Still a lost world, and still no cure for it

THE CURE’s Robert Smith and I grew up together. That is to say, we were born in the same year, 1959 (he’s about three weeks older), and we were both transformed by the wild energy and endless possibilities of punk. We both formed a band that wasn’t really punk rock, but certainly punk-inspired. Mine lasted two years, his has been going since about 1976 – that’s nearly half a century. My band achieved next to nothing (three tracks on a compilation), he wrote a long string of seminal songs, including my personal favourite “Lovesong”, sublime in its simplicity and melancholy. I gave up music for writing, while The Cure has become a phenomenon, a proper national British treasure, like The Kinks and The Who.

Smith composed some of the most depressing pieces you’ll ever hear (to get an idea just give “The Figurehead” or “Siamese Twins” a listen), but also super-catchy pop tunes like “Friday I’m In Love” and “Just Like Heaven”. And now, after a 16-year hiatus, Smith and his band have released a new record, Songs Of A Lost World, their much anticipated 14th studio album. And those who waited all those years will agree: It’s fabulous, a deep and scary dive into the dark world of Robert Smith, who takes credit for all the songs.

Let’s go back in time. I saw The Cure for the first time in September 1979, when they played at the New Pop festival in Rotterdam. They were still a three-piece then, and had released a couple of singles and one album. They had started out in Crawley, a nondescript New Town, half-way between London and Brighton. Smith had been born in Blackpool, but his family moved to Crawley when he was three. He had a northern accent and was mercilessly mocked for it at school. It probably didn’t do his outsider feeling any harm. Fellow Cure founder and drummer Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst called Crawley “grey and uninspiring, with an undercurrent of violence”.

After reading about them in the British music press, I bought their debut single “Killing An Arab”, which came out in 1978. The A-side, based on Albert Camus’s existential novel L’étranger (The Outsider) was great, tackling themes of futility and the absurdity of life. But I was particularly smitten with the B-side, “10:15 Saturday Night”, the story of a lonely soul hearing the tap drip in the kitchen, while the rest of the world seems to be having fun – drip, drip, drip drip.

In Rotterdam they played 13 songs, mainly from their album Three Imaginary Boys, which my friends and I loved for its crisp production, angular sounds and awkward songs that leaned on punk but went further, both musically and lyrically. “Grinding Halt”, “Fire In Cairo” and “Not You” were highlights for us. But the composition that heralded things to come was the title track, with its foreboding atmosphere and explosive guitar solo towards the end.

I saw them a few more times when they played in the Netherlands, after they had settled on a more permanent line-up with bassist Simon Gallup joining them, who had his instrument somewhere near his knees and looked cool beyond compare. We all tried to look like him. With Gallup they recorded Seventeen Seconds, which came out in 1980 and established their sound: Majestically depressing, with doomy basslines, mechanical beats, spidery guitars, funereal synthesiser lines and tortured vocals.

The exemplary song was “A Forest”, their first hit despite its length of over six minutes. My personal favourite, however, was the title track, which seemed to reflect on the end of a relationship, with oblique lines like “Feeling is gone/ And the picture disappears/ And everything is cold now/ The dream had to end/ The wish never came true.” And then a minimal chorus that sounded very profound to these 21-year-old ears: “Seventeen seconds, a measure of life.” 

The Cure and I became good friends for several years. I duly bought the dour Faith as well as their reporting on the descent into a mental breakdown and apocalypse that was Pornography. “It doesn’t matter if we all die” were the first lines of the opening track “One Hundred Years”. With The Top, Smith brought his guitar a bit more to the fore, which made the music seem less resigned, sounding as if he was at least trying to get away from the clawing fingers of despondency. There was even a soothing pop song on it, “Caterpillar”, whose melody seemed to hark back to the early days of “Boys Don’t Cry”. It did very little to get rid of the darkness that had started to define The Cure.

How low can you go?

Smith got tired of that. After all, how low can you go before it ends in total burnout or, worse, suicide, the path his contemporary Ian Curtis of Joy Division had chosen. To get out of that dungeon he used video director Tim Pope for a number of entertaining videos, like “Why Can’t I Be You”, in which he dances and wears a bear suit. He also wrote a trio of lysergic pop singles, embracing electronic music and faux jazz: “Let’s Go To Bed”, “The Walk” and “The Love Cats”.

If anything, they proved his versatility as a songwriter and his knack for a catchy tune. I will forever remember hearing a DJ in a seedy Nairobi nightclub playing “The Love Cats” and a scantily clad lady approaching me, singing along to the lines “Oh wonderfully, wonderfully pretty/ You know that I'd do anything for you.” Not sure if Smith could have envisioned his song reaching the sleazy parts of an African capital.

As my taste expanded, I lost touch with The Cure. But there was one more album I really liked: Disintegration, a sprawling work, inspired by David Bowie’s Low and Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left. It came out in 1989, and as the title suggests, it wasn’t particularly cheerful. But this time Smith had found the perfect balance between melancholy and pop.

