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  “[With Seventeen Seconds] I was trying to get a combination of all the things I liked about those four things,” Smith explained when the subject of his “master tape” was raised, “even though they were so disparate.”

  Seventeen Seconds was not exactly laboured over in the studio. The new four-piece Cure cut the album with Hedges in 13 days, after rehearsing the shortlisted songs at Smith’s parents’ house during the first week of January. All 11 tracks were recorded at Morgan between January 13 and 20; the album was mixed from February 4 to 10. The swiftness of the recording was as dictated by economics as it was the band’s sharp studio focus – although more than one producer who worked with the band would tell me that The Cure rarely entered a session unprepared. “We mostly had it all before we got to the studio,” Tolhurst explained. “That’s why it was pretty quick.” But Three Imaginary Boys hadn’t been a hit, so there simply wasn’t a lot of money in the recording kitty. The brevity of the sessions was possibly also dictated by the fact that the band’s drug consumption, although active, hadn’t reached the Bolivian-fuelled highs (and lows) of their next album, Faith. And again, as I was told by Phil Thornalley, who produced their fourth album, Pornography, the mood in the studio didn’t necessarily equate to the grim tunes the band was recording. For Gallup, having endured the slog of a factory job, the recording was like one sustained party. “Staying up until three in the morning, drinking …,” he rhapsodised. Producer Hedges had equally positive memories of the making of Seventeen Seconds. “When I try to remember it, all I can see is a party.” Smith related how the band slept on the floor of Morgan’s studio one, “to get that us-against-the-world feeling”.

  Smith, as he promised (threatened, actually) after Three Imaginary Boys’ unsatisfying studio experience, co-produced the album. The band’s one non-studio activity during the recording of the album was another Holland jaunt on January 15.*

  Chris Parry would relate how Smith was a very different man this time around. During the making of Three Imaginary Boys Smith seemed unsure about how much creative control he could exercise – and then complained about it forever after. But during the Seventeen Seconds sessions he took over. When Smith caught Parry tinkering with a snare drum on the first day of recording, he issued his manager-cum-label-boss a simple directive: “Don’t bother, Bill, it’s not what we want.” Equal parts impressed and vexed, Parry backed off – his creative involvement with the band was being reduced with each new session.

  “I had to ask Bill not to come into the studio,” said Smith, “because he was trying to produce the record and I wanted to do it with Hedges. I knew exactly what sound I needed for Seventeen Seconds – I wanted it to be inspired by Nick Drake with the clear, finished sound of Bowie’s Low.” Smith was justifiably proud of his co-production efforts, to the extent that he sometimes forgot that Mike Hedges was seated alongside him. “We did it on our own,” he said in 1996, “and everything about it was exactly what I wanted. I produced it, although they [presumably Parry] said I wasn’t capable. Seventeen Seconds is a very personal record, and it’s also when I felt The Cure really started.”

  “After the first album, Parry wasn’t privy to the workings of the band that much,” Tolhurst added. “He’d turn up to the studio but we didn’t let him in on much; we kept things pretty close. He might say that he knew how to remix something so we’d give him the fader and get Hedges to re-route it so he was adjusting the high-hat or something.”

  If The Cure was hoping to maintain one sustained melancholic mood with Seventeen Seconds, they couldn’t have done it better. The album locks into a sombre groove from the opening track and doesn’t let go until the final strains of the closing title track have drifted off into the sonic horizon. It’s virtually impossible to accept that this is the same band that made the patchy, unsteady Three Imaginary Boys.

  It opens with the stately instrumental ‘A Reflection’, a conversation between strummed guitar and solitary piano; a sound that Smith had purposefully designed to set a contemplative mood for the entire record. The sombre, sober track brings to mind such dimly lit meditations as those on Brian Eno’s 1977 long-player, Before And After Science. It’s followed by ‘Play For Today’, another song that was in development not long after the Three Imaginary Boys sessions. Although it shuffles along at a fair clip, unlike much of the album, ‘Play’ still maintains an appropriately solemn, downbeat mood. Smith would relate that the song dealt with “the fraudulent aspects of an insincere relationship”, but his lyrics were secondary to the downcast mood of the song, and the album.

