Was The Cure’s ‘Fascination Street’ based on a real place?
It wasn’t the first time The Cure had made a sharp, creative U-turn just as a formula was seemingly cracked.
As the 1980s arrived, frontman Robert Smith was hurtling down introspective roads of terse, minimal post-punk, cracking barely a wry smirk, and reaching his gothic crescendo with Pornography’s cavernous bludgeon. Yet, as a follow-up that same year in 1982, a reduced duo of Smith and founding member Lol Tolhurst cut the silly but infectious ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ single, replete with a larking about promo clip from the band’s long-time video director Tim Pope.
Such a creative gamble paid off handsomely. Before long, The Cure would hurtle across the next few years, leaving a trail of massive pop hits and finding a new home in Smash Hits and Top of the Pops. Expanding operations to a full band again for 1985’s The Head on the Door, The Cure would straddle the worlds of alternative and pop with aplomb, destined to adorn many a teenage music fan’s bedroom walls as one of indie’s premier poster boys.
Smith grew uneasy about their growing fame, however. Unsure about their commercial trajectory and panged with the ruminative cusp of approaching 30, Smith sought to strike another creative gamble and harken back to the darker roots of their early records. There was plenty of bad feeling to draw from. Amid Smith’s gloomy swirl of mortal clock ticking, internal fractures created a fraught tension between the band, largely down to Tolhurst’s relentless drink problem. Throwing in copious amounts of LSD, Smith began to dwell in a potent storm of stylistic guidance to inform their much-awaited eighth album.
There was some sonic residue from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me two years earlier, chiefly its penchant for rich keyboard textures and compositional scope, but 1989’s Disintegration swerves around much of the former record’s sunny cheer for a wistful yet dark tundra of enveloping soundscapes and bristling dreampop at its most unnerving. Aside from ‘Lullaby’ and ‘Lovesong’s teases of chilly light, Disintegration plumbed a deep depth of nocturnal shroud, wresting The Cure back to the gothic realm, a tag usually lazily applied to the band but more than apt on their 1980s LP closer.
Released as a lead single in North America, the jagged groove of ‘Fascination Street’ offered fans a tantalising window into what was to come, and flashed a faintly cryptic lyrical vignette born from a moment of late-night partying, seemingly at odds with Disintegration’s sombre themes.
So, was ‘Fascination Street’ a real place?
It turns out that the ‘Fascination Street’ in question is lyrically shaped by a drunken evening in New Orleans’ famous Bourbon Street while on tour in 1985, a strange celebration of the nightlife the city has to offer, spiked with cynicism as to the dead ends hedonistic pursuits can lead to. “I was getting ready to go there and I thought: ‘what the fuck do I think I’m going to find?’” Smith recalled to Select in 1991.
“It’s about the incredulity that I could still be fooled into looking for a perfect moment”.
Such existential musings would fuel an album highlight and a much-loved yet lesser-known Cure single, ‘Fascination Street’, topping Billboard’s newly formed Modern Rock Tracks and always setting the crowd alight whenever dropped during their live shows to this day.
