FEATURE:
A Long Term Effect
The Cure’s Pornography at Forty
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THE fourth studio album from The Cure…
Pornography was released on 4th May, 1982. Ahead of its fortieth anniversary, I wanted to spend a bit of time with an album that was not given great reception when it was released. It is still not seen necessarily as one of The Cure’s best. Maybe people could sense the darkness and fracture that was present within the band. The fact they survived and managed to keep on recording is amazing in itself! The album sessions saw the band on the brink of collapse, with heavy drug use, band in-fighting. Their lead, Robert Smith, was in a huge depressive state. That influenced a lot of the lyrical content. The band would go on to record more uplifting music, but I feel Pornography is a dark masterpiece that should be written about in the lead-up to its fortieth anniversary. I want to collate some articles that have explored Pornography through the years. Udiscovermusic.com told the story of The Cure’s underrated album on its thirty-ninth anniversary last year:
“A proto-goth masterpiece, The Cure’s ‘Pornography’ is one of the darkest and most extreme records
Battered by personal bereavements, exhaustion from playing 200 gigs a year, and debilitating depression, The Cure’s Robert Smith was at a very low ebb early in 1982. “I had every intention of signing off,” he admitted in Jeff Apter’s Never Enough: The Story Of The Cure. “I wanted to make the ultimate ‘f__k off’ record and then sign off.” Artistically, Smith achieved his aim with The Cure’s fourth album, the controversially titled Pornography. Released in May 1982 – and later hailed as a proto-goth masterpiece – the album remains one of the darkest and most extreme records known to rock, though it rightly ranks highly among the most essential platters in Smith and co’s illustrious canon.
Pornography is regarded as the third and final installment in the original three-piece Cure’s early “gloom trilogy”, which began with their sparse, pessimistic sophomore LP, Seventeen Seconds, and continued with 1981’s unremittingly bleak Faith: the latter recorded in mourning after Smith’s grandparents both passed away.
In retrospect, though, it’s astonishing that Pornography was even completed. Not only was the pervasive mood of nihilism in London’s RAK Studio further exacerbated by LSD and heavy alcohol consumption, but The Cure also incurred the wrath of the studio’s cleaners by expressly forbidding them to touch the mountainous beercan sculpture they constructed during the sessions.
Opening with the oppressively dense “One Hundred Years” (wherein Smith sneered “It doesn’t matter if we all die”), Pornography was harsh and brutal, but while its creators may have been on the brink of collapse they were still capable of innovation. For example, Lol Tolhurst’s monumental drum sound was captured through a (then) radical approach where all the acoustic dividers were removed from RAK’s main room, leaving him to play his parts in a huge open space. Elsewhere, to create the weird, claustrophobic titular song, the band and co-producer Phil Thornalley used a proto-sampling technique (akin to David Byrne and Brian Eno on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts) whereby they dropped in snatches of commentary recorded from a TV documentary about sex.
Though dominated by relentless, hypnotic dirges such as “The Figurehead” and the icy, keyboard-swathed “Cold,” Pornography nonetheless yielded one minor hit single courtesy of the insistent, drum-heavy “The Hanging Garden.” Its parent LP’s unyielding darkness ensured it was received coldly by the critics on release, yet, commercially, Pornography still out-performed the band’s previous LPs, peaking at No.8 in the UK Top 40.
Replicating the record’s sleeve, The Cure sported their soon-to-be trademark big hair and lipstick for the first time when they embarked on their ill-fated Fourteen Explicit Moments tour across Europe. Smith, Tolhurst, and bassist Simon Gallup, however, split after inter-band tensions came to a head during the jaunt. When Smith later reanimated The Cure, he radically changed direction, steering the band towards pop success with quirky, radio-friendly hits including “The Walk” and “The Love Cats”.
Although not the most accessible and easy-going album from The Cure, Pornography is a fascinating album that is well worth hearing! Like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, The Cure were falling apart and there was so much disruption. Although not quite on the same level as Rumours, Pornography is a remarkable album. This is what Drowned in Sound:
“The Cure didn't fit in with any scene back then and probably never have. They existed on their own terms, impossible to pigeonhole, although many have tried. Even prior to Pornography their appearances on Top Of The Pops stood out like proverbial sore thumbs. Having made their debut on the show in April 1980 with 'A Forest' and followed it up almost twelve months to the day with 'Primary', both minor hits with the former briefly bothering the lower end of the Top 40 while the latter stalled just outside, no one could have predicted they'd go onto become one of the most influential bands of their generation.
