1982@40: PORNOGRAPHY - THE CURE

So, what is it about Pornography, The Cure's fourth platter? Sounds like classic early Cure with a string of good songs but seems impossible to remember after you've played it?

Bands develop through mutation. They start with something signature that, in exhausting it, changes as each phase gives way to the next and the process, looked at over time later, constant morphing, a twisted monstrosity. Joy Division seemed to metamorphose from Unknown Pleasures to Closer but the lineage still looks misshapen and ugly, the transformation has taken work and feels like it.

The Cure are strange here. From Three Imaginary Boys to Seventeen Seconds to Faith to Pornography I hear less the constant difficult birth of other bands than a steady intensification of one approach over time. You can easily trace the melodic patterns just of the vocal parts from Fire in Cairo to 100 Years but where the first is studiously spare, almost arid, the latter is dense and swollen. It's almost as though someone steadily poured a vat of cornflour into the music. Pornography is the monster version of Three Imaginary Boys. Afterwards, things changed: more light, more variety, more air, more success. Until then there was this.

I've put myself to a test here. I'm writing this one from memory. A little cheating has happened in that I've listened to it about five times in full over the last week. While I can recall the insistent whirling riff of the opening track and the aural break by the slower paced Siamese Twins to the backwards voice on the final and title track the rest just sounds like what an A.I. would create if programmed to make a Cure album.

The modal, minor tonality, the non rock drumming (is there a single snare hit in the whole record?) and the anguished vocals all fit the profile. There's even a single, Hanging Garden, but in context, it retreats into the texture. Compare and contrast the other single from this time that didn't make the album: Charlotte Sometimes. It feels like a classic, bigger than anything before with both space and intensity and a haunting refrain ("sometimes I dream"). I wonder if I'd notice it if it had been on the LP.

So far, all this sounds like a hatchet job. However, what is emerging as I write this is that, in being a kind of distillation of the band's music from the beginning to this point, it serves as a kind of intentional no-brainer. If you hear it you cannot argue that there's less craft on show. The production feels nothing but deliberate, vocals are variously out front or buried, the guitars and keyboards continue their rockless exploration, and so on. It just doesn't reward a close listen.

At the time it was released I'd heard a few tracks on 4ZZZ and was happy to hear another Cure record was in the offing. I was over someone's place for tea and biscuits one afternoon and noted the Curey music under our voices and gaffed, "can't wait to hear their new one." Um. "This is the new one," said mine host. While that was a decent joke on me he wasn't smirking in the slightest. And then he said something stranger still, for a Cure fan: "It's a bit Cure-ish, isn't it?"

And that's it, it's less Cure than Cure-ish. 

The other side of this is that when you put it on and go about your dailies it really sinks in. It's an album of album music the same way that Exile on Main Street or the White Album. You don't put Pornography on to hear The Figurehead, you put it on when you're in a Cure mood. This is apt and actually pretty useful, when you think about it. Apart from anything else it fits the history, the band were getting exhausted, physically and creatively and this record was meant to punish. It was meant to be Phil Spector in Hell, an angry note to themselves and all their fans: you want more? Take this!

The thing is that when you do listen over your shoulder while your doing your dishes or taking an urban hike, it comes to life as a living film score. It's the gloom of the early '80s for the ages. In comparison, you can get to name every track on Closer or Travelogue but Pornography is like the drunkest black light party you ever went to; there's no song by song, it's just an interminable corridor of bodies, noise and screams. But that's why it's good.

1981@40: FAITH - THE CURE

The Holy Hour is a description of the loss of faith. An ominous flanged bass riff is held up by a percussion that might as well be electronic as played by hand. A humming synth string motif moans. The guitars come in clean playing chords in an easy counter ryhthm. Smith's vocal is high and buried. A spare hand it given to the statements of the narrator's gradual but complete alienation from religion. His "wordless scream at ancient power breaks against stone..." He cannot join even the closest of his loved ones in the church. It's just a building which he softly leaves in the manner of one gently exiting a scene of someone else's private pain.

