The Cure song Robert Smith didn’t want to release: “At the time, I was really, really angry”
With the release of their debut album, Three Imaginary People, in 1979, The Cure joined the circus at the tail end of the punk wave. “Better late than never,” you might say, but what lay in store was much more exciting and ultimately durable. Though they were late to punk, The Cure joined the likes of Joy Division, Magazine, Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees in becoming one of the first so-called post-punk bands in the UK. This subgenre was a little more artistically inclined and often traded anarchy for existential dread and a gothic aesthetic.
The energetic incoherence of Three Imaginary Boys gave way to a more concerted sonic identity in Seventeen Seconds, The Cure’s second album and what would be the first in the Dark Trilogy. Amid heavy LSD and alcohol use, calamitous intra-band relations and a general atmosphere of self-destruction, Smith, Simon Gallup and Lol Tolhurst somehow managed to spin out their early masterpiece, Pornography, in 1982.
As the final entry of the Dark Trilogy, Pornography marked the end of The Cure’s first chapter. Shortly after the album’s launch, the trio broke up in bitter dispute and disarray. As Smith took on a temporary position playing guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees, he and his former bandmates were convinced that The Cure was dead and buried. The bleak aura of Pornography had pervaded the band’s reality, and chances of recovery and reconciliation seemed extremely slim.
Reflecting on Pornography in a 2004 conversation with Rolling Stone, Smith noted the album’s detrimental effect. “We immersed ourselves in the more sordid side of life, and it did have a very detrimental effect on everyone in the group,” he explained. “We got a hold of some very disturbing films and imagery to kind of put us in the mood. Afterwards, I thought, ‘Was it really worth it?’ We were only in our really early 20s, and it shocked us more than I realised – how base people could be, how evil people could be.”
Continuing, the frontman noted how the band’s fourth and darkest album is a favourite among die-hard fans as an esoteric dose of gothic indulgence. “There is a certain type of Cure fan who would hold Pornography in greater esteem than anything else we’ve ever done, but, at the time, most people hated it,” Smith said. “They’re the only songs we’ve ever played where people would walk out or throw things. But then we probably were not that good on stage.”
Smith went on to identify Pornography as “one of the best things” The Cure ever did, despite the not-so-fond memories that came with it. “It would have never got made if we hadn’t taken things to excess,” he claimed. “People have often said, ‘Nothing you’ve done has had the same kind of intensity or passion.’ But I don’t think you can make too many albums like that because you wouldn’t be alive.”
As we know, The Cure resumed operations in the mid-1980s after Smith buried the hatchet with Gallup. This unlikely resumption was afforded by the success of the interim compilation album, Japanese Whispers. During the hiatus, Smith and Tolhurst met up to tie up some loose ends and recorded a few new tracks, including ‘Let’s Go To Bed’, ‘The Walk’ and ‘The Love Cats’. The record stood in deliberate contrast to Pornography with comparatively brighter themes and instrumentals.
‘Let’s Go to Bed’, the first single released from the compilation, was seen as career suicide by some executives at Fiction Records. But alienating The Cure’s cult following was just what Smith had in mind. “It took me a few weeks to recuperate in the bedroom I had grown up in because I was like totally gone,” Smith reflected. “And I decided to be a pop star [laughs].”
When Smith first took the song to Fiction Records, the label managers thought he had gone insane. “They looked at me, like, ‘This is it. He’s really lost it.’ They said, ‘You can’t be serious. Your fans are gonna hate it,'” Smith recalled. “I understood that, but I wanted to get rid of all that. I didn’t want that side of life anymore; I wanted to do something that’s really kind of cheerful. I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work. No one’s ever gonna buy into this. It’s so ludicrous that I’m gonna go from goth idol to pop star in three easy lessons.'”
To say Smith wrote ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ to intentionally alienate Cure fans and bring the operation to a close might be a little heavy-handed. But the frontman didn’t expect the song to offer the band a lifeline and was close to not releasing it. “It wasn’t as dumb as I wanted it to be,” he said on the Rock ‘n’ Roll Alternative Show in 1983. “It was really me reacting against The Cure’s image, the states we’ve gone through. So I wanted to do something that was really, really dumb and pop. The words mean nothing. Once I recorded it, I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t quite right.’ And it was taken over and taken to its logical conclusion and released… Looking back, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. But at the time, I was really, really angry ’cause I didn’t want it released.”
Indeed, it would be difficult for Smith to regret the single in hindsight. Japanese Whispers offered The Cure a way forward that culminated in landmark releases in the late 1980s, such as The Head on the Door and Disintegration. These later releases were by no means full of optimism and flowers, but the band never ventured quite so far into the abyss as they had in Pornography.
