Never Enough Page 22
Smith, as he had with ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ and ‘Killing An Arab’ and ‘At Night’ before that, drew some of his lyrical ideas from the literature he was consuming at the time (when he wasn’t frying his brain, of course). During a break on the Picture Tour, Smith had become obsessed with books on psychiatry, clinical insanity and what he categorised as “mental health in general”. The line “a charcoal face bites my hand”, which emerges from the sonic murk of the track ‘A Short Term Effect’, was lifted directly from his most recent reading.
But as Tolhurst explained earlier, the ideas behind other Pornography tracks came from actual life experiences: ‘The Hanging Garden’ documented yet another wild night for Robert Smith, when he wandered around his family’s garden, stark naked, after hearing what he thought was the noise of cats outside. Smith would later note that ‘The Hanging Garden’ also dealt with “the purity and hate of animals fucking … seeing someone fucking a monkey doesn’t particularly shock me”. The track ‘Siamese Twins’ – Smith cut the vocal with Mary Poole looking on – was inspired by something similar. As for ‘A Strange Day’, it was, in Smith’s words, “how I would feel if it would only be the end of the world”. ‘Cold’ was directly influenced by Smith’s hefty drug consumption of the past two years, as were parts of ‘A Short Term Effect’. And the lyric for ‘The Figurehead’ came to Smith after a Hamlet-like experience during the making of the woeful ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ video, when he unearthed a skull in the disused asylum that was the shoot’s location. Alas poor Yorick, indeed.
As uplifting as all this sounds, Smith’s po-faced lyrics were nothing compared to the barely alive dirges contained within Pornography. The album opened with ‘One Hundred Years’, a song that Smith characterised as a soundtrack to “pure self-loathing and worthlessness”. And few albums began with an opening line as overbearingly nihilistic as “it doesn’t matter if we all die”. It was a mission statement that The Cure swore by. “Nihilism took over,” Simon Gallup would state many years later, when asked about the Pornography period. “We sang ‘it doesn’t matter if we all die’ and that is exactly what we thought at the time.” Smith explained it this way: “If I hadn’t written those songs, I would have become a fat, useless bastard. I went through a period of thinking everyone was fucked and then I started to write these songs. I channelled all the self-destructive elements of my personality into doing something.”
If the robotic rhythms of Lol Tolhurst and Smith’s mercilessly bleak opening line made ‘One Hundred Years’ a tough introduction to Pornography, the track went even further downhill from there. In an increasingly gloomy frame of mind, Smith wailed about the killing of patriots, unspecified pain and dread, and, curiously, morbid laughter while a small object tumbles from someone’s mouth as the track built in intensity like the whirring of a dentist’s drill. As miserable as ‘One Hundred Years’ was – many view both the track and its parent album Pornography as the sound that launched a million Goths – Smith does use the song to drive his point home: from here on in, even more so than Faith or Seventeen Seconds, this is uneasy listening. The ultimate “fuck off” album had begun.
Tolhurst’s truly primal thumping of the tubs is dead centre of the mix during the following track, ‘A Short Term Effect’. Teamed with the wooden-legged, almost atonal bass of Gallup and another of Smith’s howling-into-the-abyss vocals, the effect is incredibly claustrophobic. Again, Smith dealt in scattershot images rather than finely crafted rhyming couplets as he spat out lyrics that in their evocation of a covering of earth suggested nothing less than a funeral. This was intoned as readily as The Beatles once harmonised “won’t you pleeeeeaaase help me”, and it was genuinely creepy, the sound of a man slowly unravelling.
‘The Hanging Garden’, the track Parry had earmarked as the album’s one commercial possibility, swiftly followed, but you’d hardly say it offered any respite from what came before. When Smith barked “fall fall fall fall into the walls” it’s as if he’s opened the door to one of his worst nightmares, which was really saying something. The pace of Tolhurst’s jungle drums is upped just a notch here, but the overall sound is as overwhelming and unrelenting as anything else on the album – or anything else that would be heard during this year of the Goth, when not only The Cure, but expat Aussies The Birthday Party (Junkyard), Smith’s strange pal Lydia Lunch (The Agony Is The Ecstasy), Siouxsie & The Banshees (A Kiss In The Dreamhouse) and the Pete Murphy-led Bauhaus (The Sky’s Gone Out) all unleashed the dogs. There were others waiting in the wings, too: within a year, The Birthday Party barked out their The Bad Seed EP, while The Creatures – whom NME would tag “the Sonny and Cher of the psychiatric ward” – delivered Feast and the Southern Death Cult released their self-titled debut. It was the best of times, it was the most Goth of times.