Then, in case you thought this was going to be a Debbie downer record, a few choppy flange chords and we're galloping along with the single Primary. A battery of twin basses (one a Fender VI) warped with the modulation effects that would illustrate the band's signature sound for the next few releases creates a tough dark restless motion. Images of the innocence of children and the awkward horror of a first love. The final lines include the primary colours in their images as Smith wails that the children of the first verse are still dreaming. Smith has dedicated this song to the recently suicidal Ian Curtis whose own crushing observations had fashioned the previous year's Closer which variously raged and whispered its way into the nervous systems of a generation. More generally Smith has spoken of the song coming from thoughts of dying young and staying innocent and going further to the notion that murder might be seen as a gift. No, that doesn't mean that Robert Smith wanted everyone to come along to a Cure gig armed: this was a moment when such statements were made to strengthen the line beyond which blared the grinning perfect teeth of the mainstream. The song hovered below the top 40 but everyone who went to their increasingly large gigs knew it. 

Other Voices opens with a standard drum pattern and a distant guitar shimmer that is taken over by a front and centre picked bass with a chunky riff. Wails in the distance before Smith comes in with the lead vocal. The narrator, abandoned, lives with desertion and eight million people, belittled by inner voices, recalls intimacy but it's ghostly, insubstantial, perhaps imaginary. "Change your mind. You're always wrong." Smith has a way of singing words like wrong that makes them sound simultaneously like self-pity and candid observation. In a way this could be the sequel to Killing an Arab as it reminds me of the same book. The way I described Albert Camus' novel The Outsider (L'etranger) is that it made me understand that all those other voices of greater society were right and would only ever be right and that I, in keeping my distance from them, was always going to be wrong. The thing is that I liked being wrong.

All Cats are Grey. A solid but easy rhythm is joined by a solemn but very easy synthesiser moan playing the same kind of modal scale heard throughout this album. A breezy, floating momentum takes over. Smith's vocal is distant. It seems to be the monologue of a corpse. It might simply be an allegory of depression or a genuinely imagined experience of death. The long-drawn beauty of the keyboards and gentle bearing of the drums fades. End of side one.

A grand swathe of synth strings, big bass and spacey drums might remind today's listeners of the Twin Peaks theme. Another buried Robert Smith vocal tells of the Funeral Party. Smith has explained that this is about his experience of the death of his grandparents. He watches and thinks of them from childhood, into maturity and then as the pale figures they are in death. As with most of the rest of the album, the structure is established with very little variation but the dynamics come through in the weight of the lyrics and vocal performance, creating a sense of inevitability. 

Doubt comes on like Primary the Sequel with galloping bass, slashing guitars and a near identical vocal melody. This is not from want of inspiration. If anything it's an admitted other side of the earlier song, describing a violent rage against the other (a lover, himself?) Well, while it doesn't hold up as a literal account, the title plays fair by telling us of the scale and context of the violence that drives him to repeat "knowing I'll murder you again." While there is so much imagery in this album taken from religion very little of it is offered as a direct commentary of it, used instead for the riches it provides as metaphor. The most violent song on an album called Faith is a song called Doubt, it's opposite. Here the doubt doesn't so much prevent action as haunt the one who has acted. Less Hamlet than Raskolnikov.

And then Faith continues the sound of inevitability with a steady slow pattern, solid bass riff and flanged six string. Smith is less buried than he is for most of the album. If anything, it is the stylistic recap of the whole set as it finally comes to rest on the overall title and theme. The lyric is typically a mix of clear imagery and obtuse statement. The unignorable line about raping children might be a literal reference to the darkest corners of organised fiath but, more typically it might be htere to get our attention to its violence and horror. The narrator rejects the traditions, the pageantry and ritual as so much dressing and leaves with nothing left but faith but the clear suggestion is that it is not faith in robes, crosses, stars or crescents but that which remains from denial of them and it doesn't sound like faith in a deity.

It was in 1981, in Britain as here in Australia, an unreamarkable thing to be an atheist. Indeed, the only people you met who made anything of it were those who reached it through oppressive experience. The Cure's use of the iconography of a child's view of religion does include commentary on the dark puzzles of the culture of the church finds a wealthier vein in taking its difficulties into the unforgiving daylight. Self-examination, the dangers of relationships, the paralysing doubt and violent response to it are all observable in the everyday, the horror of banality, the banality of horror.

And that's the thing here: you could listen to this now, never having heard it before, and easily conclude that it was the whingeing of precious emos, a symphony of snowflakes who had nothing more to add than cries of "death be mine!" But I only need to breifly repeat that this music arose from a world in real terror of its own annihilation by a cataclysmic nuclear final act. I'm not saying that they had no choice but to sound gloomy but that the great field of the mainstream was smiling as though nothing was was wrong. If the personal was, as the phrase went then, political this was and remains a political statement, no less than seomthing like Closer or Colossal Youth. Could they have lightened up just for one or two tracks? Well, you go back there with Bucks Fizz being waterboarded down your throat and try it: you're going to sound as bleak as you can get. 

