The Cure’s album Disintegration is 35 years old today. Here I dive deep into what that record means to me. This piece is for my reader-supporters only, though I will make it free to all in one months’ time. Going forward, almost all of my Compendia posts will be for my reader-supporters, but to reflect this change I have reduced the price to the minimum Substack will allow. I’m asking you to support me so that my work can continue, and in return I’ll continue to write interesting and informative posts.
It’s 1989. I’m eighteen and music means everything to me. Along with books, I guess, but I was going through one of the few patches in my life in which I’d turned my back on reading. Idiotic, maybe, but hey. I was eighteen. I’d turned my back on things before, and would do so again.
But not music. Music has been with me forever, and in 1989 more than perhaps at any time before or since. I had two close friends — identical twins — who loved music too, and their tastes were close enough (to each others and to mine) to bond us, but with enough space for (usually) healthy argument. Which was best? Throwing Muses? Pixies? What was the best Smiths album? Was it okay to like The Communards? Erasure? Too pop? The Wonder Stuff or Pop Will Eat Itself?
These were the conversations that filled the time as we sat in the pub, playing pool and drinking lager (them) or diet coke (me). I was such a wuss, too terrified to drink alcohol when I was (whisper it) underage. Too terrified to drink alcohol at all, in fact. Something I definitely got over, for better or worse. But then? Such a wuss. I even remember one New Year’s Eve when the landlord, of all people, said, ‘For God sake, Steve, I know you’re not 18 yet. Have a fucking drink.’ I didn’t.
But back to the twins and me. They were into football, in a big way. I was not, in an equally bigger way. But it mattered not. It was music that bonded us. It was all we talked about, or at least that’s how I remember it. Looking back, I can’t believe we didn’t talk about girls. Maybe I shut down all that kinda stuff. Although it wasn’t girls I was thinking about, it’d be the best part of another decade before I’d tell either of them that.
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So, music. They subscribed to a very dogmatic approach. These were all either/or questions, you couldn’t like Throwing Muses the same as you liked Pixes, you weren’t allowed to like The Wonder Stuff sometimes, and PWEI other times, and occasionally Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.
I sometimes found it uncomfortable. Being twins, I guess they were used to arguing, it was sport, whereas I was an only child and had had no training in healthy debate. For me an argument, a disagreement, was to be avoided at all costs. Arguments turned into rows, and rows destroyed things. Severed friendships. Got people kicked out of their house, or left them single and alone. Best to nod politely and agree, i learnt. With everything. And when two twins are arguing and you’re friends with both? Try to find a way of not disagreeing with either. ‘I don’t mind, either way,’ became my mantra.
In 1989, I should’ve been used to arguing. My parents were doing it. A lot. They had been for a while, but as my eighteenth birthday came and went, their arguments were increasing. The end of their marriage was near, though of course it’s easier to see that both in hindsight and from the outside. That coupled with looming A-level exams, which rightly or wrongly I’d decided were make or break as far as my future happiness was concerned, plus a decision that had to be made about whether I was going to go to University, if so which one, and what I might want to study when I got there.
There was something else in the mix, too. After years of denying it to myself, I was realising that I was gay. It was this that was hitting me particularly hard. I felt ashamed, which wasn’t surprising as the previous half a decade had seen a huge increase in homophobia, fuelled in part by the medias hysterical and divisive reaction to the AIDS. It wasn’t uncommon to see headlines — in mainstream, tabloid, newspapers, the ones that parents would read with their cornflakes or would be wrapped around a bag of chips the next day — claiming that gay people deserved to die, that this disease was God’s judgement, that ‘gays’ should be shot or sent to live on a desert island ‘in their own filth’.
For someone who is gradually coming to realise that he is also ‘one of the gays’, it was tough to see this narrative play out in the media, leaving aside the violence and homophobia it engendered and legitimised in others. It’s really no surprise that it left many of us thinking that society hated us; we hated ourselves too.
I had a totally skewed idea about how common it was to be gay, and for some reason believed that not only was I the only gay person currently in my school, I was the only gay person that had ever been there in its history, or who would go there until the moment it felt to the ground. I had no role models in real life, and pretty much the only gay men represented on television were people for whom I now have a great deal of respect but at the time despised.