Having already undergone several line-up changes during their brief career prior to commencing work on Pornography, it seemed like The Cure's star had shone as brightly as it was ever likely to. Their status as a "cult band" seemingly assured - indeed they'd released a single under a pseudonym entitled 'I'm A Cult Hero' three years earlier - they were a band in limbo, unsure of their next move or indeed if they had one left in them. Their last release 'Charlotte Sometimes' preceded Pornography by seven months, a single that undoubtedly heralded a new direction between the oblique soundscapes of third album Faith and the bleak narrative of its forthcoming successor. Produced by Mike Hedges who'd worked on both Faith and second album Seventeen Seconds, 'Charlotte Sometimes' signified the end of an era in one way and the dawning of a new one in another.
Fuelled by depression and anxiety that resulted in a lot of self-medication, vocalist, guitar player and songwriter in chief Robert Smith (in 1982 he wasn't the icon he's since gone on to become) and his two cohorts at the time - Simon Gallop (bass) and Lol Tolhurst (drums) - wanted to make a record representative of the band's mood at the time. In fact, Pornography could very well have been the last Cure record, so fraught were the sessions which culminated in Gallop leaving the group once the album was finished. Recorded over a three month period at the start of 1982, played back now it sounds like something of a chilling epitaph. Those opening lines of 'One Hundred Years' reading like a self-referencing suicide note that gets even darker throughout the song's six and a half minutes.
Comprising eight songs in total, each telling its own story of misery, despair and desolation, it's remarkable to think that just two years later The Cure would go on to become one of the biggest bands in the world, releasing happy-go-lucky pop songs such as 'The Caterpillar' and 'The Lovecats'. Yet back in 1982, their ethos was anything but. "Derange and disengage everything" declares Smith at the end of 'Short Term Effect', a song that deals with the fantasy of death from the perspective of natural elements while on 'The Figurehead', he ominously intones "I will lose myself tomorrow" as if all hope has gone.
The sentiment of helplessness continues throughout the record. An inquisitive "Can no one save you?" punctuates 'Cold's errant emptiness while 'Siamese Twins' declares "everything falls apart", its melody inspired by Low-era Bowie rather than any of The Cure's current contemporaries. Astoundingly, the one 45 lifted off Pornography gave them their biggest chart hit for two years. Driven by a coarse drum sound inspired by Siouxsie And The Banshees drummer Budgie, 'The Hanging Garden' perpetuated The Cure as a mainstream anomaly in sounding like nothing else on the radio or in the singles charts at the time. Reaching the dizzy heights of number 32, it only stayed in the Top 40 for one week before dropping like a stone but its impact would remain omnipresent, not least by way of boosting Pornography's album sales which saw them embark on new territory in reaching the Top 10, an achievement they'd repeat throughout their existence to this day.
Ending with the title track, another six and a half minutes of disconsolate melancholy that closes with the words "I must fight this sickness." Pornography remains one of the most poignant albums of its or any other generation, an album that will never grow old or become dated. Interestingly, this was also the album which saw The Cure reinvent themselves aesthetically too, Smith adopting the now trademark spider's mop, smeared lipstick and uniform black from head to toe.
Even today it sounds like nothing else on earth, yet still demands to be heard as a full body of work rather than broken down into individual segments. The band may have been at their lowest ebb during the making of Pornography but this is perfunctory greatness personified”.
I want to feature a piece from The Quietus from 2017. Although Pornography is not forty until May, I wanted to look ahead. I may explore it again before 4th May:
“John Robb, fromtman of the Membranes and author of the forthcoming history of goth The Art of Darkness, agrees. "We used to have our own acid tests where we would take lots of mushrooms and put records through their paces," he recalls. "Never Mind the Bollocks … was a brilliant psychedelic record; it was like having a head full of fire. Trout Mask Replica, which is a genius album, of course, was nightmare [when you were] tripping; it was like having your brain tied up in knots."
