Never Enough Page 13

  “The first one is my least favourite Cure album,” Smith would tell Rolling Stone in 2004. “Obviously, they are my songs, and I was singing, but I had no control over any other aspect of it: the production, the choices of the songs, the running order, the artwork. It was all kind of done by Parry without my blessing. And even at that young age I was very pissed off.

  “I had dreamed of making an album,” he continued, “and suddenly we were making it and my input was being disregarded. I decided from that day on we would always pay for ourselves and therefore retain total control.”

  Smith would admit that he felt the album was heading in the wrong direction almost from the first recorded note. “I distinctly remember thinking, ‘This isn’t sounding the way I want it to.’” What he was aiming for was a bare-bones sound, stripped down and unembellished, something the band would achieve on a few tracks but not the entire album. “When we came to record,” he said, “I didn’t really have the time to do what I wanted to do and I didn’t have enough clout to do it, either.” Smith felt that Parry “tricked” him into recording songs that Smith wasn’t mad about, just so the band would have plenty of choice when it came to determining the final track listing. (Neither of his bandmates can recall Smith saying this at the time of its release, however.)

  “Chris Parry told us to record every song we had and we’d work out what went on the album afterwards. I trusted him, but in the end he just chose what went on there.” Smith would nominate such tracks as ‘Object’ and their cover of ‘Foxy Lady’ as throwaways that should have been kept for B-sides, at best. “They were diabolical and I hated them-they were the dregs of what we were doing.” By the time the sessions had ended in February 1979, Smith was already sketching the songs that would appear on the far more accomplished (if wrist-slashingly bleak) Seventeen Seconds. If Smith had learned one thing from their Three Imaginary Boys experience it was this: he vowed to be involved with the production of every future Cure album. Unlike many of Robert Smith’s proclamations, he has stayed true to his word – he’s co-produced each of their subsequent 11 studio albums.

  Of course, Three Imaginary Boys wasn’t quite as poorly conceived as Smith wanted the world to believe, either in 1979 or 2004. If it were, it seems likely The Cure would have been laughed off the pages of the music press, never to return. (And there were other distractions in May 1979, such as adapting to the reality that arch Conservative Margaret Thatcher had just become the UK’s first female PM.) The band and Parry were savvy enough to open the album with their ace, the tense ‘10.15 Saturday Night’, as taut a track as you were likely to hear in 1979, Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’ included. ‘10.15’ rolled into ‘Accuracy’, another Sahara-dry moment of post-punk despair, a song so stripped back it’s almost naked. It’s a classic case study of Smith’s half-spoken vocal style, which he’d just about mastered, even at this early stage. ‘Grinding Halt’ – which would become a feature of the band’s upcoming Peel session, for reasons other than the song itself-had all the herky-jerky rhythms of New Wave, Smith’s staccato rhythm guitar and Tolhurst’s minimalist drum fills echoing the sounds of XTC’s recent, excellent Drums And Wires album. Tolhurst wrote the original song, but Smith took a knife to the lyrics, paring them back to their absolute minimum.

  ‘Another Day’ slowed down the pace of Three Imaginary Boys significantly – the song’s murky sound was a precursor to the type of narcotic haze that hung over subsequent Cure albums Faith and Pornography. Rather than rhyming couplets, Smith spat out fragments of lyrics –“shades of grey”, “I stare at the window”, “the eastern sky grows cold” – which wielded the same kind of gloomy melancholy that would lead to his peer Morrissey, of The Smiths, being crowned Britain’s bedsit guru, the most miserable man in Manchester.* A muddled middle-eight, where the song effectively comes to a halt, didn’t do ‘Another Day’ any favours, but the song is a handy sonic signpost for the future sound of The Cure. (As was ‘Winter’, an out-take from the Three Imaginary Boys sessions.) To Smith, ‘Another Day’ was purely about boredom and repetition. It showed.