This is a source point for what became goth along with The Banshees and Bauhaus and very few others.. If it seems a little childishly extreme in its negativity, give it enough listens to hear it fully and you'll hear a lot more than the application of black eyeliner. Recall, too, that all the cliches of horror movies themselves had source points and blaming Halloween for having a monster that keeps getting back up is to blame the invention, not its copies. Until Bauhaus adopted something closer to theatricality (which The Damned had also done but that was more theatre-restauranticality) this music was really just considered contemporary and I will happily attest that it fit perfectly into party tapes and radio play. There would definitely have been some who sat in dark rooms shivering at the sound but I didn't know any (and that is still pretty hard to do in Queensland).

Forty years have left this record a free standing artefact. Like my favourites from most eras this one sounds of its time and reaches without effort into our own. This is not because of any feature that marks it as a clear ancestor of more recent far (the programmed drums and guitar effects forbid that) but because of the humanity at the centre of its every moment. Faith is a record of people on a quest to know what they are and will report their findings whether it makes them look naive or jaded. It's also a rewarding listen because it's good and it's honest.

1980@40: SEVENTEEN SECONDS - THE CURE

An undercurrent of synthesised rhythm is squashed by a piano moving through a slightly eastern flavoured motif. It's short and repeated, broken only by a flanged guitar butting in. Eventually, a distant whining appears. It could be a human cry, an animal or an instrument. The piece ends with what sometimes sounds like muttered speech but on examination is the tail end of that synth rhythm decaying through an echo. It's called A Reflection. That might be a thought, what you see in a mirror or a puddle, or repetition like echo.

A brisk rhythm track with a bright clean guitar figure pealing above like a surf tune. Smith comes in with his signature crying tone. So far it could be from the debut album but the instrumental passages reveal that the view of the arrangement of a recorded song has risen to avian level; the songs have moved more into the realm of scoring rather than just cherry picking from jams and putting that together. Even if that was what happened it doesn't sound like it, it sounds arranged. Along with their mates from Bromley, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure at their best would follow this, adding a strong sense of cinema to their records. The lyric is the kind of self-gravitating vacuum of teenage relationships. The title and final line are taken from a U.K. tv institution Play for Today which typically dramatised stories from the lower end of the social strata in a kitchen sink style. I'd see them now and then in the '70s and loved how stark and often defiantly anti-enjoyable they were. Here, it's both sincere and ironic.

Secrets begins with the palm-muted flanged guitar and bass so close in tone that they frequently intersect. The chugging persists beneath a lyric of longing for an exhausted affair sung both in a distant reverby wail and a close up and dry murmur. Two brief verses of impressions and the  obsession chugs on. This approach in the instrumental track would speak for most of the band's output for the next four or so years when they broke out of it. But for now the pattern that could be used cheaply to evoke early '80s post punk lived here.

In Your House doctors the formula to an arpeggio on the (still flanged) guitar against a forward moving but groovy rhythm section. Robert Smith's vocal is again buried to allow the ambience to prevail. He tells of moving around the second person's house, changing the time and pretending to swim while drowning. Is he a ghost or does he just feel like one? The drums play out, machine-like, until the end.

You can find transcriptions of what Robert Smith is saying at various places online but until someone did that all you could tell was that someone was talking. It sounded like they were relating something like an event but it was too difficult to say. A tinkling piano playing octaves through a delay. The distant speech. a few guitar slices. A drum machine or a drummer playing kick+snare without variation. Wormy, squiggling sounds on a guitar low in the mix and the constant motif of tonic+semitone up+tonic+semitone down repeats before it falls into a rapid kickdrum decaying through an echo. The foreground tells you to worry and you do because you will never understand what the witness is saying. Minimalist mystery theatre.

The Final Sound opens the old side two with a waltz-time figure on the piano that sounds like a derelict house before the tape itself screws up and it stops.

