7. The CureDisintegration
The Cure was my favourite band. The Cure covered my walls, they were on the T-shirts I wore, Robert Smith was who I was going to marry when I grew up. At 15, that’s how I defined myself. I owned all the B-sides and rarities and all the bootlegs and went to see them live whenever I could.
I still look back at the Cure catalogue as one of my ultimate musical educators, especially because I feel like Robert Smith, as a songwriter, went on so many tangents and wrote so much weird shit. He was clearly a masterful pop songwriter, but he was coming up with stuff that was strange and experimental, and then stuff that was really dark and brooding, and then really funny and poppy. The Cure have this reputation as the glum, sad band, but I never experienced them that way. I experienced the music of the Cure as this adventure in songwriting. Boys Don’t Cry was the first record I got, which was a great record to start with. But after that, The Top – what a weird record! Such a departure from the punky, poppy stuff. So I was totally hooked, and totally fascinated by Robert Smith as a person, by what was going on in his head. Any literary reference he made, I ran out and bought the book. I was obsessed.