Section 28 was in force, too. Enacted in 1988, the legislation effectively prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality… as a pretended family relationship.’ So even if a kindly teacher — perhaps one who’d guessed at the reason for my isolation and ‘otherness’ — had wanted to support me, they would’ve been literally criminalised for doing so.
I was lost, lonely. But then on May 2, 1989, 35 years ago, The Cure released their eighth studio album, Disintegration.
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I wasn’t a massive Cure fan back then, but had loved the preceding album, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, since Wendy York had taped it for me (yes I know, but I was eighteen, and couldn’t afford records bought on the off-chance. I did later buy the CD and then the vinyl, though, so I think I can be forgiven?). So I was quite looking forward to the follow-up, particularly when I heard its title. ‘Disintegration’ hardly suggests lightweight pop, which I despised at the time, does it?
Then in April the single came out. Lullaby. It was dark and strange and managed to do pretty well in the charts, even though it was about being eaten by a spider (it’s not about that, of course, but you know what I mean). The video was brilliant and the band even appeared on iconic music programme Top of the Pops. In that performance Robert Smith wore such heavy eye make-up that the producers banned close-ups of his face for fear he would scare the children. Literally. It was all looking good for the parent album, and my excitement reached something of a peak when I read an interview with Robert Smith in which he claimed he’d deliberately written some of the songs in a key he couldn’t sing as he wanted to ‘sound in pain as he was singing’. This was followed by a review, which stated that The Cure were ‘back, and on thrillingly miserable form.’
(Why did these things excite me? If I was feeling so lonely, wouldn’t I have been happier listening to Kylie Minogue or ABBA? I don’t know why, but that’s never been my style. I mean, Kylie, ABBA, yes. Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, even. Yes. Especially now. But, and this is particularly true of back then, I’ve always enjoyed art that helps me to lean into my feelings, to examine them. I just find it more cathartic. Maybe it’s something about having something you’re feeling or experiencing articulated by another human being, maybe it makes me feel less alone. I’ve thought a lot about it over the years. I don’t have any answers. It’s just how I’m built.)
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I bought the CD. I was pleased about this, the vinyl record was missing two songs as The Cure’s record company was so convinced that the album was commercial suicide that they would not allow Smith the double album he wanted. In order to fit it onto one disc, two of the songs had to go, including the brilliant Last Dance which the band still regularly play live. I took it home, still unprepared for what I was about to listen to.
The first thing I noticed was that the songs are long. Its runtime is almost the same as the sprawling Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, but it has just 12 songs next to that album’s 18. Eight of the songs are over five minutes long, 4 are over 7 and the longest is over 9. Second? The liner notes carried an instruction.
So I did. (You can read why the band would’ve asked this here). As loud as I dared. And I’m so glad I did. To play Disintegration beginning to end is to spend over an hour enveloped in its world. Like the best pieces of art it’s uncompromising, it creates its own environment and invites you to join it. By turns joyful, claustrophobic, wistful, devastating, it also manages that rarest of things, which is to be bigger than the sum of its parts.
To listen to it for the first time? Put it with your other ‘first times’, whatever they are, and I promise you, if you let it in, this album is up there. I loved it instantly. I got it instantly. I’m pretty sure I reached the end of Untitled and went straight back to Plainsong. Probably a few times. I phoned the twin who I knew had also bought it, and we compared notes. Yeah, we said. It’s good. It was definitely going to be one of my favourite albums.
But then, three days later on May 5th, my parents marriage finally, well… disintegrated. The night before I’d gone to bed with Disintegration playing on my Walkman (I guess I must’ve taped the CD onto cassette so I could listen to it on the go. I don’t think I had a CD Walkman, back then), but woke up with my earphones on the bedside table. I went to college, and when I got back my biological father was alone, my mother had left him.
It was hard. Not as hard as if I’d been younger, even though my biological father was such a bullying, narcissistic nightmare that I wish my mother had found the courage to go sooner. But still. It was hard. My biological father is never at fault, so someone else had to be, and with my mother gone it was me. We argued. He tried to control me. He seemed to have forgotten I was 18.
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It’s a miracle I survived the following few months without going completely off the rails, perhaps by taking the drugs he regularly accused me of taking. But I did, and one of the reasons is Disintegration. You know when a piece of music, or a book or a piece of art, comes along at the exact moment you need it? That was this record for me. It came along and spoke to me, and saved me in the way that only art and music and books can. It became part of my DNA, part of my history.
