Three Non-Imaginary Stories about the Cure
The Cure are back with their first album in 16 years. The band doesn’t need hyping. They’re one of the great pop groups in history. Robert Smith has produced a catalog of staggering greatness. The Cure’s first album, Three Imaginary Boys, was released in 1979. I was 15 and have loved every record since. However, I’m not a Cure fanatic—unlike some of their disciples, I see the soft spots in their catalog, the songs that don’t work, the times when their gloom is excessive. I still laugh at a line I read in Melody Maker back in the 1980s—“Margaret Thatcher gave a speech last week. Boring? Like watching the Cure play ‘A Forrest’ live.”
I have three outstanding memories involving the Cure.
Cure Memory #1. This is from just last week, when the Cure released “Alone,” the first single off of their forthcoming album Songs from a Lost World. “Alone” is about bleakness, darkness and existential despair. Yet like so many great Cure songs, the music is laid on a sumptuous bed of synthesizers, rumbling bass and steady drums, and elevated by the voice of leader Robert Smith. It’s a voice that has retained its power over nearly 50 years. “This is the end of every song we sing,” Smith laments. “Where did it go? Where did it go?” It’s despair that somehow comforts.
In The Guardian Alexis Petridis speculated that “Alone” is based on “Dregs,” an 1899 work by the Decadent poet Ernest Dowson. Written just before his death, “it is filled with ghosts, hopelessness and morbidity.” The poem is echoed in “Alone,” which features birds falling from trees, stars that “grow dim with tears,” broken voices and bitterness at the transience of life. Smith has talked about the deaths of his parents and his older brother while making Songs for a Lost World. “Alone” is grand. Smith has gotten to the point in life where the suffering is not adolescent moodiness and rainy days but tragedy and death.
Cure Memory #2. It’s May 1989. I’m working at Kemp Mill Records at Dupont Circle in D.C. The Cure have just released Disintegration. The record will be considered their masterpiece, but the manager Holly and I have just played it on a slow and rainy Tuesday and we’re underwhelmed. It’ll take time to fully absorb songs like “Closedown,” “Plainsong” and “Prayers for Rain.” We will both come to love the record, but on first listen it’s a slog; I agree with Chris Robbery’s at Melody Maker, who wrote that Disintegration is "challenging and claustrophobic, often poignant, often tedious.”
The Cure are gloomy bastards, but they also could offer transformative pop songs. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, released in 1987, gave the world “Just Like Heaven,” a deliriously perfect song about the dreamy, wonderful and supernatural joy of love. The Cure’s happy songs remind me of a line by Christopher Lasch: “Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil.” I never forgot that phrase—“the goodness of being.” “Just Like Heaven,” “Close to Me,” “The Perfect Girl,” “Catch,” “Mint Car,” “Friday I’m in Love,” “Hot Hot Hot”—Robert Smith knows about the goodness of being. I admire that Smith, who can crank out happy hits, has gone dark with Disintegration, but to me Kiss Me is the better album.
Cure Memory #3. It’s 1986. I’m in college and dating a British girl named Vivian. She’s a nanny for a rich family, and has introduced me to bands like Joy Division, Depeche Mode and the Human League. We are at Poseurs, a New Wave and punk club in D.C. I’m a Catholic prep school kid, out of place here, but Vivian is New Wave and British, so she’s almost like a VIP. Everyone in the club is sitting at tables listening to music, talking and drinking. Lots of green and purple hair, black outfits and Mohawks.
Suddenly “Close to Me” by the Cure comes on. The entire patronage of Poseurs moves en masse to the dance floor. It’s like they’ve all formed one organism with a collective mind. I watch this, amazed. The Cure is the leader of this cult. I look at Vivian and ask: “Who gave the signal?” She laughs. We get up and dance. Vivian’s smiling, radiant. I am surrounded by goth darkness and rainbow colors of hair, but the song is so beautiful, so upbeat and infectious you have to feel happy.