  ‘Object’ returns to the more urgent pace of ‘Grinding Halt’, Smith’s vocals drenched in so much reverb that it seemed as though he was trying to out-Orbison The Big O himself. (What Smith would have done for just an ounce of the majesty of Roy Orbison’s voice.) Like much of his lyric-writing on the album, Smith’s message is ambivalent, as he plays off the disparate meanings of the words ‘object’ and ‘objection’ in a clever and faintly erotic fashion. It’s not clear if Smith was enjoying his time as an object of desire, or whether he was holding up a sign reading “hands off”. It’s unlikely that Smith knew himself, although he would admit that the song was written as a joke, a “pastiche of a sexist song”. It was a theme Smith would later master with the pure cheese of ‘Let’s Go To Bed’.

  ‘Subway Song’ is the band’s indifferent attempt at rock’n’roll noir; the song comprising little more than Dempsey’s rumbling bassline, Smith’s finger clicks and some very rudimentary harmonica. It stumbles along haphazardly until a piercing scream breaks the silence, making for a truly jarring ending. But it wasn’t a patch on The Jam’s ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’, that was for sure. At the time, Smith had been telling people he’d known of someone who’d been murdered in the subway, so the song obviously grew out of Smith’s twisted sense of mischief.

  From there, Three Imaginary Boys headed further downhill with the band’s diabolical take on Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’, which included Michael Dempsey’s one and only Cure lead vocal. A cursory listen to their desecration of the Hendrix masterpiece proves why: Dempsey half-raps, half-whines his way through Hendrix’s tale of seduction like the bastard offspring of Ian Dury and John Lydon. (“It’s not one of our better songs,” Dempsey admitted, when I asked him about it.) How a Hendrix lover such as Robert Smith allowed ‘Foxy’ to make the album’s final cut remains a mystery to this day. As the band insisted, the song selection was based on what worked live – and ‘Foxy Lady’ had been a standard in their live set since the time of Easy Cure. Adam Sweeting of Melody Maker was being generous when he said: “Imagine Hendrix without the guitar flash, phasing and stereo trickery and you’re left with a sparse, twitching skeleton.”

  By the time of ‘Meathook’, The Cure was rapidly running out of musical and lyrical ideas. Smith rambles on about a trip to the butcher, as if these mundane observations contained some of life’s great mysteries, while behind him the band scratches around for something resembling a tune. Fortunately, it’s all over in a bit over two minutes. If ‘Meathook’ was the song of a band short of ideas, ‘So What’ headed even further into the land of filler-dom, as Smith – now well and truly out of lyrics and drunk to boot – read out loud the details of a cake icing and food decorating set off the back of a sugar packet.

  Made all the more droll by Smith’s inclusion of the usual promo-speak designed to entice housewives who bake – Give your cakes that professional look! – he slurs a list of the packet’s contents: turntable, nine-inch icing bag with high definition nozzles, adaptor and 15-inch food decorating bag with piping nozzles. It was clear that Smith had fallen a long way from the deconstruction of Albert Camus and existentialism of ‘Killing An Arab’. The sound of the sugar packet being scrunched into a ball at the song’s close might as well have been Smith casting his verdict on the direction of not just the song, but the entire Three Imaginary Boys record. “Funny,” Smith would say of ‘So What’, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  However, the album wasn’t a complete train wreck. A slightly more polished version of ‘Fire In Cairo’, one of the first songs recorded during the September/October 1978 sessions with Parry, provided a few moments of quiet despair, while Smith’s catchy, singalong chorus displayed some early signs of his million-dollar melodicism. ‘It’s Not You’ was more filler, most likely included because its propulsive energy had been generating some lively pogoing (and gobbing) at Cure shows. />
  But if a track such as ‘Another Day’, with its dimly lit, overcast mood, was some kind of pointer for the band’s musical future, then the album’s title track (based on a Robert Smith dream) may well have been the blueprint for what was to follow. As a vocalist, Smith had found a melancholic mood rarely heard this side of one of his teen favourites, Nick Drake, even if the band’s electric backing was much spikier than anything that could be found on Five Leaves Left. And such snatches of lyrics that include a plea for help, concern about the future and a deep feeling of emptiness would establish Smith’s reputation as the guru of gloom, the only man who could out-Morrissey Morrissey. Smith’s voice, which trailed off as the song drew to its close, sounded like a man lost in the wilderness. It was hardly the soundtrack to an afternoon of hedonistic bliss, but ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ was a brooding, evocative end to a muddled, misdirected album.