And now it’s 35 years old. And I’m listening to it now, as I write this, and Robert Smith is singing ‘I will always love you’. And you know what, where this record is concerned, I will.
Happy birthday, Disintegration. Let’s dive in…
Plainsong opens the album with almost half a minute of wind chimes followed by the most glorious, soaring, plaintive song imaginable. It’s glorious. At once euphoric and devastating, it kind of sets the blueprint for the album. Long intros, keyboard heavy. These songs are big. Massive, in fact. Intricate and repetitive drum patterns, heavy use of the six-string bass.
And the lyrics? The album is often seen as belonging to a trilogy along with the earlier Pornography, and Bloodflowers which followed over a decade later. But whereas both the sonic language and lyrics of Pornography suggest an anguished howling into the abyss, Disintegration feels much more wistful. The songs speak of regret, reflection and loss. Of looking back, sometimes with joy at a thing now gone, sometimes with pain. Pictures of You is the perfect case in point (‘I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you, that I almost believe that they’re real’), and is a song that would be the highlight on most albums, but on Disintegration (in my opinion) is one of the lesser tracks. It’s followed by Closedown, another darkly romantic song and one which heralds the ‘pop’ section of the album.
I’m joking, of course. We get Lovesong, a gift from Smith to his wife and a song which both lightens the atmosphere a notch and is The Cure’s most covered track and biggest single in the US, but this is followed by Last Dance which takes us back to the realm of loss and regret.
Smith’s lyrics are so sublime here. Take this last verse:
But Christmas falls late now, flatter and colder And never as bright as when we used to fall And even if we drink I don’t think we would kiss In the way that we did when the woman was only a girl
See what I mean about loss and regret and wistfulness?
So that’s track 6. Halfway through, and now the album shifts. What follows are 6 of the best tracks The Cure, or any band, has ever produced. And they all sit on one side of one album.
Fascination Street snarls, coruscating guitars play off each other as Smith sings, once again about loss and frustration. He once said the song was inspired by a night out in New Orleans, about which he’d at first felt excited before then realising, as he got ready, that its was going to be the same as every other night out, and he didn’t know what it was he thought he might find. Then we have the six minutes of majestic, moody, brilliance which is Prayers for Rain.
I love this song. So much. Backwards keyboards herald a brutal, repetitive guitar before the song explodes with a keyboard swell that, the first time I heard it, made me feel like I was being buried alive. And yes, IN A GOOD WAY. Keyboards pummel, the song moves like a glacier, relentless and huge. It’s far from pop and kind of astonishing it was written by the man who also wrote Friday, I’m in Love. But he did.
Disintegration isn’t done with us, yet. In fact, it’s just gearing up to take us on its final journey. The Same Deep Water As You is heralded with the sound of thunder and rainfall, and is so beautiful that its runtime of nine minutes feels brutally, disappointingly short. Smith’s lyrics and his delivery, once again, elevate what was already a truly wonderful song into something else entirely.
“Kiss me goodbye,” pushing out before I sleepIt’s lower now, and slower nowThe strangest twist upon your lipsBut I don’t see, and I don’t feelBut tightly hold up silentlyMy hands, before my fading eyesAnd in my eyes your smileThe very last thing before I goThe very last thing before I goThe very last thing before I go
Then? Track ten is the title track, and my favourite song of all time. Disintegration hits hard from the first moment, with the sound of glass breaking. Keyboards and guitars build to an almost unbearable intensity, Smith’s lyrics are at their bleakest best. I could literally write an entire post about why I love this song so much, and I reckon I’ve played it at least once a week since it roared into my life 35 years ago.
After such a high, the album risks petering out. It doesn’t. Homesick is beautiful, as is Untitled. The latter is especially brilliant as, after the howling ‘Songs about happiness murmured in dreams, when we both of us knew how the end always is’ with which Smith ends Disintegration, it brings us back to a place of wistfulness, regret, and just a little bit of hope. (I say that now, as that’s the way the song makes me feel. But I’ve just checked the lyrics. The final lines? ‘I’ll never lose this pain. Never dream of you again.’ It’s the music that turns what could sound hollow and just, depressing, into something transcendent and hopeful. But then that’s true of the whole album.)
Listen to it, if you haven’t before. Do it at night, alone. Don’t do it as you wash up. Give it the seventy-two minutes it requires. Turn it up loud, turn the lights low. Let it take you on its journey.
You can thank me later.
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