THE CURE - THE TRILOGY
(Seventeen Seconds - Faith - Pornography)
On 9
September 1980, The Cure started rehearsals for their as yet untitled third
album. The quartet that had recorded its predecessor, 'Seventeen Seconds', was
now slimmed down to a trio, with the departure of keyboardist Matthieu
Hartley, who had left just days earlier, at the end of an unhappy Australian
tour. "Something had changed," remembers Robert Smith.
"Matthieu didn't seem to be enjoying it the same. Everything was
difficult, everything was too much... and it was driving the rest of us mad."
There was an abortive attempt, between 27 and 29 September, to demo some of
the songs in the familiar surroundings of Morgan Studios in London, but it
came to little. "We thought 'Primary' was the first 'finished' song of
the album," Smith points out, but that first demo was far from right.
"We did that, 'All Cats Are Grey' and 'The Holy Hour', but the versions
were somehow lacklustre. We wanted the songs to be funereal but passionate,
and it just wasn't working." Although the album had no title, it did have
a central theme - a suite of songs exploring the idea of belief. "I was
thinking about how, as a youngster, you're often indoctrinated and encouraged
to trust in something 'other'. I wanted to get at different expressions of
this trust, to understand why people have it, to find out if it was a real
thing for me." As the year's end approached, this theme was uppermost in
Smith's mind, but it remained, for the moment, a largely intellectual thirst
for understanding. However, by the time the band returned to Morgan Studios on
2 February 1981, it had become something more profoundly disturbing. In the
intervening weeks, several friends and relations had died, and drummer Lol
Tolhurst's mother had been diagnosed as terminally ill. "During that
period, wherever I was, I would go to the local church because I wanted to
feel connected," Robert remembers. "I come from a religious
background, and I wanted to feel whatever it was others were feeling. I wanted
something to believe in." Watching the worshippers around him, Smith
began to structure his thoughts more coherently, and to write them down in the
form of lyrics. "I understood that, above all, people were in church
because they believed in a personal 'eternity'. I began to realize that I
didn't believe in this eternity at all, and I was scared. On the day I wrote
the words to 'Faith', I knew I had the title track." Unfortunately, even
though the essence of the album had now crystallised in his mind, the February
sessions did not go well and some of the reasons were chemical. "We had
experimented with a few different drugs during the making of 'Seventeen
Seconds' but, by the time of 'Faith', substance abuse had become a factor in
the work dynamic," Smith explains. "It had started to slow things
down. Selfish drugs" they began to take their toll."
'Faith' was released in the UK on 11 April 1981, entering the chart two weeks
later and peaking at No14 - the band's highest album placing so far. "Looking
back now," says Smith, "I love the album, even though at the time I
wasn't really sure we'd made it quite right. It probably wasn't as extreme as
I'd hoped it would be, and I felt we'd maybe pulled back from the edge too
soon." And so, on the whole, did the press. Record Mirror lambasted its 'spineless
meanderings'. The NME moaned that it said, 'absolutely nothing meaningful in a
fairly depressing way'. John Gill of Sounds was virtually a lone voice,
pointing out that for anyone who cared enough to peel away its surface layers,
Faith carried a message of 'deep rooted hope and belief." But Robert
Smith wasn't listening to others; he was quite clearly a man on a mission. 'Faith'
was a deeply personal journey into the heartlands of trust and betrayal, of
desire and despair; if he was at all worried the results of this musical,
lyrical and spiritual journey weren't big enough, weren't extreme enough,
weren't dark enough, then, he realized, there was only one thing to do"
THE CURE - Seventeen Seconds (1980)
Before
The Cure released their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, Robert Smith had
already written most of the songs for its successor, Seventeen Seconds. In his
mind, he already had a template of sounds and styles that he felt this second
album should be built on. "I was listening to Bowie's Low, Nick Drake's
Five Leaves Left, Jimi Hendrix' Isle of Wight and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks,"
he says. "I wanted The Cure to become some weird hybrid of the
four."