It kicks off with the grinding pace of “Plainsong”, gets into gear with “Pictures Of You” and finds release in the aforementioned “Lovesong”, a song so simple and sadly beautiful that it still gives me shivers when I hear it. Then we dive back into doom and gloom, but surface again with the “Lullaby”, carried by a hypnotic, circular guitar figure. And then it’s back again to the deep dark waters of despair (yes, despair is the word that pops up a lot with The Cure). But while Joy Division always sounded beyond depressing to me (I mean, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” must be the most lost-all-hope-and-there’s-no-way-out song ever), The Cure always had a bit of fun and irony, even if it was only Smith’s smeared lipstick, smudged eyeliner and exploded hair. 

The fact that he stayed relatively sane might have something to do with his chemical preferences. Smith’s intake of alcohol and mind-expanding substances is notorious (the rest of the band didn’t stay far behind, leading to the firing of Lol Tolhurst in 1989), but acid and wine probably make for a more colourful and energetic outlook on life than heroin. And if the mid-1980s singles sounded like lightweight pop, they were a successful attempt to shake off that dark image that followed the band and had turned them into the reluctant Kings of Goth. Still, even the seemingly throwaway pop songs sounded very much like The Cure. As Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nail said, when he indicted The Cure into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019: “[Smith] had used his singular vision to create that rarest of things – a completely self-contained world with its own sound, its own look, its own vibe, its own aesthetic, its own rules.”

***

And now we’re both 65. I still write, and Robert Smith still makes music. Moreover, he’s still with the woman he met in drama class when he was 14. They got married in 1988. “Lovesong” with the lines “whenever I’m alone with you, you make me feel like I am young again”, was written for her. Despite not releasing any new albums since 2008's 4:13 Dream, the band kept touring, even stopping at Cape Town a few years ago. The fact that I didn’t enjoy that gig had nothing to do with the band or their choice of songs – it was a windy, cold night, and we didn’t have tickets for the “golden circle”, which meant bad sound and seeing the members from afar or on a big screen, standing on the dusty grounds of the Kenilworth Racecourse. Not ideal.

Songs Of A Lost World came out on November 1. I managed to get a copy in a music shop in Italy, and have played it over and over since coming back home. Unlike previous albums, which had colourful childlike sleeves, this one looks serious: A black and white picture of a partial granite head. The sculpture, made in 1975 by Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat, looks as if it came straight from the ruins of Pompeii, half-finished, fallen, broken – a perfect metaphor for a drowning world.

The perennial Peter Pan

The music flawlessly follows this image: dark and intense, almost disturbing at times, dealing with the themes of death, departure and dread. Smith is someone who at the age of 21 thought life was not worth living. But he persisted. He’s the perennial Peter Pan who has refused to grow up. He still wears lipstick and eyeliner, while his hair now circles his head like a grey halo of tumbleweed. Getting old has always been an issue for him. As early as 1985, he sang “Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die.” In a recent interview with The New York Times, he lamented: “If I go back to how I was when I was a younger man, my plan was to keep doing this till I fall over. My idea of when I fell over wasn’t this old.”

Some people get less pessimistic as they get older, Smith certainly hasn’t. The opening track of Songs Of A Lost World is “Alone”, dominated by hollow drums and mournful keyboards, which sets the dolorous tone. It starts with words taken from the poem “Dregs”, a work by Victorian poet Ernest Dowson (1867-1900): “This is the end of every song that we sing/ The fire burned out to ash/ And the stars grown dim with tears/ Cold and afraid/ The ghosts of all that we've been/ We toast with bitter dregs to our emptiness.” Asked for some illumination, Smith told The New York Times: “I think it’s natural, as you grow older, to feel more and more despairing of what goes on. Because you’ve seen it all before and you see the same mistakes being made. And I feel like we’re going backwards.” 

Mind you, the pop element is still there. “Drone Nondrone” ups the tempo and has an unmistakable 1980s post-punk sound, complete with screaming wah-wah guitars (young Robert Smith was a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, they even covered “Foxy Lady” on their debut album). The single “A Fragile Thing” is driven by a rumbling Gallup's bass line, and while it’s not exactly “Lullaby” or “Friday I’m In Love”, it has a chorus you can sing along to.

The end, however, is as bitter and hopeless as can be. “Endsong” lasts over 10 minutes, and Smith only starts singing after an intense six-and-a-half-minute build-up. Over a screaming guitar, layers of keyboards and clattering drums, he wails: “And I'm outside in the dark staring at the blood red moon/ Remembering the hopes and dreams I had and all I had to do/ And wondering what became of that boy and the world he called his own/ I'm outside in the dark wondering how I got so old.”

Then comes the chorus, like the final blow: “It’s all gone, it’s all gone/ I will lose myself in time/ It won't be long/ It's all gone, it’s all gone, it’s all gone/ It all feels wrong/ It's all gone, it's all gone, it's all gone/ No hopes, no dreams, no world/ No, I don't belong I don't belong here anymore."

Happy Friday.

♦ VWB ♦

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