  “The atmospherics of a song like ‘Three Imaginary Boys’,” Smith concurred, “was an example of where I wanted us to head.”

  Despite Smith’s concerns about virtually every factor of their debut – most of them uttered well and truly after its release, of course – the album was generally well received. Sounds’ Dave McCullough, giving Parry high praise as the “essential fourth Cure”, which must have pained Robert Smith greatly, was all over the album like a cheap suit. The successful recipe, according to McCullough was this: “Take three intelligent, sheepishly good-looking, nice middle-class boys who have a flair for original, stylish music and who don’t mind leaving their souls in the hands of a fourth streamlined, highly successful party.” He even praised their massacre of ‘Foxy Lady’ – hell, McCullough even thought that the lifeless artwork was “a witty metaphor”.

  Critic Adam Sweeting also heaped on the praise, suggesting The Cure was looking backwards in order to move punk forwards. “I can’t remember a band which has displayed such a basic format so richly since The Who … it’s like an introspective reverie on a wet afternoon.” Despite a miscue with the album’s title – he called it The Cure, which was some 25 years too early – Melody Maker’s Ian Birch was another true believer, declaring that “the Eighties start here”. Labelling their debut “masterful”, Birch – just like Sounds’ McCullough – doles out equal amounts of praise for band and producer, admiring Parry’s “intuitive understanding of The Cure psyche” which allowed each member “an equally dynamic share of the action”. Taken by the “distinctive material” and the band’s ability to move through many moods (“anger, disillusion, scorn, wistfulness and humour”), Birch signed off with this major rap. “This is great pop that you should waste no time discovering. The missing link between The Kinks 1966-style and the Banshees 1978-style? The lean and friskily alert music of the Eighties? Find out for yourself.”

  Trouser Press also signed on as Cure converts, comparing the band with Talking Heads and Wire. “Like both those groups,” they announced, “The Cure concern themselves with creating sound patterns using the barest palette available – one guitar, bass, drums and voice.” In other words – well, XTC’s, actually: Drums And Wires.

  Unexpectedly, the album spent three weeks in the album charts, peaking at number 44, holding its own in a UK chart dominated by a reasonably healthy mix of quality pop/rock (Blondie, The Police, Bowie and Squeeze all had charting records at the time) and the usual fluff, including pop castrato Art Garfunkel and such disco leftovers as Boney M, Eruption and Amii Stewart.

  But neither the band nor Chris Parry was ready for the NME backlash, heaped out by Paul Morley. He may have found ‘Killing An Arab’ “pleasurable”, but Morley wasn’t quite so charmed by Three Imaginary Boys. In a review that’s admirable for its relentlessness, Morley took issue with virtually every aspect of the band’s debut long-player. For starters, Morley felt – not inaccurately – that the band had no true idea what, if any, message they had to share with the world. “The lads go rampant on insignificant symbolism and compound this with rude, soulless obliqueness. They are trying to tell us something. They are trying to tell us they do not exist. They are trying to say that everything is empty. They are making fools of themselves.”

  But Morley was only just warming up. Quite justifiably, he slagged the album’s “mysterious” artwork (even if he misread Dempsey as the Hoover and Tolhurst as the fridge), figuring that Parry’s “no image” concept had backfired. “All this … fiddling about,” he wrote, “aims for the anti-image but naturally creates the perfectly malleable image: the tantalising enigma of The Cure. They try to take everything away from the purpose and idea of the rock performer but try so hard they put more in than they take out. They just add to the falseness.”

  Eventually Morley got beyond the band’s image and set to work on Three Imaginary Boys’ tunes. They didn’t do much for him, either. He described them as “willowy songs [that] wallow in the murk and marsh of tawdry images, inane realisations, dull epigrams”. His lengthy and at times quite justified hatchet job ended with this one final kiss-off to The Cure. “In 1979 people shouldn’t be able to get away with things like this. There are too many who do. Fatigue music. So transparent. So light and – oh, how it nags.”

