Deep Cut Friday: ‘Push’ by the Cure

Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.

On later Cure albums, Robert Smith’s songs started getting longer, and so did the instrumental intros, with the band frequently establishing a groove for a minute or two before Smith begins to sing. On “Endsong” from last year’s Songs of a Lost World, Smith doesn’t open his mouth until more than six minutes into the track.

1985’s The Head on the Door was the Cure’s last album made up almost entirely of fairly succinct pop songs, with no lengthy epics. There is, however, a very long instrumental intro on “Push,” which opens with a bright surging guitar riff. For over two minutes, the band bashes through sections of the song that sound like a first verse, a chorus, and a second verse, without any vocals. And then, when the part that feels like a chorus comes around the second time, Smith finally belts out “Go, go, go! Go, go, go! Push him away!” In an album with college radio classics like “In Between Days” and “Close to Me,” a half instrumental song contains one of The Head on the Door’s most irresistible hooks, sung only once. 

A 2006 deluxe edition of The Head on the Door features several instrumental demos that Smith made with a drum machine in December 1984. The brief “Push” demo serves largely to illustrate how much Boris Williams, the Thompson Twins drummer who joined the Cure in 1984, helped bring the song to life with bombastic tom-tom fills.

In concert, “Push”’s unusual structure created an opportunity for fans to take the lead. In 2018, the Cure celebrated its 40th anniversary as a band with a concert in London’s Hyde Park. And when the band played the instrumental first chorus of “Push,” you can hear a large segment of the audience start belting out the lyrics: “Go, go, go! Go, go, go! Push him away!”

Three more essential Cure deep album cuts:

“10:15 Saturday Night”

The opening track on the Cure’s 1978 debut Three Imaginary Boys set the tone for the band’s career, with Smith making a teenager’s disappointing weekend feel achingly grim and dramatic: “Waiting for the telephone to ring and I’m wondering where she’s been.”

“Shake Dog Shake”

Andy Anderson, who played drums on 1984’s The Top, died of cancer in February 2019. A month later, the Cure were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the band kicked off their set at the ceremony with “Shake Dog Shake” from The Top before focusing on a few more famous songs. 

“Prayers for Rain”

The ominous Disintegration centerpiece “Prayers for Rain” is one of the many Cure songs where both Smith and Simon Gallup double up on bass to create an especially heavy low end, with backmasked guitar and piano adding an eerie atmosphere.