“Didn’t enjoy it at all”: The album that pushed The Cure and Robert Smith to the very edge
Any band is bound to get a little bit testy with each other after a while. There’s no way that a group of people can be on the same page every time they go in to make a record, and when things start going sideways, it’s easy for everyone to either break out into loud arguments or storm out of the studio when the songs aren’t shaping up the way they want them to. But whereas most people would defer to Robert Smith when talking about any Cure album, it’s not like everyone was in his corner when he started listening to his songs on playback.
Looking through the band’s work, though, there’s no way to divorce Smith from any of the songs they made. Even when songs like ‘Friday I’m In Love’ broke out of the band’s traditional gothic sound, no one could sing that tune but Smith, especially with his shaky voice almost reaching the point of desperation when he reaches the bridge and shouts out to the heavens.
But if we rewind back to the band’s early days, Smith was only one cog in the machine when making Three Imaginary Boys. A lot of what they were doing was indebted to the sounds of post-punk, and there are even a fair bit of guitar riffs on the record that are vaguely reminiscent of something like Talking Heads, but ‘A Forest’ was the first time they hit on something no one had thought of.
While both bands aren’t even close to the same category, ‘A Forest’ did for The Cure what ‘Echoes’ did for Pink Floyd. Both of them had been fumbling around trying to find what their sound was going to be, but as soon as they had a better idea of what their strengths were, there was a certain atmosphere in their material that no one else could reproduce. And whereas Floyd ended up making Dark Side of the Moon, Pornography holds an equal degree of classic status over the years.
Outside of the fantastic tunes, the star of the show here is Smith’s voice and the production. There are many elements to every tune that make everything feel closer to ambient music in places, and the first time that someone listens to a track like ‘The Hanging Garden’, it’s like being thrown into a musical abyss the minute that Smith’s guitar part kicks in during the first few seconds.
“I just remember going to the studio and having this big sheaf of words. I was so possessive around that time, of the record. I was very difficult to work with.”
Robert Smith
Smith finally heard the sounds that he heard in his head, but he did admit that the band weren’t always too happy about it, saying, “A lot of it was written when I wasn’t really, I wasn’t sitting down and writing, I just remember going to the studio and having this big sheaf of words. I was so possessive around that time, of the record. I was very difficult to work with. Simon [Gallup] and [Lol Tolhurst] didn’t enjoy it at all.”
Even though the album can come off as the result of a madman working in the studio, it’s not like Smith wasn’t onto something here. The waves of sound that crash into the listener on every track marked the first time they created that sense of emotional dread, which would only be fleshed out more when they began working on their later classics like ‘Pictures of You’ off of Disintegration.
Given how the record sounds, though, it makes sense that Smith doesn’t have the greatest recollection about how the album was conceived. It can be freaky performing songs you have no memory of writing, but listening back to every tune, this is the kind of material that comes purely from emotion rather than being thought out.
