Biography: The Cure

Contemporary Musicians, June 1990 (Volume 3)
by Anne Janette Johnson


Personal Information
Original members included Robert Smith (vocals, songwriting), born April 21, 1959, in England; Laurence Tolhurst (keyboards), and Michael Dempsey (bass). Other members include Simon Gallup (drums, bass), Porl Thompson (keyboards, guitar), Boris Williams (drums), and Roger O'Donnell (keyboards).

Career
Band formed, 1976, in Crawley, Sussex, England. Signed with Fiction Records, 1978, recorded first album in Great Britain, 1978. Released first album in America, Boys Don't Cry, 1980; toured America in 1987 and 1989.

Addresses
Record company--Elektra Records, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019.

The Cure is a critically acclaimed British rock band with an uncompromising message of despair, frustration, and futility. Called "the masters of mope rock," members of the Cure have attracted an international cult following for their post-punk, angst-ridden music; after years as an "underground sensation," a 1989 tour saw the group playing its first stadium venues in America. The band is led by Robert Smith, a songwriter-singer who uses music to exorcise his personal existential demons. Rolling Stone contributor Michael Azerrad describes the enigmatic Smith as "a virtual messiah of melancholy, a guru of gloom. ... Though Smith can write a catchy tune when he wants to, the Cure makes unlikely stadium pop--the sound relies on subtle seduction and the lyrics are profoundly self-absorbed."

Indeed, Cure albums offer few chances to tap toes or clap to the beat. The music is challenging, and it demands sober consideration, especially from live audiences. "If self-indulgence is one of the chief themes," writes Mark Peel in Stereo Review, "it is also one of its virtues. After all, ideas are what Smith is indulging in. ... They may be disturbing, even distasteful ideas, but their savage eloquence makes ... an intense and unforgettable listening experience." Azerrad suggests that the Cure "makes music that is therapeutic, a musical catharsis for Smith, the band and its fans."

The Cure established a presence in America in 1986, with the album Standing on a Beach. By that time Smith and his partners had been making music for more than ten years. A working-class youth who grew up in the dismal suburb of Crawley, Sussex, Smith found himself constantly at odds with his surroundings. Before he gravitated to music he suffered through difficulties with schoolteachers and with the law. "I find authority very difficult to deal with," he told Seventeen magazine. "I couldn't accept having to be responsible to someone, having to explain my actions." At fifteen Smith formed his first band, with friends Laurence Tolhurst and Brian Dempsey. They called themselves the Cure, Smith said, because "there was a lot of negativity around at the time: the no-future brigade. Rather than just give in to it, we thought it better to try and change things--first music and then everything around us. We were an alternative. That's always been my attitude, to be seen as apart from the mainstream."

Rather than borrowing from the punk movement, then, the Cure was in it from the start. Smith loved the freedom that punk music offered, both lyrically and melodically. Between its 1978 debut album and the subsequent issues Boys Don't Cry, Seventeen Seconds, and Faith, the Cure "went from being a sprightly pop band to being downbeat moodists, with songs such as 'The Funeral Party' and 'The Drowning Man' exuding a dark radiance," to quote Azerrad. The band members also cultivated a punk look, with stiffly coiffed haircuts, red lipstick, and black clothing. Smith's intense morbidity reached a nadir with the album Pornography, a work that mentions death in almost every song. "Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise," Smith told Rolling Stone. "At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it."

The Cure's membership has changed little over the years. Dempsey left the group in the early 1980s, and Boris Williams, Porl Thompson, Roger O'Donnell, and Simon Gallup joined. Occasionally one or another member will take a sabbatical, and Smith often threatens to disband the group--largely to fight complacency. O'Donnell told Rolling Stone: "Robert likes to ?talk about breaking up, he likes to keep us nervous. But of all people, I think Robert doesn't like change. Then again, he doesn't like things to be settled, either--it's a very difficult contradiction."

The Cure was quite well established in Europe by 1986, when Standing on a Beach was released in America. Actually a compilation of proven singles, Standing on a Beach became a favorite of campus radio stations. That work was followed by a more mainstream album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, which catapulted the Cure into not-particularly-desired notoriety. Although the songs on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me are more catchy, they do not suggest any thematic compromise. Peel calls the work "bold, self-indulgent, outrageous, and unsettling--sure signs of a rock visionary at work."

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me was the Cure's first best-selling album in America. It eventually sold two million copies worldwide and stayed on the Billboard Top One Hundred charts for over a year. The album Disintegration, released in 1989, did even better, placing two songs, "Fascination Street" and "Love Song," on the Top Forty charts. Despite this success (or perhaps because of it), Smith has threatened once again to leave the Cure. "It was never our intention to become big at this," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "The whole point was to enjoy what we were doing at the time. Most bands that reach our position have a retinue of people trying to keep them propped up so that the money keeps rolling in. We don't have that."

According to Azerrad, the Cure's albums "have always been suffused with what can only be termed the Dread--an all-encompassing sense of futility." Harsh, mocking, and energetic, the music of the Cure is intended to make listeners uncomfortable, to make them question any complacent acceptance of happiness, morality, or hope. Smith says that he hopes his work proves that one can descend to the depths and come back again, "that something can come out of nothing." He told Rolling Stone: "Knowing that everything's futile but still fighting, still raging against the dying of the light--that's what motivates me all the time."

Selected Discography
Boys Don't Cry, 1980. Seventeen Seconds, c. 1981. Faith, c. 1983. Pornography, c. 1984. The Top, 1984. Head on the Door, Elektra, 1985. Standing on a Beach: The Singles, Elektra, 1986. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Elektra, 1987. Disintegration, Elektra, 1989.

Sources
Philadelphia Inquirer, August 22, 1989. Rolling Stone, July 17-31, 1986; June 4, 1987; September 7, 1989. Seventeen, April, 1987. Stereo Review, October, 1987.

~~ Anne Janette Johnson