Smith has often referred to Poronography as the first instalment in a trilogy of albums that also includes Disintegration and 2000’s Bloodflowers. “It doesn’t matter if we all die!” yelps a crazed Smith as black clouds gather above, over dry clattering drums and the shrill howl of guitars. Has there ever been a more terrifying start to an album than this? Listen, now, to Pornography’s desolate opener One Hundred Years, and you’ll be convinced that some spectacular storm is brewing.
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The truth doesn’t set her free it is the beginning of the end. “Everything was true / It couldn’t be a story,” he sings at one point, echoing the heartbreaking moment when Fuschia realises the evidence is overwhelming, and her love is a scumbag. The scene is brought to life with one of the Cure’s murkiest scores, all icy splashes of noise and the hiss of snaky guitars as Smith sings her down into the watery depths: “One by one her senses die / The memories fade and leave her eyes.” He pinches and tweaks lines from Peake’s prose, too. Overcome with despair, she is perched on a windowsill when a knock on the door startles her into banging her head on the ledge and drowning. The Drowning Man’s spooky rattle is inspired by the fateful plight of Lady Fuchsia Groan, who is devastated to discover that her lover, the sneaky Steerpike, is a murderer.
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Smith used his bookcase for inspiration on their brilliantly melancholic third album, Faith, too, this time lifting from Mervyn Peake’s fantasy series Gormenghast. There has always been a literary bent to the Cure’s work: their controversial debut single Killing an Arab, for example, tapped into Albert Camus’s existentialist novella The Stranger. “I’m lost in a forest, all alone.” You’ll feel just as uneasy as him. “Suddenly I stop, but I know it’s too late,” pants a scared-sounding Smith. Smith has since backpedalled on the story that it was inspired by a dream he’d had as a little boy about being lost in the woods, but there is still something about it that feels like a twisted fairy tale: the organ’s ghoulish murmur, the ghostly guitars, the sudden flashes of synthesiser. And no track on the album feels more like it’s been cursed by dark magic than A Forest. But with their second album, Seventeen Seconds, the Cure made their first sprawl into smothering gothic rock. “There were criticisms made that it was very lightweight, and I thought they were justified.” Far more interesting was the sound being made by touring partners Siouxsie and the Banshees, for whom Smith would moonlight as a guitarist. “I didn’t even like it at the time,” he admitted. The band’s label, Fiction, had the final say on its tracklisting and artwork, and it didn’t sound right either. Smith wasn’t particularly taken with Three Imaginary Boys. “I’m wondering where she’s been / And I’m crying for yesterday,” he bellyaches, before he’s drowned out by a needling, nagging riff. Opener 10.15 Saturday Night nails the nervy horror of sitting by a phone that never rings, with Robert Smith’s heavy fretting exacerbated by the irritating “drip drip drip drip” of a leaky tap. On their 1979 debut Three Imaginary Boys, for example, they’re still a post-punk band, coming on like Wire with smudged make-up, courtesy of cold, razor-like guitars and poppyish melodies. It also means that, because they’re so changeable, they have more than one way of being brilliant. But who cares about consistency? The Cure have always been guided by their restlessness, and it’s led them to many moments of greatness.
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