STACK #142 Aug 2016

MUSIC FEATURE

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records are due for reissue on 180gsm vinyl. So how do they hold up after all these years? Although Smith regularly dismisses their debut Three Imaginary Boys as his favourite record, it’s held up remarkably well. True, there is a bit of filler and the singles Boys Don’t Cry and Killing An Arab (included in the US version) are sorely missed, but the lean, minimalist music

The CURE In super exciting vinyl news, next month Universal are reissuing the first four albums from seminal English act The Cure. John Ferguson delves into those golden, early '80s days.

settings work well on the title track and the classic 10.15 On A Saturday Night . Seventeen Seconds

introduced synths and Smith’s flang-y guitar and while these songs are steeped in pain and loneliness, tracks such as A Forest and In Your House still exert a spine-tingling charm. Faith was when the fractures began appearing with the band, yet the long player is not quite as one-note as we remember; the clipped, relentless pulse of Primary remains a New Wave classic, while the likes of All Cats Are Grey and The Drowning Man are foreboding death marches of doubt and self-loathing. That just leaves Pornography . You can see why it is regarded by many Cure fans as their best album – its influence on emo and nu-metal scenes is readily apparent – and the jagged riffs and rhythms add an extra layer of menace to the unrelenting howls of despair. Smith has said he intended Pornography to be the “ultimate f*** off record” before signing off for good. Fortunately, he only got one part of the equation right and the pop gifts that surfaced on early songs like Boys Don’t Cry eventually got the chance to flower. But if you only know The Cure for their hits, take some time out to wallow in the masterful melancholy that is their first four records.

MUSIC

Pornography (1982)

Cure as a more pop-oriented act. The sleek electro-pop grooves of Let’s Go To Bed saw them notch up a 1983 top 20 hit in this part of the world, and The Walk and the novelty nonsense of The Lovecats helped Smith complete his transformation from brooding nihilist to lovable goth munchkin.

I t’s hard to believe that Robert Smith’s gothic icons are now celebrating their 40 th year. In fact, back in the early ‘80s, it seemed unlikely they would last much past their fifth birthday. As recounted in Jeff Apter’s exhaustive biography Never Enough , the band imploded spectacularly in 1982 while touring their fourth record Pornography . already come to blows at a bar early on in the tour but things came to a head a month or so later when the pair were joined by their roadie in an on-stage brawl at a show in Brussels. However, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to The Cure: Gallup left the band and Smith – encouraged by manager and label boss Chris Parry – decided to reinvent The Smith and bassist Simon Gallup had

Faith (1981)

Critics and fans alike lambasted their third album Faith , and by 1982, Smith’s bleak dirges of death and depression were starting to sound a

take some time out to wallow in the masterful melancholy

little old hat: elsewhere in the post-punk world, guitars were beginning

Seventeen Seconds (1980)

to jangle in exciting new ways, bands like Talking Heads,

New Order and Gang Of Four were embracing funk. If doom and gloom were what listeners were after, then Nick Cave and the Velvet Underground were much cooler names to drop. In September, the first four Cure

Three Imaginary Boys (1979)

AUGUST 2016

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