The Cure, Disintegration (deluxe reissue)

Robert Smith's finest moment is re-released. Here's the story of my first Cure encounter.

They say the first band you fall in love with will always hold a special place in your life. In which case, for me it was The Cure.

Twenty years on, I may not be their biggest fan anymore, but the impact that discovering them had on my life is impossible to overstate.

As my teens kicked in (it was the late eighties), I didn't think I was ever going to love music. On one side there was my older sister with her pukesome, Worst-Of-The-Eighties taste (recently deemed acceptable by endemic revivalism) comprising anything from Nick Kamen (hands up if you can remember him) to Rick Astley and from Madonna to Kylie & Jason. I remember finding her music saccharine and artificial. In short, absolutely revolting.

On the other, it was the peak of hair metal bands. Some of my friends and my cousin introduced me to the world of Guns'n'Roses, Motley Crue and also Metallica and similar stuff. I found bits alright, but it pretty much got on my nerves right from the start. I just knew it wasn't for me. For a while, I seriously thought I was going to turn into them people without any specific music taste.

And then I heard The Cure, and it was love at first sight. I became obsessed with music.

Laugh if you want, but I still sometimes wonder if my teenage years and then my twenties, my preferences and my personality, would have been shaped slightly differently had my music taste taken another direction.

I just instantly took to them. The first time I heard Lullaby on the radio, I was blown away by how different it sounded. It just didn't fit in with any type of music I'd heard up to that point. It just sounded so quirky, so odd. It was repetitive but I mean good repetitive - in a haunting, mesmerising way. I remember thinking that there was no proper chorus and that each guitar clank fell exactly in line with the snare drum. And that whispering voice. Jesus, I had to find out more about them asap.

Remember there was no internet back then. Finding out about any potential new favourite band was such an intriguingly elaborate task. You'd have to find out from record shops and any snippet of second hand news you'd catch from music magazines or even word-of-mouth. Luckily I caught The Cure right at the peak of their career, so that made things a bit easier.

Other singles were very big around 1989-1990. Lovesong, Pictures of You, Fascination Street. Those days you'd find The Cure on Top of The Pops and generally everywhere.

I loved the way the singer looked, and the rest of the band as well. The weird shirts, the nest-like hair, the smeared lipstick, the paleness. And the bass player looked so cool, I thought.

I also adored the sleeve. I'm pretty sure I was able to stare at the cover of Disintegration for something like an hour and ogle at the pictures and the typeface like a total ejit and just think of nothing. To me, The Cure had created a universe of their own, and I was applying to be part of it.

I quickly discovered that their new album Disintegration (like its follow-up Wish) was being acclaimed around the world and that they had an incredibly devoted fanbase, many of which would model their look after the band.

I also discovered that, buried under her sea of compilation tapes, my sister owned a dusty, handmade Cure Best Of, courtesy of one of her schoolmates who'd taped it for her. She didn't like it, so I snitched it straightaway. It was a precious window to their back catalogue. Amongst others, I heard A Forest and Inbetween Days. That was it. I instantly knew from that point that my pocket money was slowly going to finance Robert Smith's pension fund (though of course these specific words didn't cross my mind back then).

But, of course, I'm diverging.

I wonder how many tens of thousands of teenagers around the world had their lives suddenly lit up by Disintegration. I know there's a lot out there. Most Cure fans would tell you it's by far their best record ever.

Yet it's such a morose record that it's difficult to believe, at first. But it's precisely the intensity and the ernestness that both strike you. I'm sure I'm not wide of the mark if I say that Disintegration is possibly the most commercially successful sad record ever produced.

If you think the singles are quite dark already, try the album in full with its elegant layers and its gently resigned, dark tones. It grabs you right from the start, the windchimes gently heralding the epic first track Plainsong. And then there's Closedown, Prayers for Rain, Homesick, Untitled and many, many fantastic others.

Twenty years on, The Cure are now re-releasing Disintegration. The album comes with two extra CDs, one with demo versions and previously unreleased tracks from the recording session, and the other consisting of the excellent live album Entreat, which was recorded during their 1989-90 tour and which originally came out the year after Disintegration.

