look back at the black diamond of The Cure

ARTE – FRIDAY JANUARY 17 AT 10:30 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

At a time when The Cure is being hailed for its big comeback with Songs of a Lost Worldfourteenth invigorating album released at the beginning of November 2024, after more than fifteen years of discographic silence, Arte devotes a documentary to one of the cornerstones of the gothic rock formation, the ambitious Disintegrationpublished in 1989. Many musical critics have not failed to establish a parallel between these two singularly dark records.

Sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, Disintegration embodies the commercial peak of The Cure. Paradoxically, this eighth opus was intended to be a complex and dense work, taking the opposite direction from the group’s pop-oriented singles which made it popular, such as The Lovecats (1983), In Between Days (1985) or Just Like Heaven (1987). This would, however, be omitting that the British previously signed the trilogy Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981) et Pornography (1982), without artistic concessions, dark and minimalist, which sharpened their identity.

End of a cycle

In 1989, Robert Smith, then aged 30, considered Disintegration (“dissolution”, “disintegration”, in French) like the end of a cycle, perhaps even of The Cure. The atmosphere within the group disintegrates and marks the ousting of drummer and co-founder, Lol Tolhurst. The singer and icon with tousled raven hair, on the verge of depression, digs into the depths of his psyche to emotionally sculpt his black diamond.

From this dark matter, however, a few bursts of light emerge, like the romantic Lovesongthe superb instrumental Plainsong or the grandiose Lullabyinspired by a nightmare of Smith’s, where he turns into a spider.

Tim Evers’ documentary, narrated by journalist Michka Assayas, also takes the side of recounting the impact of the album upon its release on youth in East Germany, six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The story is supported by archives filmed in the GDR and testimonies from fans of the time. The idea is not bad in itself, but there is not enough time for a duration of fifty-two minutes. Especially since, at the same time, the narration lingers too long on the beginnings of the group, then its artistic orientation.

Hence this persistent impression of skimming over the main angle – of the total duration of the documentary, only a third focuses on Disintegration. We would rather have liked to learn more about the recording sessions spread over six months in a mansion in the English countryside, under the wing of producer David M. Allen, whose comments have been collected here.

The interviews collected on Robert Smith are few in number (the man is, it is true, known to be not very talkative), but are counterbalanced by the interventions of the former manager Chris Parry and the British music journalist and author Simon Price, rich in anecdotes .

The documentary is followed by the broadcast, at 11:20 p.m., of The Cure’s 40th anniversary concert given in Hyde Park, London, where the group performs six pieces taken from Disintegration.