The Cure song Robert Smith wrote when the band “sounded like crap”
Over the course of multiple decades, with changing trends and developments within the music industry, The Cure has managed to retain their influence. One of the predominant reasons for the band’s prolonged success lies in their adaptability and sonic diversity. The Cure might be hailed as titans of goth music, but songwriter Robert Smith has explored countless styles over the years, never refusing to switch up the band’s sound.
Releasing their groundbreaking debut album Three Imaginary Boys back in 1979, at the height of the post-punk era, The Cure first established themselves as a post-punk-adjacent guitar-led group before moving ever closer into the dark and mysterious sounds of goth rock as the years went on. Alongside the mounting melancholy of records like Pornography, however, the group also flirted with pop on multiple occasions, most notably on 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Smith was never a songwriter who liked to stay in one place for too long.
By the end of the 1980s, The Cure had released eight incredible albums, all of which explored different avenues of inspiration for Smith. Their 1989 effort, Disintegration, considered by many to be the band’s magnum opus, came to define the sound of The Cure during that era. Pretty soon thereafter, however, the songwriter found the intense level of success and acclaim brought by Disintegration to be quite limiting when trying to craft a follow-up.
As was standard practice for the band during that time, Smith and company went right back into the studio following the album’s release, but things weren’t quite coming together as seamlessly as they had hoped. Stuck in a rut, with nothing sounding particularly great, Smith decided to once again alter the inherent sound of the group, returning to their roots as a guitar-orientated group.
“We recorded four songs and they sounded like crap, and I was really depressed,” Smith later recalled, speaking about the post-Disintegration sessions. “Everyone knew it wasn’t working.” Luckily for the rest of the band, Smith drew upon his seemingly endless bank of songwriting inspiration to search for the answer to this sonic stalemate. “I wrote ‘Never Enough’ that night and said, ‘Let’s record this,'” he shared.
The resulting song pulled The Cure out of their songwriting woes, ushering in a new era for the band. As opposed to much of the band’s late 1980s material, ‘Never Enough’ favoured guitars over synthesisers, adopting a much more rock-orientated sound than the heartbreaking goth stylings of their previous work. What’s more, the song became an instant success, reaching number 13 in the UK singles chart upon its 1990 release and topping the US chart for alternative airplay.
‘Never Enough’ proved that Robert Smith had not lost his mojo as a songwriter and could still craft hit singles that did not compromise on integrity. The hit potential of the song eclipsed the band’s previous entries into the charts, beating out fan favourites ‘Pictures of You’ and ‘Lovesong’.
Although ‘Never Enough’ is not often mentioned in discussions surrounding The Cure’s greatest efforts – perhaps as it was hidden away on the remix album Mixed Up – it formed an essential moment within the band’s career. The single managed to bridge the gap between the beloved sounds of Disintegration and the much poppier, alternative rock of their 1992 record Wish, which featured hit singles like ‘Friday I’m In Love’.