Obviously we all move on in life. Also thanks to The Cure, I discovered other bands and gradually broadened my music taste. I also believe that, from the mid-1990s on (barring some exceptions), Robert Smith generally ran out of steam. Maybe it was the line-up changes. Or perhaps my taste really did take a different turn...Who knows...

What I know, however, is that now I'm going to get up and put Disintegration on and listen to it from start to finish. Twenty years on, it hasn't aged one bit.

Disintegration (Deluxe edition) is out on 24 May 2010.

The Cure, 4:13 Dream

Robert Smith has a habit of singing that he 'won't do this anymore'. Time to practice what you preach, Bob?

This is it. I'm not spending any more of my money on a Cure CD. Now, it may as well be there won't be any CDs around in four or five years' time, or whenever Robert Smith plans his next move (but such has been their productivity rate for the past decade and a half). But frankly, I'm better off being spared the sound of the band I used to love drifting off into Blandland.

Two are the possibilities.

Possibility Number One. My tastes have changed. The same Robert Smith lyrics that I used to find so inspiring are now looking remarkably samey, insipid and even a touch pathetic. The same voice I used to worship now feels grating to the point that I yearn for some instrumental respite. Their elegant layers of music that would convey beauty through sheer minimalism are now a lump of directionless droning about. It's me. I'm getting older, boring and incapable of appreciating Bob's quality output. Who knows, it may even be that if Disintegration or Wish were released today I wouldn’t fall under their spell the way I did as a teenager.

Possibility Number Two. The Cure have lost it. They simply cannot pull the same tricks that gave them world stardom. Just compare Lovesong, Lullaby, Just Like Heaven or High with the current singles. And I'm not just on about chart-friendly stuff. My favourite Cure tracks were always the album ones. Prayers For Rain, The Snakepit, Six Different Ways, Open, just to mention a few. They were all laid out in a certain way. They sounded quirky, yet factual, tangible, instantly grabbing. They sounded like Robert Smith had come up with an actual melody and put it to music or the other way round. The Cure were never 'growers'. They'd either instantly capture your imagination or nothing.

You listen to 4:13 Dream now and it's the sound of a man sitting in a studio able to afford unlimited recording time but clueless as to where to begin. Worse, it's the same template that characterised 2000's Bloodflowers and 2004's The Cure (which did at least show signs of improvement for the first time since the early 90s). Chimes give way to some sloppy mid-tempo in the style of a Pixies' b-side, reverse cymbals follow more reverse cymbals and Robert Smith starts yelping aimlessly as if he'd just had his jaffas squeezed by a handcuff-wielding Boy George.

His singing goes absolutely nowhere. Sometimes a line ends up drowned in tonnes of echo, but rest assured, Bob will yelp again. Because he just can't think of a melody that can be pinned down and define a song. And so he sings the word 'suicide' like, 'Sue-ee-syde', for the 127th time, the word 'sky' like 'skyyyyy' like he already did endlessly back in the days of Peter Beardsley and Terry Butcher, and more 'tell me you love me before it's too late', 'underneath the stars', 'it's raining and I'm cold', 'and the way it feels inside', 'it's late and you're gone' etc etc. Robert!!! Stop! You've already done that!

And this is what I was dreading when I got hold of 4:13 Dream. But, alas, this is exactly how most of the songs sound. Utterly unmemorable. The only two tracks that I felt like playing again were Freakshow and Siren Song which explore relatively new territories for the band without drifting aimlessly. But it's more like Gazza Gascoigne scoring a free-kick in the dying moments of his career. The man can hardly run but every now and again glimpses of the old magic resurface. Freakshow, in particular, wouldn’t look out of place alongside The Cure's best. Robert Smith's frantic singing sits astride a high-tempo, teasing rhythm and Porl Thompson's rocking guitar. For once, a track with real oomph. And Siren Song too, with its memorable, beautiful, slide guitar, a piano in the background and -lo and behold- Robert Smith registering that less is more and he doesn't have to sing high-pitched and assault the listener's nervous system with a sledge hammer.

