“Seventeen Seconds,” “Faith,” “Pornography”: in three albums, Robert Smith’s band built a fascinating fresco that left its mark on the eighties and on music in general.
One November evening in 1982 – I remember it as if it were yesterday – Bernard Lenoir launches his show Feedback, on France Inter, with a poppy track inflated with disco hormones, in which a rascal pretends to imitate Robert Smith’s voice.
And when the august musical patron of our teenage nights announces that this is indeed The Cure’s new single, the jaunty Let’s Go to Bed, it’s as if a sacred mountain has suddenly turned into a pile of gravel, a proud iceberg melting into a shallow puddle. The Cure? Disco? Playful? There are at least two words too many there, and a host of hidden betrayals behind them. Let’s Go to Bed—a song that Robert Smith would himself later call an “idiot and superficial”—and that we would come to love, thus, wrecked in 3 minutes 30 seconds three years of beautiful (mis)illusions slowly counted down across three albums.
The Cure was indeed a miraculous cure
One captured the era with Seventeen Seconds (1980), another froze its blood with Faith (1981), and the last dragged it into the inflamed mucous membranes of Pornography (early 1982). All of this aimed at arriving at Let’s Go to Bed. Many of us, devoted Cure fans or simply curious onlookers of the phenomenon, ended up spending a very bad night indeed.
Robert Smith did not have the right to do this to us: to leave us adrift in a raging sea, with a swarm of drones and a nest of octopuses in our heads, our moods adrift, only to go play “My Cure on the dancefloor,” as if all of this had no consequence. A few months later, New Order would drive the final nail into the coffin of cold wave by releasing the historic Blue Monday, and we would then understand that real life lay elsewhere than the records, which are only simulacra of joy (Sgt. Pepper’s) or of spleen (Unknown Pleasures).
In that single year 1982, from the solemnity of Pornography to the obscene pop of Let’s Go to Bed, The Cure leapt from one extreme to the other and demonstrated that a contrived despair did not have more value than a façade of euphoria. For all the little adolescent depressions, where relativism is rarely invited beneath the covers, The Cure was indeed a miraculous cure.
A living organism burning from the inside
We won’t pretend it’s the Trojans’ Trojan war that never happened. The Cure’s trilogy does exist, it can still be contemplated and listened to with the same fervor, the same dread at times, and its influence remains as tangible as ever, including within The Cure itself, which regularly siphons its incomparable atmospheres from it.
It has never appeared as a cold, conceptual objet d’art—in contrast to that other famous trilogy, Bowie’s with Eno—but rather as a living organism, burning from the inside, whose successive states suggest the process of a slow decomposition. With a detour toward the sacred (Faith) for the salvation of lost souls.
To the often fierce arguments of its critics, past and present, who treat it as the king emblem of self-satisfied puffiness, one can oppose the opposite: The Cure’s unwavering sincerity, which, like the Velvet Underground before it and Nirvana after, did not toy with fire, but jumped into it headlong, out of curiosity, and above all without protection.
Surviving it did not change anything for its members at the time, for they left behind more feathers than anyone else—and with that surplus, inadvertently created generations of ravens that still contribute to casting them as peddlers of bargain-basement horror.
Three years of an interminable winter
Do we realize we are building a trilogy when we start it? Probably not. It is only later, once its work is completed, that Robert Smith will turn around to contemplate both its graceful architecture and its heavy damage. Later, he would rewrite the history by naming Trilogy a tour that included the albums Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers, but it is the original and matricial triptych that remains in the public imagination.
It is also our fan’s gaze that will bind these three canvases with violently contrasting hues—opal white, purple, and the gray of ashes—yet perfectly complementary and inseparable. During these three years that resemble an endless winter, The Cure remained isolated from the world, with no roots or bearings, regenerating itself in a closed circuit and drawing the outline of a unique style that, though it would later exert a colossal influence, at the moment kept the entire English music scene at bay.
At the end of 1979, the only band with which they shared post-punk waves on the board was Siouxsie and the Banshees. Three years earlier, while traveling back from a Banshees show in London, Smith and Tolhurst decided to form a band, investing half of their meager savings into instruments and the other half—less glorious—into hair gel.
Seventeen Seconds, a Fantastic Tale
The autumn 1979 tour of Siouxsie and the Banshees had begun with an implosion, with the drummer and guitarist being replaced. When Robert Smith shows up for the audition, his performance is so convincing and his mood so in sync that the other guitarists are sent home.
The Cure had already faced quite a few hurdles on its path, and this time it was its leader who carried on an adulterous liaison with a dangerous rival. Yet it is during this escape that Smith writes the key songs for Seventeen Seconds, making full use of the variety of effects pedals he is required to use: flanger, delay, reverb… all the tools of the fog-makers. He would later say he drew inspiration from Bowie’s Low period, Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, Hendrix again, and also Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and, more surprisingly, the ballet Gayaneh by Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, famous for its Saber Dance.
But Seventeen Seconds remains an upholstered record, as if sealed from the inside, where The Cure’s unmatched sound settled on its own, alternating fevers and cooling circuits.
Recorded in ten days, after two weeks of rehearsal at Smith’s home, this second album stands out so much from the band’s earlier pop-punk imprint that Chris Parry, the label boss, who had kept the group at arm’s length during the making, melts on the spot when he finally discovers its nature.
Horror and Ecstasy for Ian Curtis’s Orphans
England, at the time, is more than ever a land of musical contrasts, split between the vindictive euphoria of the Specials, Madness, and their kin, and the theatrical disillusionment of a new wave that grew increasingly cold, stretching its frosted branches across Europe. A tragedy would inadvertently work in The Cure’s favor: Seventeen Seconds arrived just weeks before Ian Curtis’s suicide, the enkindled spirit of Joy Division, in May 1980.