Despite considerable press acclaim, he had been dissatisfied with how Three
Imaginary Boys had turned out and was now determined to create something that
better represented the band's real potential. First, though, Smith had another
problem to solve. In recent months he had become increasingly distanced from
bassist Michael Dempsey, whose personality and ambitions for the band were
strikingly at odds with Smith's. Around the same time, Smith was finding a
great deal in common with Simon Gallup of Horley band The Magspies. Saturday
nights invariably found the pair out drinking together and, on one such night,
they hatched a plan to record some material with local postman Frankie Bell.
The upshot was a one-off single, I'm A Cult Hero, under the name The Cult
Heroes, featuring Gallup on bass. Although clearly a side-project, it was
immediately clear even to Dempsey that Gallup was a markedly better musical
partner for Smith than he was. Before the second album could be started, fate
intervened again via a meeting between Smith and Steve Severin of Siouxsie and
the Banshees at a Throbbing Gristle gig in the Central London YMCA on August
3, 1979. The pair hit it off immediately and their friendship resulted in a
support slot on a fateful Banshees tour that set off from Belfast on September
5 only to grind to a halt two days later in Aberdeen when drummer John McKay
and guitarist Kenny Morris quit the band. After auditioning several hopeful
guitarists, Siouxsie and Severin concluded that no-one was more suited to
their band than Robert Smith, so the tour resumed with Smith playing guitar
for both The Cure and The Banshees. Because Smith had disagreed with so many
of his decisions on the first album, manager Chris Parry was now banned from
Morgan, and their studio time was productive, with the band completing a song
a day on average. "We felt like we were creating something that no-one
had ever done before. I remember being really happy, completely at home in the
studio, totally obsessed by what we were doing." Mike Hedges quickly
recognised that the Cure had evolved significantly since their last
collaboration. "I really appreciated the musical direction - morose,
atmospheric and very different to Three Imaginary Boys," he explains.
"We weren't thinking about commercialism or potential popularity at all.
I followed Robert's instructions - he wanted a certain sound." And he got
it. "Every song we did," he says, "I was like, 'Ah, this is it.'
I remember doing Play For Today and A Forest and thinking, 'This is the music
we should be making.' On the last day in the studio, Smith allowed Chris Parry
to hear what they'd achieved only to find that, "He was horrified. He'd
wanted us to follow up on the quirky pop stuff like Boy's Don't Cry. But he
realised very quickly that we'd got something. By the end of the evening he
admitted we had made a really good record." Released as the album's first
single, A Forest entered the UK charts high enough to secure the band its
first slot on Top Of The Pops but, aware as he was of how much vital exposure
the appearance would bring, Smith hated it. "I was getting to this phase
where I was really anti everything like that, anti pop. I didn't want The Cure
to be a pop band." On May 3, 1980, Seventeen Seconds entered the UK album
chart where it would peak at No20, a markedly better showing than the debut
album. Looking back now, Smith says, "I've always thought of Seventeen
Seconds as our first album, actually. It was the first record I felt was
us." And, just as he had been looking forward when the debut album came
out, he was already planning a global future for the band. "By the time
Seventeen Seconds came out," he notes, "Chris Parry had made sure we
were playing around the world and not worrying too much about the UK, which
was pretty radical at the time. We went around the world, to Australia and New
Zealand and did our first trip to America. As a result, we knew we didn't have
to rely entirely on the UK. I knew there were other avenues open to us."
