The album The Cure recorded totally in isolation without “outside stimulus”
Different records require different things. Some artists feel called to travel to other countries in search of the right atmosphere, while others set up a studio at home so they don’t need to go anywhere. Some bring in a whole cast of helping hands, while others go it completely alone. Different sounds, energies, and aims need different circumstances to bring them about, and for The Cure, they needed a complete and utter ban on all distractions.
For most of their albums, they did the same thing. Many of their earliest albums saw them head down to Morgan, a studio in Willesden, London, that many icons were fans of, helping to craft the work of Paul McCartney, the Kinks, Cat Stevens and more. The songs would be written in advance, most of the time, and then they’d book in the dates, bring their instruments along and get it on tape.
Obviously, that’s a deeply simplified retelling that doesn’t give much credit to the different energies, even on the albums that were recorded at the same place or at some other London studio. An album like Pornography, for example, was a deeply personal one that required a lot of introspective digging from Robert Smith, then the recording process was fueled by, in his words, “a lot of drugs”.
Often all of that just led to a recording process that was hectic. They were in their own city meaning that their lives around the album kept going, friends came in and out, families and partners demanded attention. The world would keep getting in the way, or at least, poke it’s head in.
So when it came to making their seventh album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, something had to change. As their last album levelled up their success and stepped the pressure up with it, they knew they needed to cut themselves off from all that. There was one thing for it – pack their bags and go.
The band decamped to the continent and to what Smith called “the most enjoyable period of time I’ve had in the past 10 years,” describing the scene as he said, “It was in Provence, in the South of France, in an old country mansion with its own vineyard.”
At Miraval studios, where Pink Floyd recorded part of The Wall, The Cure basically locked the doors and shut everything else outside. “We recorded it in complete isolation,” Smith said, and the rules were strict. As a band that had battled to have full creative control, they levelled it up even further this time, explaining, “We didn’t allow anyone to hear anything until we’d finished it – no one at all, not even our families. It was a very incestuous, very secretive kind of thing, because we were having so much fun that we didn’t want anyone to come and break the spell.”
The aim was to be able to completely focus on themselves and only themselves. They wanted this album to be untouched by anything else, so Smith demanded a strict cut-off. “10 weeks of being completely cut off from the world, with no outside stimulus at all,” he laid out as the law, “We had no television, we had no transport to get to the nearest town which was five miles away, and all the food was sent in a van in the morning.”
It was worth it. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me truly feels like an undiluted record where the band went all in and unfaltering on their own sound and vision, because quite literally nothing else was getting in.