  Smith’s vocals are barely audible on ‘Secrets’, although if you tune in closely you can make out his lyrical design, which was to craft a song about missed opportunities, and the dream he held of “hopelessly wishing to have the courage” to seize the day. (Smith stated that this muffling was intentional: “The voice was supposed to be so you could almost barely hear it.”) The very hollow-sounding Eighties production style that dates a song such as ‘Play For Today’ isn’t so evident with ‘Secrets’; it’s yet another twilight mood piece, where Smith and band were in a mood so blue that it made their Mancunian peers Joy Division seem like a fun-loving dance band by comparison. The pensive, slow-burning ‘In Your House’ follows, Smith’s snake-like guitar line wrapping itself around a lyric that dealt with “feeling uncomfortable in someone else’s presence, but always returning”. The song was a perfect example of Smith’s desire not to deviate from the one mood during the entire album; it’s an unwavering, unapologetic study in sorrow and bleakness. Though not quite as grim as such future long-playing downers as Pornography or Disintegration, Seventeen Seconds isn’t a record for the young at heart. That was especially true when you consider the fact that it emerged in the spring of 1980, at a time when the charts and airwaves were ruled by such irrepressibly upbeat pop fluff as Lipps Inc’s ‘Funkytown’, Paul McCartney’s ‘Coming Up’ and Jermaine Jackson’s ‘Let’s Get Serious’.

  The following track, ‘Three’, was somewhat sinister, dominated by a creaking keyboard and Tolhurst’s rock-steady, one-step-at-a-time drumbeat which pushed it along at a virtual crawl. Smith described how ‘Three’ dealt with what he called “the eternal triangle” but that’s virtually impossible to determine, given that his vocal was buried so deeply in the mix. ‘The Final Sound’ goes one step further into the abyss; the soundscape was so positively Gothic in tone you could almost be fooled into believing that it was lifted straight from the soundtrack of some Hammer Horror gorefest.

  ‘A Forest’, the next track, is the definitive early Cure mood piece, a strikingly original and authentic slice of Smith songcraft that would feature on most Cure setlists for the following quarter of a century. Just like his ‘Three Imaginary Boys’, ‘A Forest’ was, allegedly, based on one of Smith’s childhood dreams, where he was trapped in the woods, unable to find any way to escape. (Typically, Smith would then do a backflip and deny it all. “It’s just about a forest,” he said.) As Smith’s guitar – which sounds as though it was recorded from somewhere deep inside a wind tunnel – entwines itself with another of Tolhurst’s no-nonsense rhythm patterns and Gallup’s plodding bassline, the track slowly yet relentlessly builds to a genuinely eerie crescendo. ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ may have been the band’s first three minutes of timeless pop, but ‘A Forest’ was deeper, more profound, a genuinely stirring, unsettling six minutes of sound. It was Seventeen Seconds’ centrepiece and, as it transpired, the band’s first legitimate hit. Chris Parry thought the song was “wonderful – a most pleasant surprise”.

  Simon Gallup would recall that ‘A Forest’ was a song with an indefinable running time. In fact, sometimes the people playing it didn’t actually know when it would end. “[It] was one that just used to go on and on. The drums would stop, Robert would carry on playing guitar and I was never sure when he was gonna stop so I’d just carry on after him. Then I got some effects pedals and I found I could experiment and make all sorts of bizarre noises.”
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  Smith also knew the song was crucial for the band; it definitely pointed the way forward. “[It was] the archetypal Cure sound,” he said in 1992. “It was probably the turning point when people started listening to the group and thinking we could achieve something, including me.”