‘Siamese Twins’ continued where ‘The Hanging Garden’ left off: it was not so much a song as a death march, the merciless plod of Tolhurst’s toms teamed with a rare splash of keyboards (all three members played keys during the sessions). Even the act of lovemaking is reduced to something primal, brutal and ugly by Smith, as he coughs up lines about writhing beneath a red light and the Siamese twins of the title as if he were describing a sweaty wrestling match. Halfway through the song he effectively gave up, moaning how it would be best for him to be left to expire since he’ll soon be forgotten. No wonder the black trenchcoat brigade took to Pornography like moggies to catnip: Smith had written the guidebook to eternal damnation. ‘Siamese Twins’ typified just how grim this album truly was.
A brief moment of respite followed, as Smith’s squiggly guitar line brought a rare suggestion of melody to ‘The Figurehead’, but his vocal was still delivered from an emotionally cold and distant place. He twice repeated a line about meaning nothing as if they were the last half a dozen words he would have the chance to utter, while the song plodded ever onwards to the closing mantra about never being uncon-taminated again. As hard a listen as Pornography was, full marks to The Cure for their dogged pursuit of a single sound: this psychodrama of an album rarely wavered in tone during its 35 grim minutes.
‘A Strange Day’, not surprisingly, is more of the unholy same, yet another soundtrack to the demons that were doing in the head of Robert Smith (so much so, as it turns out, that only a few notes in, Smith actually announces the fragmentation of his head). As with ‘The Figurehead’ before it, Smith makes a half concession to melody with another wiry, knotty guitar line – you’d hardly call it a riff – but it’s half-submerged beneath another of his venomous lyrics. This time he depicts a day where he stumbles into deep waters. Smith believed there was no way out – although, admittedly, he wasn’t ready to go the way of Ian Curtis.
‘Cold’, the next track, lived up to its name; it was a creaking, slowly creeping ode to nothingness, in which Smith howled into the void how he was in an embryonic state, dreaming of being interred and becoming a memorial to bygone days with all the walking-corpse-like blankness of The Sister Of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch. Yet unlike Eldritch – who was still a few years away from his own Goth rock masterwork, 1987’s Floodland – it was hard to believe there was even the hint of a sense of humour, albeit morbid, at play here: if Smith really wanted to kill off The Cure, he’d just written their eulogy.
But wait, there’s more: the title track then brought this epic downer to a thankless close. It opened with the muffled snatches of the Germaine Greer/Graham Chapman debate, as sampled by Smith and Thornalley, before it locked into yet another of the band’s thudding, ill-tempered grooves. Should this continue, Smith warns, the outcome will be fatal. It was the perfect kiss-off from an album that had “band suicide” smeared over it in the blood of Tolhurst, Gallup and Smith. That much said, there was just the briefest ray of light in this closing track to the album that would effectively be the last rites of The Cure, Mk 1, as Smith vowed to fight his melancholic blues and, inevitably, find his cure. What Smith couldn’t have known was that that cure would come in the shape of a
n eccentric English videomaker and a totally different musical outlook of his own. But that was some way off in the distance.
Pornography would prove to be enormously influential. Several decades later it would be namechecked as a career-starter by such nu-metal monsters as The Deftones and System Of A Down. And those who considered themselves true Cure lovers, not just blow-ins seduced by the pop songs and big hair, firmly believed that Pornography was the definitive Cure album.
Of course it was a tough sell on its release in May 1982, even though the album reached a chart high for the band, peaking at number nine. As Rolling Stone’s Mark Coleman would astutely point out in 1995, albeit with the benefit of hindsight: “Though Pornography is revered by Cureheads as a masterstroke, normal listeners will probably find it impenetrable.” Pornography turned out to be the kind of album – just like Lou Reed’s junkie soap opera, Berlin, or Bowie’s coke-fuelled Low – that required some distance and a good few years of music history to be really appreciated.
