The Cure and the others: the first cry of post-punk (1978-1980): episode 1/4 of the podcast The Cure, birth of post-punk

If you listened carefully to this song until the very end, you may have perked up your ears when you heard the very young Robert Smith, the singer, guitarist and lyricist of the group The Cure, then aged nineteen , pronounce a word in French in a low but intelligible voice: « Oh, Meursault ». Meursault, not like the excellent wine of Burgundy but, obviously, like Meursault, the anti-hero of the famous novel by Albert Camus, The Stranger. A book in which many adolescent readers recognized the reflection of their discomfort and young Robert Smith was of course one of them. “I look at the sea, I look at the sand, I look at myself in the eye of the dead man lying on the beach, I am alive, I am dead, I am the foreigner who kills an Arab”. A precise allusion to the gratuitous murder, committed without the slightest reason by Meursault, this man foreign to himself, whom we become acquainted with in a long confession in the first person which constitutes the material of the book The Stranger. « Killing an Arab »kill an Arab, of course there are idiots or ill-intentioned people who may have taken that literally, for all kinds of reasons, who are watching them. So much so that Smith finally conceded that he should have called this song « The Stranger » or « Staring at the Sea »and that way he wouldn’t have all the trouble that this song caused. In any case, it was the first cry of a group called The Cure, from a small English town called Crawley, right south of London, about 45 minutes by train from the capital, towards Brighton.

« Killing an Arab »I remember it precisely, it’s a 45 rpm that I bought as an import, as they said, in a record store in Paris, in the Odéon district, which was called Music Box, the ancestor of New Rose. A black and white cover, dark and mysterious, that’s what attracted me. There was the enlarged image of two eyes with completely white pupils, under very full eyebrows. It looked like a photogram from an old horror film, like The Night of the Hunter. The back was a black background on which we discovered a small photo, placed obliquely, showing the dark silhouette of a young man from behind who turned his head, facing a white door. A photo that seemed to have been taken through the peephole of a white door and which was, undoubtedly, that of Robert Smith, whose face no one knew except those close to him. You’ve heard it, the sound of The Cure, a simple guitar, bass, drums trio, is still minimal, as if lean. In the theme of the song, lugubrious and disturbing, there is something reminiscent of « Watching the Detectives » by Elvis Costello, then a rising star, riding the punk wave without really identifying with it. And, in these guitar stripes, the little oriental motif, we find the angular side of a group like XTC. Both of them much better known at the end of 1978 than The Cure, then a small group among a few others, which was part of a certain movement, as I told you, minimalist, music with a deliberately skeletal sound and with austere and even, as we have seen and heard, disturbing themes.

Honestly, I was very seduced by « Killing an Arab »this sound, this voice, these words but in the same way as by other productions of the time in the same particular light, gray and pale. I didn’t imagine that this group, in particular, would go particularly far. Honestly. I believed much more in Joy Division, I’ll talk about that again, or in U2. I wasn’t wrong, it’s true, but I was only partially right. The Cure went very, very far, well beyond what I imagined, and was the source of a whole movement in its own right. This was especially noticeable, on a large scale, in the 90s and particularly in the United States. I’m thinking in particular of the Smashing Pumpkins. So, in a nutshell, to finish, why this particular spotlight on The Cure this evening and all this week, for that matter? Well because The Cure is preparing to release on November 1st, that is to say next Friday, a new album of new songs, announced for years, Songs of a Lost World. His first in sixteen years, if we exclude a live performance and a remix album. We will discover this powerful recording in a special broadcast on Monday, November 4.

Before focusing specifically on The Cure, I thought it would be a good idea to let you hear other productions, completely forgotten but as promising, at the time, as The Cure’s first 45 rpm. Productions specific to this pivotal period, that of England in the years 1978, 1979, 1980, sometimes a little beyond. The musical landscape of those years, in the wake of the punk revolution, was shaken by an earthquake and was changing visibly. There were other groups which seemed to me, sometimes wrongly, to hold great promise. Like this one, for example, who came from Sheffield, that’s the north of England, and was called the Comsat Angels. He released his first album, Waiting for a Miraclein September 1980, two months later Closer by Joy Division. And, after hearing this title, a classic, « Independence Day », I expected a lot.

To find out more, listen to the show…

Playlist :

The Cure – « Killing an Arab » album « Staring at the Sea »
The Comsat Angels – « Independence Day » album « Waiting for a Miracle »
Siouxsie and the Banshees – « Hong Kong Garden » album « The Scream »
Scars – « Leave Me in the Autumn » album « Author! Author! »
Department S – « Is Vic There? » album Artistes divers « Demon – The Singles Collection »
The Passions – « I’m in Love with a German film Star » album « Thirty Thousand Feet Over China »
The Associates – « The Affectionate Punch » album « The Affectionate Punch (2016 Remaster) »
Sad Lovers & Giants – « Things We Never Did » album « Epic Garden Music »
Wire – « I Should Have Known Better » album « 154 » (2006 Remastered Version)
The Sound – « I Can’t Escape Myself » album « Jeopardy »
Joy Division – « Digital » album « The Best of Joy Division »