I Quite Like The Cure

K-Punk is excellent on The Cure, cracking open a few Goth emblems along the way. He stops at Pornography though; bailing out on them just when they were beginning to get interesting...

{insert sound of squeaky eye rub here}

Because for me the importance of The Cure comes not from Robert Smith's fantasmallegorical 'sickness' (why's he sick? Too many pies...) but from The Cure's bridging effect in the late 80s which meant that, whenever you met someone new and asked them about their musical tastes (always more personal than asking them for a snog*), you would inevitably hear something along the lines of:

"Well...I quite like The Cure"

This was especially true for the kind of girls who possessed only 12 tapes (but knew every word) and had apparently won a competition in which first prize was a lifetimes supply of stripey tights.

The popCure of the dance remixes and Close To Me and Love Cats and Let's Go to Bed is The Cure that's more socially relevant because it allowed people in and it dissolved suspicion that these freaky looking Goth kids plied unsufferable dirge and songs about cat innards.

When I was 14, I can remember playing Standing On A Beach to the rest of Sherborne Football Team while on a tour of France - bearing in mind my nickname was Brainball because I actually took a book to read on the tour (Bill Hicks: "Look out...we got a reader in here...") - and more than a few of the guys actually went out and bought it afterwards; ditching their Phil Collins and Queen fixations for a temporary transport into transcendence...

I wonder if 'Ner or Noj (so named because he was called John and he was backward) went out and bought Faith or Japanese Whispers or Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me as well? Wonder if they were into The Cure after that? I like to think so...





By 1990 the 'serious' Goths (i.e. the ones who could still be bothered to paint on Bauhaus bruises and dig past row one of the t-shirts section of Kensington Market) had moved onto the Nine Inch Nails / Ministry / Industrial axis but the 'quite like The Cure' people were still everywhere; this music was social glue, a quick way to diffuse Music Taste Performance Anxiety - it wasn't particularly cool (therefore there was no way you could be misjudged as a big thumbed musical nerd) but it allowed people to stick you in a large tub marked Alternative (this was before Pearl Jam) which meant:

1) You probably wouldn't kick their face in, even after nineteen Snakebite N Blacks
2) You probably wouldn't admit to liking The Blues Brothers and you probably actually hated it.
3) You probably would be prepared to hang around the kind of Indie Nights at clubs where only ten people would ever turn up and they'd all hang around in case The Wolfgang Press's Kansas came on and they could discuss the video they'd seen on Snub TV.
4) You probably would like to come back and listen to a This Mortal Coil 12" featuring the bird from The Cocteau Twins.

The Cure, then, ought to be regarded not just as not particularly gothic but as anti-gothic, if gothic is seen as a self-enclosing solipsistic (23) Envelope rather than simply an extension of the Glam drive towards self-annihilation. To understand the importance of The Cure you should look beyond the Camus fixations of their early 'post punk shards' and through the astral bleaks of their 'classic' period and onto the Dissociative Identity Disorder of The Top, Head On The Door, Disintergration etc...



This is why the ultimate Cure album is not Faith or Pornography but Mixed Up. One day, I'll explain this but right now this isn't my main point so I'll leave it hanging like a laundered cat.

The Cure brought lonely people together in Student Union bars all over the world. You could travel through South America with a Cure album under your arm and you'd immediately identify yourself as someone not worth shooting.

And without The Cure I seriously doubt if I'd ever have got any girls back to my house - I've sat listening The Cure with many paisely ape-girls (ah, the smell of patchouli!! - and there's a reason why The Top is my favourite Cure record..) but every single time I asked them to huddle close and listen to TGs 'slug bait' or Faust or Coil...

This then is the reason I will always love The Cure and will always be suspicious of anyone my age who doesn't own a record by them.

I mean, does any current band fulfil such an important social function?

Answers on a e-card, to the usual address.


Here's The Cure, from their live8 performance:


The Cure - Just Like Heaven

The Cure - 100 years



*note to self: write long post on why this is; use Deleuze and Badiou and Zizek at least once before resorting to usual crap.

And then explain that Mixed Up thing.