User Profile

They’ll tell you that Disintegration is the Cure’s masterpiece; don’t believe it. It’s not their most consistent (Pornography), most inspired (The Head on the Door) nor most innovative (Seventeen Seconds). The best Cure song ever (“All Cats Are Grey”, imho) is on Faith. Their best ensemble playing: Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Worse still, this celebrated “gaze into the abyss” is, in my view, very likely not quite sincere. The culmination of a confessional narrative which had been building at least since 1980’s “Play for Today” (“Call me a liar, you would anyway”), the lyrics to Disintegration are near-naked revelation, or appear to be. Yet look closer. “How the end always is”? The end of what? “Disintegration”, “Last Dance”, “Pictures of you”, “Untitled” suggest their protagonist has just made the pivotal decision of his romantic life; “Lovesong” reverses that decision with just a few glib clichés, yet it’s these clichés that bear the closest relation to Smith’s reality. In other words it’s escapism, this leap into the void, and like all escapism it’s seductive. Fellow old-school Cureheads may accuse me of “revisionism”, and to be honest at the time I was sucked in too, but never so entirely that it didn’t make me feel a little dirty, and never to the point of proclaiming it their masterpiece. Musically, though I learned to play guitar from it, it never thrilled me like their earlier stuff. It’s easy, safe; not one chord is surprising, not one riff obscure. It’s lush, spacious, atmospheric; Smith and producer David M. Allen always were good with a soundscape (cue “Sinking”, 1985). It’s no doubt been influential too, not least on the Cure, whose 2016 live shows have been saturated with it, and who never recovered their poise after it. (“Friday I’m in Love”, their biggest hit since, tries to pretend it never happened.) Also, it was an event, a brief takeover of popular music by a genre (introverted funereal mope-rock) which had to have its day. Don’t get me wrong, notwithstanding my concern for Smith’s presumably long-suffering wife, I approve. But their masterpiece? “Crying for sympathy, crocodiles cry for the love of the crowd and the three cheers from everyone” – just because Smith knows the game he’s playing doesn’t make it any less of a game. You wanna gaze into the void, listen to Joy Division. You want coddled-in-sound atmospherics, any number of Cure tracks from 1980-87 will suffice, and they won’t leave that nasty taste of self-deception. The goal of every man is to find himself, they say; by Disintegration, it seems, Smith was near that goal, but he turned away. 25 years of wandering undead in the wilderness may well be the cost.