The orphans of Curtis thus find in Smith another figure capable of translating, with few words and few effects, that Baudelairean romance of isolation and the nuptials of horror and ecstasy. But whereas such convulsive feelings pass through Curtis via a strangled voice, grave and tremulous like a dying flame, in Smith they take the form of a quasi-childlike, dreamy, cosmic chant in its relation to reality.
Moreover, Seventeen Seconds is too often associated with adult torments, when in many respects it is an album directly inspired by the fantastic of children’s tales, where the threat of the dark (A Forest) rivals that of the deep woods (A Forest), and where there finally reigns a kind of protective, maternal softness that the amniotic guitars suggest with great delicacy.
The Cure’s great achievement with this album is to have pulled away from the wave to flourish in an isolated isle, cultivating, through its fierce invulnerability to fashion, a form of distinction that would, for many, contribute to the creation of a genuine cult soon transformed into a religion in its own right. This independence would keep the band slightly apart from the London coteries, but would open loyal overseas outposts early on, where it would tour part of the year in 1980.
Faith or the Funeral Party
On returning from a final Australian tour, keyboardist Matthieu Hartley quits the band, which he never fully integrated; meanwhile the others begin laying the groundwork for an album that appears even less open than the previous one. Several factors contribute to weighing down the atmosphere, starting with the drugs, which each member tests in isolation and without real joy for their effects, chasing the most paralyzing ones.
Death also stalks: friends disappear, and Lol Tolhurst’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is on a constantly slowed-down tempo that the songs take shape, centered mainly on the terrifying, funeral bass of Simon Gallup, who becomes the dominant instrument on the album.
The kid lost in his expressionist dreams from the previous record gives way to an adult who is cold toward the outside world, with a sour tongue and a disarmed melancholy, whose voice carries within it a kind of permanent and abstract mourning.
Schizophrenia and Claustrophobic Tendencies
As The Drowning Man suggests, Robert Smith’s voice now resounds as a cry of distress, colliding with the walls of songs that look like tombs. Some drugs push him toward the edge of schizophrenia, alcohol makes dialogue increasingly difficult, and it is to this somewhat uncertain faith in Faith that Smith owes not ending up entirely submerged.
But this record with its claustrophobic leanings, which gave the listener the unprecedented sensation of being buried alive in The Cure’s sound, later reveals itself as the most accomplished of the famed trilogy. It is also the one whose influence extends far beyond rock, seeping into unexpected territories, like Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic Twin Peaks theme, which he matched almost note for note to The Funeral Party’s extraordinary track.
From these unsettled sessions, The Cure emerges with an album that secures its place in posterity, plus about thirty minutes of a long instrumental drift intended to serve as a soundtrack to the animated film Carnage Visors. A conclusion five months after the release of Faith is added by the release of an unreleased, staggering single: Charlotte Sometimes. The Default gray sky of The Cure takes on crimson tones with this track, signaling the coming storm.
Pornography, a Chaotic Conception
In December 1981, Robert Smith isolates himself again in the studio to compose the future tracks… on drums! If one is to define the trilogy as it nears completion, one sees in the dominance of a single instrument for each album the start of an intriguing path. It is, in fact, because he appreciated the drum sound on the Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk that Smith wanted Phil Thornalley to produce the new album instead of Mike Hedges, who had guided the group since its beginnings. Thornalley, from the first January 1982 sessions, wonders what he has gotten himself into…
The tracks resemble magma, difficult to identify, while the band members, who take more LSD than they crack Coca-Cola caps, seem locked in some internal upheaval that makes the atmosphere almost unbreathable. Yet many great records have been built on top of a volcano, and this one, more than any other before, benefits from the eruptions of each of its protagonists. The RAK studio in London, where The Cure records for the first time, is transformed for several weeks into a fortified camp where bottle corpses serve as screens to shield the hostility among the players.
When listening today to The Hanging Garden, The Figurehead, or One Hundred Years, one can still feel the extreme tension that presided over their emergence, in the fury and chaos—as if those songs were never granted rest, as if they still swarmed with some vermin whose strain would resist everything, especially nostalgia.
A Long Nihilist Poem
Pornography, the trilogy’s final act, is the barbaric opera of a era that plummeted into the simple amusements of synthetic pop and into the precious disguises of ridiculous neo-romantics. Pornography is precisely the thing that Smith sees as transforming anything into a permanent peep-show. The Cure dresses up, but as a scarecrow clad in lip gloss and running mascara, hair crimped like a spider’s silk that has grown from his head.
Robert Smith conceived the album as a long nihilist poem, which in the end should have left only a tangle of sick, repulsive scraps on the master tapes, a kind of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Thornalley’s patience and the band’s survival instincts, however, mold it into a fascinating voodoo procession, detached from reality but in perfect resonance with the torments of its audience, elevating Robert Smith to the Maldoror of the cold wave. Some even say he becomes a Pied Piper whose followers on the cliff edges get too close for comfort.
After a grueling tour in which relations between Gallup and the others drift further apart each day, The Cure realizes the monstrous entity it is creating. A sharper clash between the bassist and the singer one evening in Strasbourg marks the moment when the cathedral of The Cure loses one of its chief architects. A few weeks later, returning to Crawley’s schoolyard where they first met, Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst play at being kids on the set of the Let’s Go to Bed video. The Cure is cured, but its fans are the ones who fall ill.
