‘Closedown’: The Cure’s painful lament of turning 30
No band has displayed such a sharp creative U-turn as 1980s alternative heroes The Cure. Following the thunderously bleak Pornography album in 1982, frontman Robert Smith had exorcised all his demons and sought spiritual recuperation during a month’s retreat to the Lake District.
Expecting a gothic follow-up, their label Fiction instead was handed ‘Let’s Go to Bed’, a ditzy new wave pop number featuring “doo-doo” backing vocals and funky bass—’The Hanging Garden’ it wasn’t. Dropped with some reluctance, The Cure’s new direction would herald their MTV era, helped by their string of acclaimed videos from promo filmmaker Tim Pope.
Off the back of monster albums such as The Head on the Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Smith was struck by existential pangs surrounding the band’s future. Playing stadiums and dwelling in the upper echelon of the pop universe, far removed from their post-punk foundations, the ruminative loom of approaching 30 cast a dark cloud over Smith’s mood, combined with coping with his creeping depression with copious amounts of LSD and hallucinogenics. In his lysergic fug, another confounding jump away from pop appeal and fan expectations their awaited eighth album was realised.
Often celebrated for its dark and introspective turn in light of their prior chart-friendly records, 1989’s Disintegration shares a sonic proximity to 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Like winter following summer, The Cure conjures a strange sequel to their prior pop monster, awash with the same lush synthesisers and dramatic scope; notwithstanding that several of the songs are mutually interchangeable.
Unlike the chillier records at the decade’s beginning, Disintegration still boasted some forlorn pop marvels, from ‘Lullaby‘s nocturnal surrealism to ‘Pictures of You’s sweeping romance that anticipated Wish‘s shimmering indie sound.
The record’s thematic crux is lyrically captured on ‘Closedown’. Plagued by the notion that all popular music’s greats were creatively spent before turning 30, Smith expels a brief but poignant lament over dried-up artistry and emotional shut-down in a mere seven-line piece. Clouded by Boris Williams’ haunting drums and Roger O’Donnell’s enveloping keys, ‘Closedown’ can often lie unassuming among the record’s more epic cuts like ‘Fascination Street’ or ‘The Same Deep Water as You’, but no other track on Disintegration feels as viscerally connected to the album’s conceptual roots than its meditative third chapter.
Maintaining a thick atmosphere in Hookend Studios, Smith often remained mute and instilled a tense environment to draw out sufficiently brooding energy. Disintegration‘s potential as the band’s departing record hung over them to encourage a crackle of urgency in the sessions. This approach kicked off a trend for most subsequent LPs, which were all produced with a sense of finality to stave off complacency or creative stagnation for Smith and his ever-rotating Cure ensemble.
A gloomy traipse through introspective anguish proved to be a commercial winner, and Disintegration was their highest charting album at that point, still standing as their biggest selling. Looming large in their body of work as a benchmark future albums would inevitably be compared to, Disintegration bookended The Cure’s exceptional decade-long run of colourful and mournful pop while ushering the alternative rock era that followed into the 1990s.
