“Virtually unbearable”: Robert Smith’s desperation to kill The Cure with brilliance
For some great bands, knowing when to call it quits is a tricky process – on the one hand, the allure of great creativity means that the perfect song always feels right around the corner, pushing an artist into an endless pursuit of greatness.
While for others, a dramatic blaze of glory feels like the only way to bring the curtain down on a rock and roll career. For The Cure, the right way to bow out felt somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. In 1982, just three years after their debut album, at a point where some of their most beloved tracks hadn’t even been recorded yet, the band were planning their grand exit.
Three albums in and recording their fourth, Pornography, The Cure looked like a band that had it all. Critical and commercial acclaim were overlapping, as Robert Smith and co established themselves as a modern band fit to capture the new zeitgeist of industrial British indie. This upcoming fourth album would cement that legacy and set out a stall for a bright new future.
But it was their were unwilling to fulfil, as the backdrop of Pornography became too much to bear for a band with so much potential. “During Pornography, the band was falling apart, because of the drinking and drugs,” Smith remembered. “I was pretty seriously strung out a lot of the time, so I’m not sure if my recollection is right.”
Smith continued, explaining how the personal situation had become untenable, and the painstaking Pornography had to serve as a dramatic and untimely exit for the band. Desperate to free himself of the trauma, Smith sought to make a record that soundtracked their goodbye.
“I wanted to make the ultimate fuck-off record,” he explained. “And then The Cure could stop. 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.”
Any feelings of disillusionment Smith had towards the band and their music were then reaffirmed by the subsequent tour. In what Smith would quietly have thought of as the very last tour for the band, he only confirmed the hesitations he had towards the whole project.
“The band that did Pornography – me, Simon and Lol – that went out and played those songs the first time round… Well, I’ve got a few tapes of that tour, and we really weren’t that good,” he admits. “It was an incredibly intense experience for us on stage. And at the time, it was pretty depressing, and I found it really, really difficult. We didn’t even get to America on the Pornography tour because the band disintegrated in Europe and me and Simon didn’t talk for well over a year. It was pretty fraught.”
Clearly, something needed to change for the band, and so bassist Simon Gallup provided it by quitting. Suddenly, the make-up of the entire band changed, and quitting altogether no longer felt like an option. The band regrouped and recruited producer Phil Thornalley to play on bass, and suddenly kick-started the commercial part of their career that would see some of their biggest hits being laid down.