Reviews filed some 20 years later typically found much more to like about the album than critics did in 1982. The following review typified that revisionist attitude: “With Pornography, [Smith] entered the downward spiral that prompted the greatest music of his career. The title track is sheer hell as Smith abandons music altogether. But the remaining tracks are among the finest the Eighties had to offer. ‘One Hundred Years’, with its grinding riff, ‘Siamese Twins’, with its stuttering beat, and ‘The Figurehead’ (“I laughed in the mirror for the first time in a year”) are Gothic studies in terror par excellence. Nothing sounded like Pornography, not even other Cure records.” Uncut followed suit in August 2004. “On its release,” they noted in the midst of a Cure cover story, as the band entered a third wave of popularity, “Pornography was met with bafflement and disgust. It’s actually a masterpiece of claustrophobic self-loathing.”
But in the summer of 1982, Pornography was a hard album to love. In his NME review, which ran on May 8, Dave Hill opened with this warning: “It [Pornography] won’t improve your social life or relieve you of your load, and this music proves an antidote to nothing much at all, though it may clear out your system … this record portrays and parades its currency of exposed futility and naked fear with so few distractions or adornments and so little sense of shame. It really piles it on.” Though a great deal more reverential than Paul Morley’s demolition job on Three Imaginary Boys, it was hardly a glowing recommendation from Hill, especially in light of the praise heaped on the Banshees’ A Kiss In The Dreamhouse LP, which emerged a few months later. “Beyond all wildest hopes and dreams,” Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland noted when dissecting the Banshees’ third and best-known album, “beyond all past suggestions and momentum, beyond all standards set this year, Dreamhouse is an intoxicating achievement.” It was pretty clear who was top of the Goth rock hierarchy: and it wasn’t Crawley’s Three Imaginary Boys.
Yet, perversely, Pornography became a hit, of sorts, somehow finding its place in the UK Top 10 alongside such far more chart-friendly acts as ABC, Madness, Duran Duran and Malcolm McLaren’s latest creation, Bow Wow Wow. The latter’s oddly beguiling and wildly catchy ‘I Want Candy’ was fast becoming the summer anthem of 1982, along with such other hits as ‘Happy Talk’, a reworking of the Rodgers & Hammerstein song from South Pacific by Damned outcast Captain Sensible, and Yazoo’s ‘Don’t Go’. Robert Smith might have felt decidedly uncomfortable in the pop spotlight, but producer Phil Thornalley, for one, was chuffed with Pornography’s small-scale success. “That was my first effort as producer – and my name was on the charts,” he told me, just as thrilled 20 years later.
The Cure, meanwhile, had more pressing matters to deal with. They had yet another tour lined up, which would consume the trio for the best part of three months. The Fourteen Explicit Moments Tour began to cast its ghoulish spell with shows at the Printemps de Bourges on April 10 and at the Top Rank Skating Bowl in Plymouth on April 18, with Zerra 1 opening the night. Even at this early stage of the itinerary, Smith had some inner-band tension to deal with – Tolhurst may have been the usual recipient of Smith’s razor-sharp sarcasm, but The Cure frontman had really started to fall out with Gallup.
“Pornography was an intense period of mindlessness,” Smith would go on to admit. “I was just full of rage. I felt I hadn’t achieved what I wanted to. I thought everything was coming to an end. I hated Simon – who was my lifelong friend – more than anyone else in the world. The whole thing was a complete mess.” And Smith’s growing camaraderie with Steve Severin wasn’t doing The Cure any favours, either. Severin’s idea of a good time was to hang around backstage at Cure shows and either hide Tolhurst’s drinks or spike them with LSD. At the same time he’d be in Smith’s ear, trying to entice him over to the Banshees’ ranks as a full-time member. “I was always asking Robert to disband The Cure and join the Banshees,” Severin admitted. “I was definitely sowing the seeds of discontent.”
Tolhurst, interestingly, had no problems with Severin, despite his divisive role in the world of The Cure. “I love Steve,” Tolhurst said as recently as 2005. “We had many a crazy night on tour or in clubland. [But] given the Banshees’ history with guitarists, I’m sure he thought about luring Robert away.”