In due course, those avenues would sustain The Cure through some very hard
times indeed
With their third album, Faith, The Cure had established new boundaries for the expression of emotional turmoil and spiritual desolation. Pornography would see them go even further. In December of 1981, Smith retreated, initially alone, to Rhino studio in Surrey and demo'd a dozen new songs as the starting point for 'Pornography'. Despite having established a good working relationship with Mike Hedges who had been involved as an engineer/co-producer on the first three Cure albums, Smith was now feeling the need for a change. "I wanted to get someone in close to our own age, and decided to go with Phil Thornalley mainly because of his engineering work with Psychedelic Furs, in particular the great drum sound on "Talk Talk Talk Talk". As well as a new co-producer, Smith also decided to change environment, abandoning The Cure's home-from-home, Morgan Studios, in favour of RAK, situated in the St John's Wood area of London. "It had a good ambience," he remembers. "Three different studios housed in an old building with big windows and really high ceilings. Studio One control room looked out onto the street. It was a bit funkier than Morgan. You felt like you could fall over on the floor and not worry that someone would come in and try to sweep you up." When work started in January of 1982, falling over on the floor was entirely on the cards, as the band's drug consumption was almost out of control. "We turned the studio into our own weird nocturnal world. Every night we would bring in more and more 'found' stuff... it was pretty bizarre. We started building rooms out of cans, boxes, newspapers and towels... the place got very strange!" Personal relationships within The Cure were however becoming strained, and it didn't help that, "When we got into RAK I couldn't find the Rhino demos, so we had nothing to refer to. I was just telling everyone what I wanted as we went along. It was somewhat chaotic." The wild card in the pack, however, was Phil Thornalley. Having never worked with The Cure before, he didn't know what to expect, and found himself plunged into a world where the normal values of a recording studio no longer seemed to apply. "Phil got pretty stressed with us," recalls Smith. "He had ideas of what our music was like, but what I wanted wasn't really like anything we'd had before. I remember there was one particularly long row over a guitar sound that he didn't like. He thought it was horrible... and couldn't see that was a good thing!" By all the usual terms of reference, Thornalley was absolutely right. What he didn't understand was that Smith's intention was to create truly disturbing music. "I wanted to make the ultimate fuck-off record," explains Smith, "then The Cure could stop." And to achieve that, horrible guitar sounds would be essential. "Phil was trying to make it too nice... I wanted it to be virtually unbearable. I needed this recording to be our grand statement and in the course of making it I didn't much care about anything or anyone else in the world." The RAK sessions ended in April, and from the opening line of the first track, 'One Hundred Years', the music's visceral assault was undeniable. "It doesn't matter if we all die," intones Smith, at the start of a violent, lyrically inscrutable song that throws up deliberately disturbing juxtapositions - from slaughtered pigs to a little black-haired girl to an exploding head. "The first line on the album," he says, "is a real scene setter. It's total nihilism - and yet the record ends with a call to arms. I wanted everything and nothing - I was a more than a bit confused!" Other songs offer, in varying degrees, a terrifying self-portrait of an alienated dysfunctional psychopath. On the whole though, 'Pornography''s words refuse to succumb to the rationale of orthodox criticism, working best as streams of oblique but potent imagery. Lines like "Too many secrets / Please make it good tonight... / But the same image haunts me / In sequence / In despair of time / I will never be clean again..." (from 'The Figurehead') defy logical analysis but, nevertheless, conjure pictures in the mind's eye, drawing together threads of mysticism, psychology, cinema, literature and science. Like every Cure album so far, 'Pornography' out-performed its predecessor, entering the UK album chart on May 15, 1982, and peaking at No8 - their first Top 10 placing. It must have seemed that whatever they did, no matter how difficult an album they placed before the public, they would be rewarded with ever greater success. Music critics, once again, couldn't reach agreement on its merits. David Quantick of NME wasn't totally off the mark when he described it as "Phil Spector in hell," but to Dave McCullough of Sounds it was just "Dryly meaningless". "The reviews were pretty mixed," acknowledges Smith, "and not that many people came to the live shows, but I felt we'd finally made a great record."
