Robert Smith on the album that saved The Cure: “I achieved my goals”
For The Cure, the 1990s were a time of extremes. The decade’s early years were some of the most successful the band ever had. 1992’s Wish is something of a departure in tone from ’89’s masterwork Disintegration, but just as successful. Selling over a million copies in the US alone and keeping their momentum alive as the purveyors of gloom du jour.
In fact, their moody stylings were about to become a lot more au fait in the US of A with the advent of grunge. Back home, though, the opposite would happen as the decade passed. In an interview with Uncut, Robert Smith said, “In the UK, Britpop did kill us. For the first time, the NME and Melody Maker were right in their view of how the public perceived us.”
Put it this way, the follow-up to Wish, 1996’s Wild Mood Swings, was released the same week as the debut album by Ash. 1977 has all the joyous energy of a golden retriever puppy and (said with all the love and respect in the world for the lads) about as much going on between the ears. The Downpatrick teenagers went straight in at number one the first time of asking. ‘Wild Mood Swings’, an album from a band that not too long ago were playing literal stadiums, stalled at number nine. Number eight was Mike And The Mechanics’ Hits, a compilation record spending its tenth week on the charts.
Now, to be fair to England’s music-buying public in the ‘90s, Wild Mood Swings isn’t great. It’s messy, it’s tired, and the band are throwing things like string quartets and brass bands at the wall to see what sticks. The problem was these were vague attempts at spicing up some thoroughly mid-tiered songs the Pope of Mope was bringing to the table. Considering that he was about to turn 40 and was stuck in an eight-month-long lawsuit against founding member and childhood friend Lol Tolhurst, that is fair enough, really. So, to be clear, we’re not talking about an unappreciated masterpiece here. The Cure, at their core, were in a rut.
After the tour for the record had finished, Smith had one thing in mind: take a short break and dream it all back up again. With 2000’s Bloodflowers, that’s exactly what they did. Early on in the creative process, Smith connected the record they were making with two of their best efforts, Pornography and Disintegration. He decided then to consciously make a record that harked back to those, in its emotional intensity and focus on guitar driven, gothic dreamscapes.
In doing so, he saved the band, telling the Chicago Tribune in 2000, “Bloodflowers was written during a period when I was really disenchanted with the group and had no intention of carrying on. But the process of making it changed my mind.” Later, Smith told Rolling Stone, “Recording Bloodflowers was the best experience I’ve had since doing the Kiss Me album. I achieved my goals, which were to make an album, enjoy making it, and end up with something that has real intense, emotional content. And I didn’t kill myself in the process.”
While the record didn’t quite return them to commercial or critical prime, that was never what the record was for. It became the first record in a while that Smith and Co could truly be proud of. They showed just where it stands in their catalogue with the trilogy concerts they played in Berlin in 2002, two nights where they played what they considered their signature albums in full. Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers.
