“The 13th” by The Cure

"The 13th" was the Cure's opening shot from Wild Mood Swings, their tenth album, issued on Fiction as the record's first single in April 1996, and it began as the barest of sketches. Bassist Simon Gallup explained that it was one of Robert Smith's songs, nicknamed "Two Chord Cool" because that's all it was. The band kept layering percussion onto it, shelving it and coming back for more, and Gallup himself called the result tacky and tongue-in-cheek.

Smith sang it, wrote the words and produced it, with the music credited to him, Gallup, Perry Bamonte, Jason Cooper and Roger O'Donnell; Jesús Alemañy and Sid Gauld supply the trumpets. It reached 15 in Britain and number two in Hungary, yet the band played it only a handful of times on the Swing Tour and have left it in the drawer ever since.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.