![]() My best friend Robin was pretty depressed, too, and having an awful time at home with his parents. What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that I was in the midst of my first significant bout of depression, which lasted for the better part of two years, encompassing all of 1989. During my freshman year of college, I’d come perilously close to attempting suicide, so this depression Smith was expressing was something I understood. But Disintegration was a perfect synthesis of everything they could do: the guitar textures were (are) stunning, and Smith’s lyrics in many ways never sharper, and when I say “sharper,” I mean akin to something you’d use to slit your wrists. Its follow-up, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, had its moments but was overall a bit poppier than I wanted - needed - from Smith and co. The Head on the Door, the first Cure album I would’ve heard around its time of release, was a fairly brilliant dark goth-pop album I gravitated immediately to closer “Sinking,” still my favorite track to this day. ![]() Poster art for the excellent new concert film The Cure Live 40, out now on Eagle Vision My clinically depressed, sad little heart responded quite strongly to Smith’s lyrics, with music that perfectly backed them up. No one wrote depression quite like Robert Smith (save, perhaps, Ian Curtis, but he wasn’t making new music at the end of the ‘80s). With this record, however, a return to the heavy gothness of the likes of Pornography and Faith years earlier, I tended to focus on its gloriously despondent lyrics. We had a beat-up boombox in there, and rotated tapes in and out of it as I recall, we played Disintegration a lot - the album’s songs with more thrust, like “Fascination Street” and “Prayers for Rain,” helped work go along more quickly. I spent the summer, following my bad freshman year of college, back at home, working with my closest friends in our local college cafeteria’s dishroom. But by August, Disintegration already felt incredibly lived in, to this gay, goth-hearted, lonely teenager. The massive, unexpected, and frankly shocking (to longtime Cure fans, at least) success of “Love Song” - which would ascend all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, only held out of the top spot by Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” - was yet to come. Lead single “Fascination Street,” while not a top 40 radio hit, had moved from the Buzz Bin to Heavy Rotation on MTV by the start of July. It was August 1989, and my best friend had just said goodbye to me, with neither of us knowing how long it would be until we saw each other again.ĭisintegration came out at the start of May of that year, so I’d been listening to it fairly obsessively for much of the summer. (“Ye Gods! I felt like Thor with his hammer!” he reflected in his memoir.There I stood on the massive, concrete wraparound porch of my parents’ Indiana farmhouse, endlessly rewinding and playing the title track of The Cure’s Disintegration, tears racing down my face. Tolhurst’s nerves dissipated as soon as he took to the stage and struck a bell with his percussion mallet to begin Faith. As my salty tears streamed down my cheeks, I found that I could not stanch the flood of emotions that filled me.” “The tears wouldn’t stop,” he writes of the moment in Cured. The former drummer waited backstage to play with the Cure for the first time in 23 years. Tolhurst then made up the full complement for Faith. ![]() O’Donnell joined them for Seventeen Seconds. O’Donnell rejoined the Cure in time for the shows, any negative feelings about his firing apparently dispersed.Īt the Opera House, on May 31 and June 1, Smith, Gallup, and Cooper played Three Imaginary Boys. They selected Sydney Opera House, as part of the Australian city’s annual Vivid LIVE festival, as the venue for these so-called Reflections shows. Smith had a more extravagant notion: The group would play their first three albums live in their entirety. He wrote to Smith suggesting that the band celebrate it. It hadn’t escaped Tolhurst’s attention that that year marked the 30th anniversary of Faith. Lifetime achievement awards, back catalogue reissues.heritage acts traffic in nostalgia, and in 2011 the Cure took this process one stage further when they revisited the landmarks from the start of their career. The following is an excerpt from journalist Ian Gittins' book, The Cure: A Perfect Dream.
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