Their setlist from that opening show in Plymouth exposed Smith and The Cure’s miserable mindset at the time, as did Porl Thompson’s grisly painting of animals falling from the sky, which fluttered behind the band. The plan had been to use Thompson’s image – clearly influenced by the lyrics of ‘The Hanging Garden’ – as the album art, but he missed the deadline. So they enlarged the image which Thompson had painted, and used it as the stage backdrop instead. ‘The Holy Hour’, which opened most of the Picture Tour shows, had been ditched as the set opener, replaced by the equally morbid ‘The Figurehead’. ‘M’, ‘Cold’ and ‘The Drowning Man’ followed in rapid, relentless succession. Clearly intent on pleasing no one but themselves, The Cure then plunged even deeper into the murky existential waters of their recent albums, as they worked through ‘A Short Term Effect’ and ‘The Hanging Garden’. In fact, they were a good eight songs deep into the set before they unleashed something resembling a hit, 1981’s ‘Primary’, only to head deeper into the gloom with ‘Siamese Twins’, ‘One Hundred Years’, ‘Play For Today’, ‘A Forest’ and ‘Pornography’. Reluctantly, they tacked on two older, more familiar tracks, ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ and ‘Killing An Arab’, before signing off with ‘Forever’, a rarely heard (and unrecorded) track.
Both the running order and the setlist rarely changed as the band moved through Bristol, Brighton, Southampton, Sheffield and Newcastle. When Pornography finally made the record stores, they were in London, playing a 20-song set at the Hammersmith Odeon. By this time the band had fully embraced their recently introduced onstage look, which would soon become a Cure signature: they smeared cherry-red lipstick around their eyes and mouths, which would smudge and run as soon as the stage lights kicked in, giving the impression that the trio were bleeding. “[It looked] like we’d been smacked in the face,” said Smith. It seemed the perfect look to accompany the torrid, ugly music they were making.
Tolhurst, Gallup and Smith were also at the early stages of their big-haired period. Heavily inspired by the skyscraping flat-top that actor Jack Nance sported in Eraserhead, David Lynch’s eccentric freak-out-cum-nightmare of a film, Smith and Gallup, especially, were starting to test the acceptable limits of just how high their hair could reach, while Tolhurst – whose locks were naturally curly – adopted a style that made him look like a drink-sodden Byron. (The puffy sleeves that the band would soon sport pushed that image to its logical fashion-victim conclusion.) But that was yet to come: at the time of Fourteen Explicit Moments, the trio’s towering hair and bleeding-face make-up exacerbated the impact of the brutal music they were unleashing on the public. This was a freak show.
Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland, a music correspondent embedded deep inside Goth rock terr
itory, unleashed a written assault on the band’s latest tour that made Paul Morley’s slagging seem little more than empty words. “Seldom have three young people in pursuit of a clutch of aimless atmospheres achieved so little with such panache,” he wrote. “The Cure – that’s a joke. More like a symptom.” Reluctantly, Sutherland accepted that his word meant nothing to The Cure faithful, lost children who lapped up all this ghoulishness, but that didn’t stop him describing Tolhurst, Smith and Gallup as “three updated Al Stewart bedsitter boy students [ouch] squeezing their pimples and translating Camus prose into Shelleyian stanzas.” In short, he thought The Cure sucked.
NME were a little less brutal when they covered the band’s show at The Dome in Brighton on the night of Smith’s 22nd birthday. Smith had obviously liked his and Thornalley’s experiment in “found sound”, because the band recycled the strange, garbled gurgles at both the beginning and end of ‘Pornography’, which closed their set (they returned with a three song encore of ‘10.15’, ‘Killing An Arab’ and ‘Forever’). But critic Richard Cook could sense some dissent in the ranks of The Cure. “The Cure felt dissatisfied with this performance,” he wrote. “Smith, on his birthday, looked dejected and tired. If this is second-string Cure then their best must be very close to the edge.”
Oh how right Cook was: The Cure was so close to the edge that a hefty push and a few ill-chosen words would have destroyed them completely. As Fourteen Explicit Moments headed to the continent on May 5 – their Rotterdam show at De Doelen being their first since the Hammersmith Odeon – some major cracks were opening up. There were any number of contributing factors: Gallup blamed the European heat and the intensity of the music; Smith believed that Gallup had started to taunt Tolhurst because “he couldn’t get to me”, while faithful roadie Gary Biddles felt that part of the problem was Gallup’s increasing popularity with audiences. Smith also felt that Gallup was jealous of the increased attention he was receiving as Cure frontman.