The Cure and the birth of a certain post-punk, from Europe to Brazil: episode 2/4 of the podcast The Cure, birth of post-punk

The obvious influence of the group XTC, which then occupied the forefront in a certain new Music which, after the punk explosion, made the news on this title signed by The Cure, « Play for Today »and which appeared in the group’s second album, Seventeen Secondspublished at the beginning of spring 1980. Music with often gaunt instrumentation, a rhythm that is often tense, sometimes spasmodic, and a bitter or, as in the title we have just heard, anxious tone. I imagine that many of you listening to me have never heard of XTC, or barely. However, it is a group whose singer and composer, Andy Partridge, appeared on the cover of Les Inrockuptibles, it must have been in 1991, by the looks of it. And who some considered the Beatles of new wave. Well, that’s not what happened but it was a model then. For The Cure as for others. To be precise, for Michael Dempsey, the first bassist of the group, but not at all for Robert Smith who, by his own admission, felt much more in tune with the cold colors, much less tangy, and the heavy, even oppressive atmospheres , music by Siouxsie and the Banshees. Of which The Cure had provided the opening act on tour in the United Kingdom. Smith, I told you about it yesterday, had even taken over the guitar parts of Siouxsie and the Banshees on stage at short notice after the abrupt departure of their first guitarist, John McKay. And he had, dare I say, seen the light. It was during this period that what we began to call gothic rock was born, with its dose of theatricality, of course, and open pessimism. It is also because of this new direction that Michael Dempsey left The Cure, giving way to Simon Gallup.

The Cure will release a new album at the end of this week, Songs of a Lost Worldwhich many no longer expected. Since the previous album of new songs signed by The Cure was released in 2008, it has been more than sixteen years already. An album to which I will dedicate a special broadcast, it will be next Monday. In the meantime, I will broadcast tomorrow and the day after tomorrow some of the tracks recorded by the group since its appearance in 1978, I hope to surprise you a little too, sometimes. And surprise myself too because, to be honest, I didn’t follow The Cure’s journey, absorbed by other sounds, other hobbies, other obsessions. I will try to explain the very particular context of these musical chapels and sometimes micro-chapels, which flourished in the early 1980s. Finally, today, it is the music that remains and triumphs and no longer its function as a mirror. Yes, because at the time, rock held up a mirror to young people, most often boys, who sought in it, often the reflection of their soul, because they sometimes felt so desperate at not looking like anything.

And then Friday evening, the 31st, for Halloween, my friend Matthieu Conquet will have French artists testify about the role that the music of The Cure may have played in their journey. I told you that a certain post-punk rock that was deliberately cold, like, atonal at times but very intense in its very austerity was born in those years. Thanks to a sort of biotope, as they say, conducive to the emergence of The Cure. But also other groups, and not just in the UK. In France too, we will hear it, as far as Brazil, we will hear it too. In the meantime, I can’t resist the pleasure of bringing to the surface certain well-forgotten pearls. Here is a title whose sound is, admittedly, meager but which has lost none of its period charm. It is signed by a totally forgotten Liverpool group, Modern Eon, whose posterity has remembered this song, “ Euthenics “, like euthenia, I didn’t know what that meant, I googled, as I often do, and I came across a site that gave this definition: “euthenia is a field of medicine that focuses on optimizing environmental conditions to improve the health and well-being of individuals”. There you go, you know everything.

To find out more, listen to the show…

Playlist :

The Cure – « Play for Today » album « Seventeen Seconds »
Modern Eon – « Euthenics » album Artistes divers « Birth of a Nation : Inevitable Records – An Independent Liverpool 1979-1986 »
Modern English – « I Melt with You » album « After the Snow »
Asylum Party – « Julia » album « Picture One »
The Opposition – « Black and White » album « Breaking the Silence »
The Chameleons – « Don’t Fall » album « Script of the Bridge (Remastered) »
Trisomy 21 – “The Last Song” album “Chapter IV – The Je ne sais quoi and the almost nothing”
X times Germany – « Moonlight » album « Tocsin »
Gang 90 & Absurdetes – « Jack Kerouac » album Artistes divers « Sexual Life of the Savages »
Chance – « Samba do Morro » album Artistes divers « Sexual Life of the Savages »