  “With ‘A Forest’ I wanted to do something that was really atmospheric, and it has a fantastic sound,” Smith continued. “Chris Parry said, ‘If you make this sound radio friendly, you’ve got a big hit on your hands.’ I said, ‘But this is how it sounds. It’s the sound I’ve got in my head. It doesn’t matter about whether it’s radio friendly.’”

  ‘M’, a crisply strummed valentine to the love of Smith’s life, Mary Poole, followed ‘A Forest’. Though it would be a stretch to call it a love song, this mid-tempo ballad came as a relief in the midst of the album’s almost terminally heavy emotions and all-round broodiness. All Robert Smith would say, when asked about the song’s meaning, was to state that it was “about a girl” – although he would later admit that another Albert Camus story, A Happy Death, had a major influence on the lyric. But anyone close to the band knew the truth about ‘M’.

  Seventeen Seconds’ closing pair of numbers, ‘At Night’ and the title track, maintain the deep, dark mood with a steely-eyed intensity. The former, a slow-grinding plod that was once again held in place by the metronomic thud of Tolhurst’s drums, contained a lyric inspired by another literary purveyor of the paranoid, Franz Kafka, whose story gave the song its title. The song seemed so insistent on maintaining an overwhelming sense of despair that the band would have gladly kept playing its slow-motion groove for another hour. As for the title track, the album’s closer, Smith’s lyrical inspiration was more oblique; he stated that it was derived from “an arbitrary measure of time – one that seemed to be suddenly everywhere once the song was written”. While that was hardly the most concise and easy-to-follow explanation, few of these studies in solemnity were dictated by lyrics or anything resembling a message; Smith would readily leave that to the Bonos of the world. He was more intent on pursuing a single mindset in the manner of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left or Bowie’s Low, albums that played such crucial roles in dictating the tone and style of Seventeen Seconds.

  “I knew exactly what I wanted to do with Seventeen Seconds,” Robert Smith declared years later. “I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound and I didn’t want anyone to interfere with that. Anyone who wanted to play more than one piano note could go and do it somewhere else.” Producer Hedges was impressed by the band’s sharp focus: they were barely recognisable from the novices who made Three Imaginary Boys. “I really appreciated the musical direction – morose, atmospheric, very different to Three Imaginary Boys,” he said. “I followed Robert’s instructions – he wanted a certain sound.” (Not only would Seventeen Seconds become a career-saver for The Cure, it proved that Hedges was much more than some in-house studio journeyman. His career was also set in motion.)

  The Cure didn’t realise just how influential an album they’d created with Seventeen Seconds. As late as 2004, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitarist/songwriter John Frusciante would swear allegiance to Seventeen Seconds and its sequel, Faith, revealing that both albums were major influences on his band’s mega-platinum 1999 comeback Californication. There can be no question that the band’s gloomscapes achieved far more than simply becoming a sonic touchstone for the Goth movement.

  Smith felt much closer to Seventeen Seconds than Three Imaginary Boys. “During Seventeen Seconds, we honestly felt that we were creating something no one else had done,” he would tell Rolling Stone. “From this point on, I thought that every album was going to be the last Cure album, so I always tried to make it something that would be kind of a milestone. I feel Seventeen Seconds is one of few albums that genuinely achieved that.”

  With the album now wrapped, The Cure returned to the Lakeside at Crawley on March 18 for their first home-town show since the pre-Christmas debacle at Crawley College. Their last Crawley concert had been marred by surly skinheads and local jealousies; this time around it was a much better-natured gig. Porl Thompson even jammed with the band for their encore of ‘Cult Hero’. Clearly inspired, Smith subsequently pieced together The Cult Heroes for their one and only gig, opening for The Passions at The Marquee in London five days later. (Smith had obviously forgiven his Fiction labelmates for the “very peculiar ideologies” which he felt had marred their late 1979 tour.)