When the dark harsh synth riff emerges from the shadows and the chorused guitar riff picks out an unresolved figure we are entering classic territory. The band already had a few songs well enough known to even peripheral fans to render them singalongs (my brother at the time delighted more than anyone else around him in singing "burn like a tyre in Cardwell") but A Forest was the epic that sealed it.  The drum machine starts with the basic kick and snare tone augmented by a kind of hi hat whisper. The bass fortifies the synth figure and the guitar chug emerges from the riff. Smith again comes in low in the mix. A verse about seeing a girl or not gives way to a change in the guitar chug tonality over the constant of the bass and synth. Another verse. Same. The final verse sings the frustration of a dream where you are denied what you want until you wake up and want to get back into the dream. "Again and again and again and again..." A new guitar figure soars until the drums and bass pare down to a heartbeat. The guitar lifts ever higher  but fragments (never had modulation effects been so expressive) and dissipates into the dark. One last progression by the bass and it, too, falls and rolls away into an echo.

M surprises by sounding like a brighter throwback to the first album, a pacey two chord riff on acoustic guitars and a straightforward 4/4 push. As a film buff I always thought this was about the Fritz Lang proto noir but M stands for Smith's beloved Mary, eventual wife. Still, if a love song it's happy with its spot in the shadows as the obscure lyric both admires and fears the subject who attracts him but daunts him with powers he doesn't understand. In other words, while not conventionally romantic it's an accurate description of the thoughts of someone in love. It's not all sunshine and kisses, folks, it can be paranoia, anxiety and despair as well: sometimes they just all feel the same.

At night begins with a spacey drum sound and distorted bass that sound like Joy Division's first album are augmented with a sax-like keyboard figure that removes that impression. Smith's distant vocals have a Latin descent to them. At the end of the verses the same ascending two chord riff is joined by a chorused guitar. The second verse gets an extra fuzz bass even further into the foreground. And the lyrics; is he a stalker? He stands alone in the icy night while someone else sleeps in a safe bed. He suggests that someone has to be there in the solitude, in the dark. Someone must be there. The gaps are where this story plays and something unlovely and cold lives there. The buzz of a synth and a distant processed guitar that sounds like a dog barking falls to silence.

The usual minimalist drums are joined by another chorused guitar playing minor chord figures. The bass fills the gap as the figure is repeated.  The bass picks up with semi-quavers before a more synchopated groove. Smith comes in. A dry vocal much further up front than any so far on the record. The final thoughts of a suicide? The disappointment of anyone still young and learning how flimsy even the best things are and could collapse in as little as seventeen seconds. The wish never came true and the girl starts to sing. The girl might be the end ("the opera ain't over ...") Whatever it is, that time interval is seen as a measure of life. Is it bleeding out? Something is going on after the thoughts end. The guitar chords finish and the drum pattern, now dry and closer, leaves us with a final couple of beats before the silence. End.

To read this you might think I'm describing some massive goth fest but really the thing that strikes me more now than when I first heard this album (when fresh in 1980) is how understated it is. The Cure, along with the Banshees and Bauhaus etc., went on to upscale their images until the big black hair monster overtook the look and T-shirts sold in their millions. But for the moment it was a band who'd already shown their skills and were already moving on to produce music that was too strong to forget but also too difficult for the mainstream. If you YouTube the video for A Forest you'll see what I mean here. It's a long song without a chorus and the band whose hair is neat and short wear jumpers rather than capes. Smith frequently fills the screen, lipsynching straight down the camera, keeping his expression plain. Images of forests dissolve in and out of view but mostly it's just the band playing. This is definitive post punk as it eschews the marketing image of flamboyance for something everyday while the music speaks for itself; a reaction against the plastic glued up spikes and torn jeans.

It wouldn't last but didn't have to. Smith and co. grew into what would soon be called goth and embraced that for a few very successful years before moving on again. The freshness, cheek and invention would wear out as it always does. Until that started, though, there was this set of pieces that feel coherent enough to identify with but without the grandiose overstatement of a '70s concept album. It's why it still works. Yes, its chorused guitar tones and telephone vocals and drum machines scream early '80s, regardless of how many hipsters copy them and cry postmodernism, it's not the datedness of the sound but the essence of the feeling. It's from the doom of the early X life under the nuclear apocalypse and it's time stamped. That said, I don't consider the notion that period-specific culture is any the less for that character. I've heard too many defences in the name of timelessness made in the name of things whose blandness and conventionality should have them all but shunned by their decade of origin. If flavourless garbage like Steely Dan or ELO are timeless I'll take dated any day. This is from 1980, sounds like it, and it sounds good now. If you've been young and felt, you've felt this.