Best known for their gloomy worldview and cobweb-coiffed
front man, The Cure do not seem like an expected topic for one of Sterling
Publishing’s slick, coffee table-style Rock biographies. Yet much about The
Cure is unexpected. Mixed amongst the dirges were near-bubblegum confections
such as “Just Like Heaven” and “Friday I’m in Love”, and for a band that seemed
consciously designed for cult status, they’ve sold millions of albums and
stadium-seat tickets. So unlikely stars The Cure may be, but they are stars
nonetheless and perhaps not such a bizarre choice for a jolly old pictorial
history such as Ian Gittins’s The Cure: A
Perfect Dream.
Fortunately, A Perfect
Dream isn’t really that jolly, because that would be dishonest to The Cure
story. Theirs is a history with all the demon-wracked turmoil of “From the Edge
of the Deep Green Sea” or “Give Me It”. The group was beset from within with
substance abuse, legal, and interpersonal issues. Robert Smith was a
sometimes-cruel control freak. Lol Tolhurst was regularly a victim of that
cruelty yet often unable to contribute anything to the band because of his
constant inebriation. Even those adjacent to the band could be rather difficult,
such as Siouxsie Sioux, who dismissed Robert as “Fatboy Smith” when he decided
to quit being a part-time Banshee to re-commit himself to The Cure, or Ross
Robinson, the nu-metal producer who helmed The
Cure and sounds like an absolute dickhead.
A Perfect Dream
certainly isn’t a sanitized version of the Cure story, but it does have a whiff
of redundancy considering how heavily Gittins leans on quotes from Tolhurst’s recent
autobiography Cured and the old
biography Ten Imaginary Years. His
writing is generally crisp, but he has a tendency to lapse into pretentiousness
when analyzing the music. To their credit, those analyses steer clear of hero
worship, but they can also be a tad confusing. Why after giving Pornography a veritable track-by-track
drubbing does the author conclude that it is “oddly addictive?” Despite such
issues, A Perfect Dream still works
as a pithy biography that refuses to pull punches and provides plenty of color
images of some of Rock’s most photogenic freaks.
