Until the release of Songs of a Lost Worldin November 2024, Disintegration was considered the Cure’s last great album. In any case, the last one to count. At the time, in 1989, Robert Cure’s group was at the height of its glory, driven by albums with more pop sounds.
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But Robert Smith, who is approaching thirty, has difficulty experiencing this popularity that he never really sought. He then decided to reconnect with his first gothic loves and publish a record, the eighth of Cure, with dark romanticism and a leaden mood: Disintegration.
From commercial suicide to triumph
Some, especially in their record company, are screaming commercial suicide. Ultimately, this double album will turn into a triumph with more than 4 million copies sold worldwide.
It is this improbable trajectory that this German documentary, produced last year, aims to retrace. From the Crawley pub where a young trio made their debut to gigantic stadium concerts. With archive images, unpublished testimonies from producers and the group’s first manager and the voice of Michka Assayas as a common thread.
-Small stories mingle with the big one
The documentary also gives pride of place to the group’s fans, the most able to testify to the enormous impact that Cure had on their lives. In France, in Scotland with Stuart Braithwaite, the guitarist of Mogwaï, but also in the GDR (German Democratic Republic), on the other side of a wall which was going to collapse – disintegrate one would be tempted to say – a few months after the release of Disintegration,
Small stories that mingle with the big one with the music of Cure as the soundtrack of a generation that found light in the tormented songs of Robert Smith. After all, black also rhymes with hope.
Disintegration. An album. A group. A generation, this Friday, January 17 at 10:30 p.m. on until followed at 11:30 p.m., by a Cure concert in Hyde Park in 2018. Available in replay on arte.tv until March 19.
