merits", Mason noted that it "sounds uncomfortably close to a complete ripoff ofNew Order's 'Blue Monday,' a fact that probably has as much to do with the limited abilities of early sequencers as it does with the phenomenal impact of that pioneering dance-rock single."[8] Ranking it as the Cure's 20th best song in 2025,Mojo wrote that it "could've been just a whimsical one-off in the band's otherwise doomy discography. Yet The Walk unexpectedly, established the happy/sad aesthetic of the many smash singles that followed."[9]
7"
12"
US mini-LP
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