How Robert Smith crafted the ultimate “fuck-off” album in a bid to break up The Cure
Artists work forever to find success. Across every city and every country in the world, there will be people dreaming of fame, dreaming of multi-album record deals, screaming fans, and having busy schedules.
They’re even dreaming of the pressure, of label heads popping into the studio and asking about new music. They’re dreaming about it all, but when the weight of it lands on a person’s shoulders, it can quickly get too much. On one specific album, Robert Smith and The Cure were looking for a way to shake it off.
This is a story seen time and time again. Bands strive for fame and success, but become completely overwhelmed when it lands. The approach then varies person to person. Some completely disappear, fading to a one-hit wonder as they choose to step away. Others implode instead as the pressure leads to infighting that eventually tears the band apart. Plenty just get on with it and eventually get used to it. But the most fascinating response is always the acts that seem to go on a sort of sabotage mission against themselves.
This can come in many forms. When Ethel Cain released Perverts, a strange ambient album that couldn’t have been more different to the work that made her name, people likened it to a kind of musical mosquito alarm crafted purposefully to drive away fans. We often see artists who are becoming uncomfortable with their broad, mainstream success turning to more experimental sounds.
Even the Beatles did it to a degree when they quit touring and emerged with more psychedelic, conceptual works that were less screamable to try and quieten the teenage girls. The Cure fell into that camp, and they felt like the only way they’d get out from under the weight of their success was to essentially blow it up with one last boom.
“For a number of reasons, I had reached this point where I didn’t feel like I knew what I wanted to do, and I’d never really felt like that before,” Robert Smith said of the late 1970s and start of the ‘80s. Their last album had flopped and the band were now back in the studio, working on what would become Pornography, but Smith’s heart wasn’t in it as he added, “I wondered if this is how it felt when it was it. When it was time to stop.”
He’d hit a state of fatigue that becomes dangerous for a band. Not wanting to fall into fighting and not wanting to simply disappear, Smith picked the other option – deciding to make one last record, and make it one that no one would be asking for ‘more’ after.
“I wanted to make the ultimate fuck-off record. And then The Cure could stop,” he said. His motivations were simple. He wanted to push away all the fans the band had gathered so far, leaning all the way into the darkness, hoping no one would hold on and the music world as a whole would let them go. “Phil was trying to make it too nice,” he said of their producer Phil Thornalley, “I wanted it to be virtually unbearable.”
It was going to be a grand goodbye. “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,” Smith recalled, but then, as always, after putting so much passion into the album, it was the band that couldn’t let go.
It also backfired when it came to their fans. Pornography, despite the band’s intentions, is still celebrated as one of The Cure’s finest moments and a moment of purity where their decision to piss people off led to an album without compromises from the artists.
