The Cure / Join the Dots: B-Sides and Rarities, 1978-2001 / 2004
Purple Haze
woozy, disoriented, urgent
This is The Cure's cover of Jimi Hendrix's psychedelic classic, recorded as a B-side. Robert Smith takes a song built on guitar-effects wizardry and vertigo-inducing wordplay and filters it through his own band's sensibility, testing whether the song's disorientation survives outside its original sonic context.
disorientation altered perception romantic infatuation as intoxication loss of control confusion between pleasure and distress
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses no one in particular, narrating his own confusion in real time; he's an unreliable narrator by design, since the entire point is that he cannot trust his own senses.
What happens
The song doesn't progress so much as circle: the speaker registers a change in his mental state, tries and fails to locate himself in space, time, and emotion, attributes his condition to a woman's effect on him, and breaks into a plea for help before the cycle repeats with the same confusion intensified.
How it's built
Three verses of near-identical shape (a haze image, a disorientation couplet, a question) separated by a short two-word cry for help, functioning almost like a chorus. The lack of a real bridge or resolution mirrors the lyric's refusal to resolve its own confusion — the song ends mid-spiral rather than concluding.
Section by section
First verse
The opening lines establish a shift in the speaker's mental state and a directive toward some vague sensory experience, gesturing outward toward the sky as if physical space itself has become unstable.},{
Second verse
“that girl put a spell”
The confusion is retroactively pinned to a romantic or sexual cause here, though the attribution feels almost like a guess rather than a certainty — the speaker seems as unsure about the source of his state as about the state itself.
Help me refrain
This bare plea interrupts the verses without elaboration, functioning less as a request for a specific kind of help than as a wordless expression of being overwhelmed.
Third verse
The disorientation intensifies from spatial confusion to temporal confusion, and the final question stretches the scale of the speaker's uncertainty from a single day to something apocalyptic, suggesting the haze has expanded to swallow all sense of continuity.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The titular haze stands in for both drug-induced and love-induced disorientation, letting the song stay ambiguous about whether the speaker is high, in love, or both.
- repetition
- The recurring plea functions as a release valve after each verse's escalating confusion, giving the song its emotional punctuation without offering an answer.
- rhetorical questions
- The speaker repeatedly asks unanswerable either/or questions about direction, emotion, and time, formally enacting the confusion the lyric describes.
Reading it
The most straightforward reading treats the haze as a stand-in for psychedelic drug use, with the sky-kissing gesture nodding to the transcendent claims often made for such experiences. A credible alternative reads the song purely as an account of infatuation so consuming it mimics intoxication — the woman's 'spell' causing the same vertigo a drug would. The lyric itself refuses to settle the question, and that ambiguity is arguably the whole point: the speaker cannot distinguish altered chemistry from altered feeling.
Context
This track is a cover of Jimi Hendrix's 1967 song, included on The Cure's rarities compilation rather than a studio album, indicating it was likely recorded as a B-side, radio session, or one-off tribute rather than a core part of their catalog. Robert Smith has spoken admiringly of Hendrix in various interviews, though I don't have reliable details on the specific circumstances of this particular recording.
Listen for
- how Smith's vocal delivery handles a lyric written for Hendrix's phrasing and guitar-centric arrangement
- whether The Cure's typical atmospheric production choices replace or echo Hendrix's original guitar effects
- the way the repeated plea is delivered — resigned, panicked, or almost playful
- any tonal shift between the verses' unease and the plea's more exposed vulnerability
About The Cure
The Cure are an English rock band formed in Crawley in 1976 by Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst (drums). As of 2026, the band's line-up comprises Smith, Simon Gallup (bass), Roger O'Donnell (keyboards), Jason Cooper (drums) and Reeves Gabrels (guitar).
1977 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue