The Cure
I first checked in with the The Cure at the relatively elderly age of 15, around the time the remix album Mixed Up came out. I was playing Talisman(!) with some friends and my friend Mike Lindley put his copy on the stereo. He was enthusiastic about it, but I don’t remember being too fussed until the 12” version of Fascination Street lumbered balefully out of the speakers. The song felt so heavy, unlike anything I’d heard before.
But I wasn’t immediately hooked. At the time, I had just become head over heels in love with classical music, and rock seemed a bit down-market to me. Even setting snobbery aside, I discovered the Cure was championed by other people in my social circle of whom I was not especially fond. It took me months to get past this pettiness; luckily I gradually succumbed.
Although The Cure makes to me now sense now as an angsty but reasonably poppy act, to a lamentably naive teenager everything of theirs sounded cosmically confronting, be it the lachrymose album Faith or the highly commercial record Head on the Door. A consequence of this is that the Cure catalogue up to 1992 has remained sufficiently vivid to me that more than 30 years later I’m writing about them.
Here follows a commentary on select works by the group. Is there anything a Cure neophyte should know before I dive in? Well, the band is comprised of singer/songwriter/guitarist Robert Smith, and an evolving roster of regular, irregular, and highly irregular bandmates. In the public consciousness (at least for my age group) the band’s style is considered goth rock. Goths certainly like(d) listening to the band, although - as is universal with goth groups - Robert Smith has always denied it.
Boys Don’t Cry (1979)
This was a US compilation of the band’s first LP, Three Imaginary Boys, with adjacent singles added and filler tracks excised. We could choose to be indignant about record messing with a nascent group’s artistic vision, but in this instance the interference made for a better product.
The style is snappy if slightly weedy post-punk, and my favourite songs are Fire in Cairo and Three Imaginary Boys. As an aside, this album was on heavy rotation during the winter I turned 17. Other associations from this time: the taste of Montana “Blenheimer” Reisling casked wine (class!) and Mahler’s 6th Symphony. Good times? Well, “times”, certainly…
17 Seconds (1980)
A less chirpy and more sonically focused followup. Arguably the quintessential difficult second album in that it’s difficult to listen to. The highlight is most certainly the group’s signature song A Forest, but the other tracks are equally bleakly beautiful. Standouts for me are In Your House and M. Shout out, too to Matthieu Hartley for his understated organ work. Words I’d use to describe this album are: tight, spare, and claustrophobic.
Faith (1981)
Despite the fact it’s miserable as all get-out, I find this album quite agreeable: it’s got a sort of languorous, consumptive mood. There’s only eight songs, but each is (or at least feels like) five minutes long, so it all works out to a full album length. “There’s nothing left but faith!” wails Bob at the end. Faith’s lyrics felt intensely profound to teenage me, but now I like it more for the remote, cathedral-like production sound. What else… I love the (auto?) double-tracked bass on Other Voices, and the strumming-in-wilderness guitar on The Drowning Man. The Funeral Party is a bit cloying, and Doubt is a bit too jarringly jangly, but overall it’s a very decent, “funereal” disc. It’s worth mentioning the similarly bleak Charlotte Sometimes, a non-album single released after Faith.
Pornography (1982)
The height of the group having-a-bad-time-of-it phase. I find it hard to listen to now; not so much because of its nihilism, which is pretty insubstantial (I think Smith was in more fertile territory with his earlier interest in Camus), but because the album sounds like output of a group of men who are in a bit of a rut psychologically.
Japanese Whispers (1983)
This for me is the most interesting point of the band’s career, so I hope you’ll indulge me in a bit of explication. Between Pornograpy in 1982, and the The Top in 1984, The Cure’s release activity was limited to three singles. Things had gotten a bit complicated: bassist Simon Gallup had been ejected after the Pornography tour, and Smith hadn’t replaced him, so touring ceased. While keeping The Cure on life support, Smith took on extracurricular activities: guitar duties for Siouxsie and the Banshees, and a side project, The Glove, with the Banshees’ Steve Severin.
I wouldn’t mention any of this if not for the fact that the songs The Cure did manage to record and release during the period were a radical change in style. Consider Pornography’s sole single, The Hanging Garden, with its thunderous wall (or wail) of sound. And now consider the next single, Let’s Go to Bed, with its playful mood and jaunty synth arrangement. This abrupt change must have shocking for anyone keen on “miserable” Cure. The stylistic break only continued with following release, the more energetic and Blue Monday-apeing single The Walk. The playfulness then reached perhaps a career apogee with the faux jazz nonsense of The Lovecats. Subsequently these singles and their B sides were compiled into a release christened Japanese Whispers.
Although it’s not a “proper” album, Japanese Whispers is my favourite Cure release. The singles are of course fun, but I absolutely adore the B sides Just One Kiss, The Upstairs Room, Lament, and The Dream. In some ways the more melancholy of these songs wouldn’t be out of place on Faith, but the use of drum machines and synths gives them a brightness and openness that earlier songs lacked. And although the synths are indelibly 80s, the way that they’re deployed is idiosyncratic enough to not feel too dated, at least to me. Added up, Japanese Whispers stokes more affection in me than any other Cure record.
The Top (1984)
In 1984 Smith assembled a new band to record The Top, and the subsequent tour signalled that the group was fully resuscitated.
The Top shares the psychedelic mood of the Banshees’ album Hyaena from the same year (and for which Smith was the group’s guitarist). The result is an album where there’s no real dud songs, but it doesn’t sum up to a cohesive whole. That said, I particularly like the agreeably weird Bananafishbones, and the extremely odd Piggy in the Mirror, and The Wailing Wall has some good atmosphere.
Head on the Door (1985)
The Head on the Door marked the beginning of a period we might call “mature Cure”. The band’s personnel would be largely constant for the next four albums - the longest period of continuity the group enjoyed. Stylistically the psychedelic excesses of The Top were dialled back in favour of more radio-friendly songs. There’s still plenty of variety, and this time the songs work well together. Better still, the album was winningly commercial - arguably the most intentionally commercial album of the band’s career, though its performance would be surpassed by later albums (including the gloomy Disintegration - something that couldn’t have been anticipated in 1985). My favourite tracks are the flamenco The Blood, Six Different Ways, the John Hughes movie-esque Push, and the fuzz bass hook of Screw.
Disintegration (1989)
I’m going to skip over 1987’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, which has some good songs but was a bit too long for its own good. (I’m not sure I’ve ever managed to listen to it all the way through in one sitting…) One thing to note though is Kiss Me x 3 marked the end of the period started with Japanese Whispers. By 1988 Smith was in a very different mood: about to turn 30, he feared his creative peak was now behind him. He set about trying to prove himself wrong by composing an album that expressed how he felt about things (sort of like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, only in Smith’s case it’s What’s Glooming On). Happily for us Smith managed to come to his own party, as it were, and produced a sprawling masterpiece of sad longing called Disintegration. Unlike Pornography, where the misery was too mawkish, Disintegration features more tastefully restrained wallowage. The first half is near perfect; the songs on side B are a bit samey, but the album does stick the emotional landing.
Wish (1992)
I remember the excitement at my school when Wish came out (at least among us girlfriendless sensitive types): it was the first album released since we’d become fans. On mature reflection it’s a fairly ho-hum record, notable only for being Cure-gone-grunge. There’s also an irritating tweeness to it, esp on To Wish Impossible Things. The success of the radio-friendly single Friday I’m in Love was a bit discomforting for my frenemies, but it’s nice that Smith has an evergreen golden oldies radio hit. My favourite track from the period is the B side This Twilight Garden, a beautiful piece of melancholy that recalls earlier glories. I’m mystified why the song didn’t make it onto the album, or indeed why it wasn’t released as an A side.
The Cure played a concert in my home town in middish 1992 and I almost could have gone, only my father forbade me because he feared I’d be beaten up by gang members(?!). There was no convincing him how embarrassingly off the mark that assessment was. Jeez Dad! Anyway, apparently the gig was amaazing, but in adulthood I’m not too fussed, really.
Afterwards
After Wish the Cure continued releasing, with lengthier hiatuses. When Wish’s successor Wild Mood Swings came out in 1996, I had become an adult (of sorts) and was exploring quite different areas of music: I didn’t listen to it until maybe 15, 20 years later. It’s an interesting record with Smith returning somewhat to the whimsy of mid-80s Cure, but the results weren’t particularly affecting. It was the first sign of a significant creative decline, rather than misfires (eg The Top, Kiss Me x3). 2000’s Bloodflowers was a return to bleakness, framed as a third part of a retroactively framed “dark trilogy” of albums, along with Pornography and Disintegration. The trilogy was performed in concert in its entirety on a subsequent tour (that’s a grim night out!).
Releases have continued into the 21st century, the latest being 2024’s unengagingly titled Songs for a Lost World. Whenever I listen to these songs I don’t hear anything very essential, sadly. That’s not to say others don’t get a lot out of them though.
Summation
If my favourite album is Japanese Whispers, identifying The Cure’s best albums is tricky. Objectively I think I’d say it’s Disintegration the best, though 17 Seconds and Faith are more raw and perhaps more interesting. If you’re not interested in misery then The Head on the Door is your best bet.
Robert Smith is a very singular fellow. In my Bauhaus treatise I compared the group to Joy Division - perhaps unfairly - because I felt it was instructive. I could repeat the dose with The Cure with similar results, but I don’t think that would highlight much of interest. It’s more interesting to compare The Cure to Depeche Mode, who were similarly popular and angsty. But although you can argue that songwriter Martin Gore is a reasonable analogue for Robert Smith, the band was more than just him. The Cure - with respect to founder member Lol Tolhurst, and long-time bassist Simon Gallup - is really just Robert Smith.
So who could we fairly compare Smith to? Who had a track record of reinventing his style and produced 15 years or so of great music? Well, Nick Cave is a decent choice, but I’d go further and also select David Bowie. Quite different artists certainly, but all similarly singular. I’d say critics would be more comfortable lauding Bowie and Cave than Smith, I think because Smith’s mawkish teenish romanticism doesn’t feel very grown up. And that haircut and lipstick is pretty credibility sapping… Well, I don’t disagree, and perhaps that’s why I prefer mid 80s Cure because during that period the angst was leavened with wiggy surrealism.