But what of the contemporary sounds of the early 1980s? "We did test Pornography as well and it was fantastically dense but full of texture which is perfect for tripping; there's so much to trip you out," Robb says. "Lots of great records are 3D and psychedelia is so much more than paisley shirts and the swinging 60s. Even punk was tinged with psychedelia, and music in the north west of England has always had a trip glow to it. The so-called goth period was laced with the lysergic - it was flipped to the black. I know for a fact that the Banshees were immersed in that world but created an early-80s trip narrative that really suited them, and The Cure had been building up to literally and psychically blowing their minds."
Robb hits the nail on the head when he places Pornography in the context of the contemporary psychedelia of the late 70s and early 80s and the environment in which it was created.
"Pornography is a magnificent record - a stark landscape of a record that, for us, was the Part Two to The Stranglers' Black And White, another psychedelic record in a then-modern sense that ate into the bleak times but in imaginative musical shapes. We used to love tripping to those bleak landscapes. Joy Division fitted this world as well, and their debut album is a very tripped out work, as was Section 25's magnificent Always Now."
If the much of the first generation of British psychedelia in the late 60s had harked back to the innocence of childhood, then Pornography was something altogether darker and nightmarish. A world of deception, paranoia and mortality, The Cure's fourth album is, at times, the sound of abject misery.
For Robb, it was a continuation of a lineage that's rooted in the darker variant of the psychedelia that emerged from the other side of the Atlantic in the 1960s. "There's so much crap talked about hippies and the Year Zero of punk but it all merged really; it was the counter culture but with a sharper edge, and more in a 70s focus," he says. "I'm not sure how much peace and love there had been in the 60s anyway. Every band from that time always claims they were the ones who defined peace and love, but the music in the late 60s had darkness and violence around it. The Doors, The Velvet Underground and The Stooges were all in the same spirit as the period we're talking about, and in many ways The Doors were the alpha 'goth' band - all Baudelaire in leather kecks, romantic poets dressed in black. Looking back, punk didn't end this stuff - it sparked it into life again."
"People started to reference the 60s again," agrees Youth. "The Doors were very popular again in the 80s as was The Doors' biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. Certainly if you listen to The Cure and bands of their ilk, they definitely dabbled with a kind of psychedelia."
Having worked relentlessly since the release of their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys in 1979, the recording of Pornography was made at the end of an intense four-year period that saw them working under a punishing schedule. Opening with 'One Hundred Years', The Cure set out their stall. At surface level, the song may well seem like a series of disconnected images thrown together at random but there's something much deeper at play here. Whether consciously or not, this is a damning critique of the 20th century, a period of time that saw huge scientific leaps while at the same time industrialising the slaughter of humanity. Factor in images of post-war alienation and meaningless existence, and this is an howl of existential anguish that's fuelled by Robert Smith's whining and dizzying guitar lines, Simon Gallup's two-note bass drones and Lol Tolhurst's relentless drumming. Alice In Wonderland this ain't.
"Over the period of about a thousand days, we played a show every other day as well as making three albums," Tolhurst recalls. "We were absolutely blasted, really. We operated at that level of intensity anyway as a matter of course because we wanted to feel connected to what we were doing. We were very committed and we were a three-piece. A three-piece is a cauldron of intensity. To me, The Cure is two separate bands; you've got the three-piece of which the pinnacle is Pornography and then you have the five- or six-piece band of Kiss Me.
"If you have a bigger band you have not so much of the vision necessarily but you have the opportunity and if one person flags then someone can help and it becomes that much more easy to navigate. But a three-piece is a triangle and my position was to facilitate the communication between [the other two]. In terms of the intensity of making something that hard together, by its very nature, then the emotional intensity is going to be ramped up”.
A remarkable album from 1982, Pornography arrived a year after the brilliant Faith. Although the Crawley-formed band are still going (though the line-up has changed through the years), Pornography almost ended them! A lot of critics were quite middling about the album, through it has gained acclaim and new recognition. Though it is hard-going and dark, it is well worth investing some time in ahead of its fortieth anniversary. The mighty Pornography ranks alongside The Cure’s…
BEST and most interesting work.