However, this is it. Every other track is an annoying, unfortunate parody of The Cure. It leaves you wondering whether Robert Smith is truly unaware of it, or whether he's actually taking the piss in some perverse proto-ironic way. Look at closing track It's Over. The lyrics go 'I lost another life/ Oh I can't do this anymore/No I can't do this anymore', which is exactly what The Cure already did with most of their closing tracks since 1992's End. 'I-can't-do-this-anymore'. 'Anymore-this-I-can't-do'. 'This-do-I-can't-anymore'. Swap the words round and you have the lyrics for their next album's final track. 'Can't-do-this-anymore-me', perhaps? Or better, how about practising what you preach then Robert?

And it's a shame because, judging from the interviews, Robert Smith sounds like a fairly nice, humble guy with none of the affectation and messiah-delusions that are typical of some his contemporaries like Morrissey or Bono. And it's also a shame because I will forever be indebted to The Cure for introducing me to music. Back in Year 8, when I was stuck between my sister's abysmal Madonna and Michael Jackson LPs and my cousin's fascination with Guns'n'Roses and Metallica, for a short while I really thought music wasn’t my stuff. Until I stumbled upon Robert Smith and fell in love. And help finally came in morphing, for better or for worse, my own preferences and individuality.

That's The Cure I'd rather preserve in my memory. Which is why 4:13 Dream is the last Cure album I'll ever buy. Funny how it even sounds like a Robert Smith lyric, isn't it?

The Cure Fan Special

To celebrate the release of The Cure's new album, finally scheduled for Oct 13, at Hagley Road to Ladywood we decided to put together the most interesting Cure-related stories and anecdotes as sent by our readers.

Last April we called for Cure fans to tell us how they first got into The Cure and which song in particular got them hooked up. The results were so successful that we decided to turn it into a permanent feature. Here it is.

A call to all Cure fans

How did you get into The Cure?

We are currently working on a project to coincide with the release of the new Cure album. It's a call to all Cure fans, old and new, no matter what sex, age, religion or country, to get in touch with us.

We would like to know how you first got into The Cure. Were you at school? Was it through a relationship? Did you her them on the radio? Or were you flicking through a magazine and liked the look of Robert Smith (or Simon Gallup)?...How did you get into them? Also, how has your attitude towards The Cure changed through the years???

Please drop the site an e-mail or contact me directly if you wish to contribute.

My love affair with downloading

Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look at the romantic times when we were spending hours amassing MP3 files into a music library. And Nick Hornby will write a book about a couple of nerdy file-sharers called Dick and Barry.

I'm never the sharpest when it comes to technology and gadgets. Remember when CDs first came out and brought along a whole new world of features? A swishing noise, to start off, and within seconds the display would tell you track number and total running time. That was the end of any stylo-based surgical manoeuvring and pizza-like twirling of a-side and b-side: with CDs, a simple one-finger movement would be enough to skip tracks. Not to mention the shuffle option, as well as a louder, crispier sound. And, most importantly, the added bonus of a music format that, as the catchphrase went, "will last for years". In spite of all that, my conservative inner self didn't bow down to CD domination until 1993. Reluctant to the idea that my few LPs and cassettes could soon fade into obsolescence, I talked myself into the cliché that "vinyl has a warmer sound", whatever that means. Soon I was the last one out of my group of friends to give in. However, when the last LP I bought (Suede's debut album) got dreadfully scratched within days of its purchase, I realised time to concede defeat was knocking at my door.