  For the Marquee gig, Smith roped in the true cult hero, Horley postman Frank Bell, plus two local schoolgirls and his Cure buddies. Fuelled by enough booze to stop a football team, and cheered on by around 400 Horley and Crawley locals, The Cult Heroes flashed back to 1973, rocking their way through a Top 10 set that Smith had taped from one of Jimmy Savile’s Sunday radio programmes. It was unlikely that any post-punk outfit had even contemplated covering Thin Lizzy’s ‘Whiskey In The Jar’, Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’ and Gary Glitter’s ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)’, but it said something about the brotherhood being shown on stage. Those who could stand up fell about laughing.

  With time to kill before the release of Seventeen Seconds’ first single, this was the first of several Smith cameos. He also added backing vocals to The Associates’ upcoming long-player and then became a temporary Strangler, playing guitar for the pop-punk pioneers at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, as part of a fund-raiser for their recently busted bassist Hugh Cornwell. As well-intentioned as all this was, it was really only a lead-up to the main event, the release of the first single from The Cure’s second coming.

  ‘A Forest’ appeared on April 5. It was backed by the live staple, Another Journey By Train’, an instrumental remake of ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’, which had carried the prosaic working title ‘Horse Racing’. “The name [change] came about because the demo rhythm went from sounding a bit like galloping horses to sounding kind of like a runaway train,” the ever-logical Simon Gallup explained. But ‘Another Journey’ wasn’t the cut that most critics were interested in: with ‘A Forest’ they were witnessing a new Cure, a band who’d undergone both physical and spiritual changes since their not-so-successful Three Imaginary Boys. The reviews were mixed, even if the commercial response to ‘A Forest’ was outstanding by Cure standards.

  NME’s Julie Burchill, later to become a million-selling writer of bodice-ripping fiction, was no Cure fan, as proved by her earlier hatchet job on the band. She found ‘A Forest’ equally unsatisfying. In her review of the single, she accused the band of “trying to stretch a sketchy living out of moaning more meaningfully than man has ever moaned before … without a tune, too.” Inadvertently, she had given Smith credit for not doing things in small steps, but it was hardly the type of upbeat press coverage for which the band was hoping. However, there were other reviewers who spotted how far the band had advanced from their scratchy, indifferent debut LP. “This isn’t what you’d call an immediate song,” wrote another critic, “but there’s something very attractive about it.” Co-producer Smith was also given kudos in the same review, which declared that ‘A Forest’ “has the [band’s] best production to date.”

  The year 1980 also marked the point when The Cure’s reach extended beyond Europe and the UK. ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, backed with ‘10.15 Saturday Night’, was given a release in Australia and New Zealand through Stunn Records, a New Zealand-based indie label run by Terry Condon, a school pal of Chris Parry’s. A second version of the seven-inch, specifically for the Kiwi market, added ‘Killing An Arab’, making for a very rare (and collectible) three-track single. Accordingly, the band’s reputation started to build south of the equator, with such alternative-before-their-time radio stations as Sydney’s 2JJ jumping all over ‘Boys Don’t Cry’.

  As rewarding as it was to build a fanbase in Parry’s part of the world, he also had larger plans for The Cure. In February 1980 a repackaged version of Three Imaginary Boys, re-titled Boys Don’t Cry, became the band’s first North American release. Featu
ring a cover image as un-informative as the parent album – three palm trees of varying sizes in an Egyptian setting that just reeked of ‘Killing An Arab’ – Boys Don’t Cry compiled eight tracks from Three Imaginary Boys plus the A-sides of their first three UK singles and ‘Plastic Passion’ and ‘World War’, a hitherto unreleased cut from the band’s early Morgan sessions for Fiction. This rejigged Cure debut album was also released through Stunn in Australia and New Zealand.

  Parry was sufficiently buoyed to book the band’s first US tour, which commenced on April 10. Rather than launch a full-bore assault on the US of A, which could consume months and eat up many thousands of pounds, Parry focused on eastern US cities with the type of college radio (and new music fans) that would embrace this strangely angular, moody UK quartet. The band opened their rapid-fire tour at Emerald City in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, then played three nights (April 15 to 17) at Hurrah’s in New York, with a Boston show at the Allston Underground on the 20th.