3. The Cure – Pornography
Pornography is by far and away my favourite Cure record. If you like ‘Friday I’m In Love’ you’re not going to like Pornography, but conversely I don’t like ‘Friday I’m in Love’ and I like Pornography. The opening line is, “It doesn’t matter if we all die”, and that sets the tone for the album. That album is pretty fucked up. It’s very angular and dark, and there is a thread of madness going through it, I think. I’m pretty sure, and I might be wrong in this, but there might have been drugs involved at the time. It’s a very nihilistic album. I love the insistence of the drum machine. You put the album on and basically it’s got one sound for the eight songs, there’s no attempt to vary that sound or to make it more palatable, and I just love it. Even to this day when I put it on it’s still great to hear that record, and I just love the mood of it.
When it came out in 1982 I would’ve been living in Liverpool, but I would’ve been playing with Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls, and I remember we were on tour and playing in Edinburgh, and Robert [Smith, The Cure frontman] and Simon [Gallup, bassist] came to see us after they’d played in Edinburgh that night. That was the first time I met them, very briefly. I was just the guitarist in Pauline Murray’s band, so it was just hi, how you doing. But I’d seen them before; I’d seen them at Eric’s actually, on the first tour when it was just the three of them, it was a different bass player – Michael Dempsey was playing bass at the time – and that was just something different for the time as well, because everyone came in to Eric’s and it was all very loud and thrashy, and the Cure were a little bit different to that.