Yet it took me months to recover. Those puny plastic boxes were no match for the romantic sight of LPs and their laminated cardboard. In those pre-internet days when you couldn’t dispense of trips to your record shop, an album sleeve was the only available preview of a band and their artwork a key insight into their world. It was the equivalent of nightclub 'pulling' politics. For all talks that it's personality that matters, looks and style are the first things you notice the other side of the dancefloor. I could list every single detail of The Cure "Disintegration" sleeve, Pink Floyd "Animals", or "Manifesto" by Roxy Music. I may have had my maths test the following day but my eyes could gaze at the front sleeve of "Wish" by The Cure and the world would just slip away. Not to mention that every new 7" or LP was like Christmas. In the days of pocket money, it was up to your mates' legendary compilation tapes - whose ritual is exceptionally portrayed by Nick Hornby in "High Fidelity" - to provide the bulk of your music collection.

But humans are creatures of habit and, whatever the change, they get used to it. As I got older, my CD collection gradually grew in number, and it was soon apparent that in no way had artwork been sacrificed to the advance in technology. And if it had, then it had been a good compromise. In fact, as PCs started popping up in every household, it even became possible to "burn" CDs, waving goodbye to nagging hours of rewinding and fast-forwarding that cassettes entailed. Soon, even the sight of CDs (though generally of the Mariah Carey type) on display at Sainsburys or Tesco became routine.

And then the word "downloading" came along. It took me years to get my head round it: is it true you can get hold of a song from 'outer space' with a simple, single mouse click? And what about all those scary stories of "Napster", Metallica's court battle and the notion of piracy and copyright? To me, the idea that you could lay hands on music without knowing what the artwork or the band look like felt quite dubious. One-dimensional. Shallow, in fact. Music as a throwaway product that you can acquire and then ditch at a finger click. I kept reading of record sales going down and stuck to my regular trips to Plastic Factory, Tower Records, HMV or the record stool at the Rag Market in the Bull Ring. I read of dodgy Russian websites to be avoided like the plague and Trojan horses that would stick to your computers like a fat man to a double burger. Horror stories of infested PCs that would make a clap clinic pale by comparison. In my imagination, the notion that "download is bad" became the equivalent of not letting off in public. Something that you don’t do.

Until the day came when bands themselves started releasing official downloads, free downloads, legal file-sharing and the rest. It suddenly dawned on me that it'd be absolutely pointless to fork out £12-99 for a single track you think you may like that is hidden on an obscure Matt Bianco release circa-1984. The fortune you'd have to spend if you simply fancied a peek into the Rolling Stones back catalogue suddenly no longer seemed an insurmountable obstacle. A whole new world opened up. Old albums from your school days that you were never able to afford and then faded into oblivion? A one-off single released back in '81 that you'd have to order from god-knows-where? A personal culture-induced journey into the sound of the 1960s? Records that if added to a shopping basket in HMV would eat into half your monthly wages? Well, they now come for free and are with you in minutes.

Thanks to downloading I've been able to make up for lost ground and broaden my musical knowledge. Northern soul, rockabilly, 70s glam rock and the worst of late 70s disco music. I've been able to revive dormant memories of early 80s Italian summers with the sound of "Vamos A La Playa" by Righeira. Not to mention the fun side of it. Do you remember that crap entry (which one…) from the Eurovision song contest? All you need to do is look it up on Wikipedia, download it and then scramble for the nearest bucket. Or that toe-curling single released by that Scouser who won Big Brother 1? You can resurrect it from the dead and make it haunt you again from the deepest depths of forlorn bargain bins. Or you can cringe at the sound of lost classics like "Yes Sir I Can Boogie", "Who Let The Dogs Out" and other junk the walls in my house never thought were gonna be subjected to.

And that's not to say that I won't buy CDs ever again. When it comes to my favourite artists, I'm afraid owning their records and monging out in front of the artwork is still integral part of my sad, sad life. Yes, it may be a shame that songs can be given the relevance of a notepad document or a discarded Excel folder. But for every track that ends up in the recycling bin or the land of hard drive oblivion there's another one I cherish and am proud to own.

The record industry are crying foul at the current outlook of dwindling sales. But I'm afraid with the thousands of pounds I gave them since the age of 13 I can now say it's time to get even. Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look at the romantic times when we were spending hours amassing MP3 files into a music library. And then Nick Hornby will write a book about a couple of nerdy file-sharers called Dick and Barry.