The Cure’s Discography: Robert Smith Looks Back
Before the release of the Cure‘s eleventh album, 2000’s Bloodflowers, fresh off a photo shoot and all made up in his trademark teased hair and lipstick, Robert Smith sat in a New York City hotel bar in front of a stack of Cure CDs. He picked up each one and recounted the story of its recording … sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with a grimace.
Smith was convinced – as he’s often been – that his band’s latest opus would be its last. As always, he was wrong, and in 2004, we updated the piece with Rolling Stone‘s then-recent interview about The Cure. Four years after that, we spoke with Smith yet again about 2008’s 4:13 Dream, their most recent album.
Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don’t Cry
1979/1980
After nearly every major label rejected their demo tape, three schoolmates from the London suburb of Crawley signed with Polydor imprint Fiction Records. Under the tutelage of label owner and producer Chris Parry, who landed the Jam and Siouxsie and the Banshees for Polydor, the Cure recorded their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, at London’s Morgan Studios in just three nights. The next year, Fiction repackaged most of the album with some early singles as the Boys Don’t Cry album.
I was writing songs for the first album for a period of about two or three years. I wrote “10:15 Saturday Night” and “Killing an Arab” when I was about sixteen, and we recorded the album when I was eighteen, so I wasn’t really still convinced by some of the songs. The pop songs like “Boys Don’t Cry” are naive to the point of insanity [laughs]. But considering the age I was and the fact that I had done nothing apart from go to school – no real life experience, everything was taken from books – some of them are pretty good.
The Jam were recording their album during the day and we used to sneak in at night and use their equipment – we knew the bloke who was looking after it – to record our album. We just borrowed tape and stuff.
The first one is my least favorite Cure album. Obviously, they are my songs, and I was singing, but I had no control over any other aspect of it: the production, the choices of the songs, the running order, the artwork. It was all kind of done by Parry without my blessing. And even at that young age I was very pissed off. I had dreamed of making an album, and suddenly we were making it and my input was being disregarded. I decided from that day on we would always pay for ourselves and therefore retain total control.
Seventeen Seconds
1980
On the Cure’s U.K. tour opening for Siouxsie and the Banshees, Smith began playing in both bands after the headlining band’s guitarist defected. Smith wore the same drab clothing on stage for each set, prompting an NME scribe to write that the Cure had “no image, no style.” When it was time to return to Morgan Studios, bassist Michael Dempsey voiced distaste for Smith’s new atmospheric songs, and Smith replaced him with Simon Gallup. Enthralled with the new synthesizers coming out at the time, Smith also added keyboardist Matthieu Hartley.
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