CD One - Seventeen Seconds
1. A Reflection
2. Play For Today
3. Secrets
4. In Your House
5. Three
6. The Final Sound
7. A Forest
8. M
9. At Night
10. Seventeen Seconds
CD Two - Rarities 1979 -1980
1. I'm
A Cult Hero - Vinyl Single A Side By Cult Hero
2. I Dig You - Vinyl
Single B Side By Cult Hero
3. Another Journey By Train (aka 44f) - Group
Home Instrumental Demo 1/80 - Previously Unreleased Version
4. Secrets - Group Home Instrumental Demo 1/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
5. Seventeen Seconds - Live In Amsterdam 1/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
6. In Your House - Live In Amsterdam 1/80 -
Previously Available On The "Curiosity" Mc 1984
5. Seventeen Seconds - Live In Amsterdam 1/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
7. Three - Alt. Studio Mix 2/80 - Previously
Unreleased Version
8. I Dig You - Cult Hero-Live In The Marquee Club
3/80 - Previously Unreleased Version
9. I'm A Cult Hero - Cult Hero-Live In The
Marquee Club 3/80 - Previously Unreleased Version
10. M - Live In Arnhem 5/80 - Previously
Unreleased Version
11. The Final Sound - Live In France 6/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
12. A Reflection - Live In France 6/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
13. Play For Today - Live In France 6/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
14. At Night - Live In France 6/80 - Previously
Available On The "Curiosity" Mc 1984
15. A Forest - Live In France 6/80 - Previously
Unreleased Version
CD One - Faith
1. The Holy Hour
2. Primary
3. Other Voices
4. All Cats Are Grey
5. The Funeral Party
6. Doubt
7. The Drowning Man
8. Faith
9. Carnage Visors - The Soundtrack 28.00
CD Two - Rarities 1980 - 1981
01. Faith
- RS Home Instrumental Demo 8/80 - Previously Unreleased Version
02. Doubt - RS Home Instrumental Demo 8/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
03. Drowning - Group Home Instrumental Demo 9/80
- Previously Unreleased Song
04. The Holy Hour - Group Home Demo 9/80 -
Previously Unreleased Version
05. Primary - Studio Out-Take 9/80 - Previously
Unreleased Version
06. Going Home Time - Morgan Studio Out-Take 9/80
- Previously Unreleased Song
07. The Violin Song - "Faith" Studio
Out-Take 2/81 - Previously Unreleased Song
08. A Normal Story - "Faith" Studio
Out-Take 2/81 - Previously Unreleased Song
09. All Cats Are Grey - Live Somewhere Summer 81
- Previously Unreleased Version
10. The Funeral Party - Live Somewhere Summer 81
- Previously Available On The "Curiosity" Mc 1984
11. Other Voices - Live Somewhere Summer 81 -
Previously Available On The "Curiosity" Mc 1984
12. The Drowning Man - Live Australasia 8/81 -
Previously Available On The "Curiosity" Mc 1984
13. Faith - Live In The Sydney Capitol Theatre
8/81 - First Time On CD
14. Forever - Live Somewhere Summer 81 -
Previously Unreleased Version
15. Charlotte Sometimes - Single 10/80
CD One - Pornography
1. One Hundred Years
2. A Short Term Effect
3. The Hanging Garden
4. Siamese Twins
5. The Figurehead
6. A Strange Day
7. Cold
8. Pornography
CD Two - Rarities 1981 - 1982
1. Break
- Group Home Instrumental Demo 11/81 - Previously Unreleased Song
2. Demise - Rhino Studio Instrumental Demo 12/81
- Previously Unreleased Song
3. Temptation - Rhino Studio Instrumental Demo
12/81 - Previously Unreleased Song
4. The Figurehead - Rhino Studio Demo 12/81 -
Previously Unreleased Version
5. The Hanging Garden - Rhino Studio Demo 12/81 -
Previously Unreleased Version
6. One Hundred Years - Rhino Studio Demo 12/81 -
Previously Unreleased Version
7. Airlock - The Soundtrack 3/82 - Previously
Unreleased
8. Cold - Live In The Hammersmith Odeon 5/82 -
Previously Unreleased Version
9. A Strange Day - Live In The Hammersmith Odeon
5/82 - Previously Unreleased Version
10. Pornography - Live In The Hammersmith Odeon
5/82 - Previously Unreleased Version
11. All Mine - Live In The Hammersmith Odeon 5/82
- Previously Available On The "Curiosity" Mc 1984
12. A Short Term Effect - Live In Brussels 6/82 -
Previously Unreleased Version
13. Siamese Twins - Live In Brussels 6/82 -
Previously Unreleased Version
14. Temptation Two - Aka Lgtb - Rs Studio Demo
7/82 - Previously Unreleased Song