The album Robert Smith called The Cure’s “grand statement”
Art has a tricky balance.
Too much comfort and it falls flat because nothing great was ever created in boredom. Too much chaos, though, and it can be blocked with all those real-world hurdles. For the most part, greatness lies in the golden in-between. However, on rare occasions, masterpieces are made at the end of someone’s tether, and The Cure know that.
By The Cure, I mean Robert Smith, who sticks around as the only continuous member of the band and, realistically, the master of its own carnage. Pretty early on, Smith seemed to realise that comfort would kill them, and so, he always kept them on their toes.
It’s a pretty cruel way to boost their creative motivation. “The Cure changed its line-up almost on every CD, which is the reason we’ve such a varied and broad repertoire,” Smith said as he constantly switches up the band members. Or, if that doesn’t work, he threatens to cancel the whole band, stating, “I know I’m saying to my musicians, ‘it will be our last album’ ever since Disintegration, but then I mean for that line-up of the group.”
But really, Smith’s tactics come from way beyond that 1989 record. In reality, from as soon as the band got any real success, the singer has been calling in an amount of chaos as he realised how much a settled kind of fame seemed to cripple his creativity.
When the band first got started, he paid too much attention to the voice of critics, but part of his upset was that, really, he agreed with them. Reflecting on reviews of their debut, he said, “A lot of it was very superficial – I didn’t even like it at the time. There were criticisms made that it was very lightweight, and I thought they were justified. Even when we’d made it, I wanted to do something that I thought had more substance to it.” But as always, on a mission to dig deeper, Smith pushed himself to his ultimate limits and landed on a fourth album that represented a breaking point.
By 1982, after their success had kept growing, so too did Smith’s feelings of dissatisfaction. Pornography was the end of his tether with the music world. “I wanted to make the ultimate fuck-off record. And then The Cure could stop,” he said, with this record being the first time that Smith threatened to quit it all.
But here, he seemed to truly mean it as he set about making something abrasive that he hoped no fan would endure. “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,” he said.
However, as is often the way, when an artist is making something with passion and abandon, it ends up being really good, and only makes fans like it more, which is exactly what happened when Pornography became the band’s first UK top ten album.
