Pornography

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Recording sessions were chaotically stop-start, with the band getting ever more immersed in the twin evils of drink and drugs (the most infamous outcome of this ongoing overindulgence was the giant mountain/pyramid of empty beer cans they had assembled in one corner of the studio). In its place were cryptically opaque, bleached out and foggy soundscapes built on sparse instrumentation: Dempsey’s replacement Simon Gallup’s simple basslines, new member Matthieu Hartley’s unobtrusive synth drones, and robotic machine-like drumming from Tolhurst, topped with Smith’s distant, almost disembodied vocals and his economical off-kilter guitar. However, no Cure album before or since has paired its cover imagery with its music as perfectly as Pornography has done.

On the album's recording sessions, Smith noted "there was a lot of drugs involved". [8] The band took LSD and drank a lot of alcohol, and to save money, they slept in the office of their record label. [9] The musicians usually turned up at eight, and left at midday looking "fairly deranged". Smith related: "We had an arrangement with the off-licence up the road, every night they would bring in supplies. We decided we weren't going to throw anything out. We built this mountain of empties in the corner, a gigantic pile of debris in the corner. It just grew and grew". [9] According to Tolhurst, "we wanted to make the ultimate, intense album. I can't remember exactly why, but we did". [8] The recording sessions commenced and concluded in three weeks. Smith noted, "At the time, I lost every friend I had, everyone, without exception, because I was incredibly obnoxious, appalling, self-centred". He also noted that with the album, he "channelled all the self-destructive elements of my personality into doing something". [8] In 2017, Damnation A.D. released a cover version of the entire album. Xiu Xiu and Chelsea Wolfe covered "One Hundred Years" on Xiu Xiu's 2021 album Oh No.Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Indeed, in 2003, The Cure performed all three albums in their entirely, in chronological sequence on a tour, which was later captured film and officially released as the DVD ‘Trilogy’.

Not for nothing did Cure fan and metal supremo Ross Robinson offer to produce one of The Cure’s later albums in 2004, in a conscious effort to get the band to record another similarly ‘angry and intense’ reprisal of his favourite album Pornography. However, the end result was a hugely uneven and disappointingly overwrought album which had none of the immediate devastating potency or claustrophobic intensity that Pornography served up, just somewhat inferior contrived attempts at familiar themes, which just goes to prove the old adage that any band can try and revisit or emulate their previous glories but seldom to the same degree of effectiveness. The band, Smith in particular, wanted to make the album with a different producer than Mike Hedges, who had produced Seventeen Seconds and Faith. According to Lol Tolhurst, Smith and Tolhurst briefly met with the producer Conny Plank at Fiction's offices in the hopes of having him produce the album since they were both fans of his work with Kraftwerk, [11] however, the group soon settled on Phil Thornalley. [8] Pornography is the last Cure album to feature Tolhurst as the band's drummer (he then became the band's keyboardist), and also marked the first time he played keyboards on a Cure release. [8] The album was recorded at RAK Studios from January to April 1982. [12] Following the band's previous album, 1981's Faith, the non-album single " Charlotte Sometimes" was released. The single, in particular its nightmarish and hallucinatory B-side "Splintered in Her Head", would hint at what was to come in Pornography. [8] Beaujon, Andrew (April 2005). "66.6 Greatest Moments in Goth". Spin. Vol.21, no.4. pp.70–73 . Retrieved 27 October 2012.Released in May 1982, Pornography bore zero resemblance to anything else that was around at the time. Despite it surprisingly hitting the top ten at number eight and thus their most successful album to date (setting off a chain of consecutive top ten studio albums for the band which only ended in 1996), it was the ultimate party-pooper of a record when placed in direct contrast to everything else around it (mostly exponents from the aforementioned New Pop Renaissance). Its sheer impenetrable sense of nihilistic doom and existential angst immediately set it apart from the rest of their contemporaries. Funny but after all these years I still own my first pressing I bought in Leeds that Saturday afternoon in 1982. It's in beautiful mint condition and I'm going to give it a deep clean wash via Spin clean tomorrow and really listen to it again. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Apter, Jeff (2006). Never Enough: The Story of The Cure. Omnibus Press. ISBN 1-84449-827-1. According to Apter, Pornography would prove to be "enormously influential", and has been cited as an influence by bands such as Deftones and System of a Down. [8]