  The Cure, up until this point, had been blessed with the perfect media relationship. Through their earliest days, when they played covers for drunks in Crawley and then throughout their Hansa tribulations, they’d been ignored. This worked to their advantage when Melody Maker’s Rick Joseph reviewed their Hope & Anchor show and the jury returned with a positive verdict for ‘Killing An Arab’: at the time they were still a fresh, new band, the kind of act that most writers would like to claim they’d discovered. Hell, they’d even been nominated as ground zero for the Eighties, according to Ian Birch. Now the relationship was starting to sour.

  “I think a lot of people in the music press thought we were manufacturing our image in some way,” Lol Tolhurst figured, “and it was as though they were trying to find the ‘truth’ behind our ‘mysterious façade’. In truth, we were probably quite naïve, so what they really saw was that naivety mixed with our genuine desire to communicate our emotions. I think the music press was no different from the mass populace – we tended to polarise people.”

  Parry had also led a relatively charmed life up until the publication of Morley’s review. He’d signed and produced critics’ darlings The Jam and the Banshees. Rolling Stone had gone into raptures about the former’s debut, In The City, blessing the album with four stars and stating that it “stood out from the class of ’77 … [it] barrels along at a pogo pace.” They’d been just as effusive when it came to Siouxsie & The Banshees’ 1978 debut, The Scream. Not only did they also receive the four-star treatment, but Rolling Stone believed that “their debut draws a vital connection between punk and psychedelia”, going on to namecheck The Cure and The Psychedelic Furs as bands directly influenced by the Banshees.

  So Smith and Parry – much to their credit – responded as any self-respecting music fan would to Morley’s damning review. They wrote a letter to Morley at NME. Admittedly, Smith did actually concur with some – but not all – of the writer’s barbs. “[But] what irritated me,” Smith said, “was that I agreed with some of what he said but the bit about the packaging making claims for social validity was nonsense. He was saying that we were trying to do something and then not achieving it, which was obviously not true.”

  In a 2000 interview, Smith conceded that there was some merit to Three Imaginary Boys, but that was more a result of the band’s musical shortcomings – especially Lol Tolhurst’s bare-basics drumming skills. “People picked up on it, because it sounded very different from anything else at the time,” he said. “Because Lol couldn’t drum very well, we had to keep everything very, very simple. Our sound was forced on us to a certain extent.”

  The band didn’t connect that well with another journalist who wielded some influence. Nick Kent, one of the most widely read (and quoted) music writers of the time whose best work was compiled in The Dark Stuff, simply
found them hard to like. In a May 19 NME piece called ‘A Demonstration Of Household Appliances’, he sensed that the band just didn’t feel that comfortable discussing their music. Kent was right on the money, given that Smith would admit that he didn’t think Three Imaginary Boys “sounded like The Cure at all”. They were very much a band-under-development, who hadn’t quite decided which direction their music should take.

  Although Kent admitted that The Cure was neither “rude nor cliquish”, he got the sense that “the ongoing interview situation is not one that they feel particularly at home with, that they find the process bemusing, almost quaint in its ridiculousness”. Running through the individual band members, Kent found Tolhurst “the most democratic and business-like” and felt that Smith was “the creative, shoulder-shrugging one”. Dempsey left no impression on him at all. “Between this pair,” Kent wrote, “Dempsey blends in without adding any particular dimension.” However, Kent’s criticisms seemed more personal than professional, advising that The Cure should be watched closely. “What will follow may well be some of the finest pop of the Eighties.”

  The band’s response to this new-found criticism was simple and direct. At their next Peel show appearance – Peel had championed ‘Killing An Arab’, spinning it most nights on his show – they altered the lyrics of ‘Grinding Halt’, inserting grabs of Morley’s panning of their album, tearing strips off his lofty prose stylings and laughing away his claims about “the tantalising enigma of The Cure”.