With the discharge of their sixth studio LP, 1985’s The Head On The Door, The Treatment launched into the sluggish however regular industrial ascent which pulled them away from cult standing and elevated them to the very apex of worldwide rock stardom – a journey that may soak up classics akin to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Disintegration, and Want.
Hearken to the deluxe version of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me now.
Recorded by a dynamic new line-up that includes Robert Smith, drummer-turned-keyboardist Lol Tolhurst, and newly recruited drummer Boris Williams, in addition to two returning ex-members, guitarist Porl Thompson and bassist Simon Gallup, the atypically accessible The Head On The Door afforded The Treatment their first important mainstream success. Attracting a collection of rave evaluations on launch, the album went gold on either side of the Atlantic and yielded two of the band’s most enduring hit singles, “In Between Days” and “Close To Me.”
Although the following world tour continued till August 1986, Robert Smith had already been working up a recent batch of songs. Accordingly, over the winter of 1986, The Treatment returned to the studio for a collection of classes with Head… producer David M. Allen, and emerged, on Could 25, 1987, with their most formidable launch to this point: the coyly titled double-vinyl set Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.
Although The Treatment have been within the ascendency after The Head On The Door, releasing a 20-track, double-disc set operating for a difficult 75 minutes was nonetheless of venture. But there was methodology in Robert Smith’s insanity, for whereas Kiss Me… was sprawling and generally wilfully eclectic, it was additionally an excellent, “White Album”-esque affair which has since gone on to fascinate complete new generations of followers.
Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me relished taking possibilities. Few, for instance, would have envisaged Smith and co mastering wah-wah-drenched funk (“Hey You!!!”) or scoring a US membership hit with the sweaty, dancefloor-friendly “Hot Hot Hot,” but each have been among the many file’s triumphs. Ditto the decadent, Motown-inflected UK Prime 30 hit “Why Can’t I Be You?” which was promoted with a hilarious, Tim Pope-directed video of the band dressed as bears, bumblebees, and Morris dancers.
These audacious stylistic coups have been, admittedly, tempered by extra conventional Treatment fare, such because the moody, wracked “One More Time,” the looming, opium-laced dreaminess of “Snakepit” and the visceral, Pornography-esque “Shiver & Shake.” But the album arguably reached its pinnacle with the elegant “Just Like Heaven”: a wonderful slice of uplifting melancholy which additionally delivered The Treatment into the Prime 40 of the US Billboard Scorching 100 for the primary time.
Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me aggressively pursued its hit singles up the charts, peaking at No.6 within the UK and at No.35 on the Billboard 200, the place it earned the band their first platinum disc. Its spectacular efficiency set the bar excessive, however when the band returned in 1989 they got here touting one other creative triumph within the form of their goth-rock masterpiece, Disintegration.
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