Review: 'The Cure: A Perfect Dream'

The words "The Cure" invoke aural images of despair, of epic, majestic howls into some bottomless grey void. Yet Robert Smith often dismissed his own music as half-assed. He also insisted his band had crafted deliberate pop parodies so often that you might think he aspired to be Crawley's answer to Weird Al. 

Any armchair psychologist will tell you that such self-criticism or defensiveness is usually deployed to cut critics off at the pass. Which either makes Smith's comments about his band sadly lacking in self-awareness or sadly oversaturated with self-awareness. I couldn't quite figure out which it was after reading Ian Gittins's The Cure: A Perfect Cream, but was constantly reminded that Smith's defensiveness was sadly unnecessary, because The Cure is awesome. Nevertheless, the humor in his remarks does give The Cure's story a much-needed puff of buoyancy, because there is so much darkness in their tale: the drugs, the drink, the constant personality conflicts, the hazing, the lawsuits, and of course, so much of the music. But Gittins doesn't let that stop him from further lifting the mood with a sly lack of reverence and a welcome shot of humor (be sure to read all of his image captions!). 

As for the music, Gittins oddly seems to echo quite a few of Smith's assessments of The Cure's body of work. The author is largely dismissive of the group's first four albums, made when the band was at their most unrepentantly gloomy, and he even waves off the wonderful and extremely popular Wish. So A Perfect Dream is likely to put off some of The Cure's more devoted cultists. 

I love a lot of the music Gittins dismisses, but I still enjoyed his book quite a lot. Because it's a coffee table tome, you can't expect the most thorough of Cure biographies, and he does lean a little too hard on quotes pulled from Lol Tolhurt's autobio Cured, but it's still a more satisfying read than most books of this sort tend to be. And few bands lend themselves so well to the format because The Cure are so doomily, absurdly visual. A Perfect Dream is not only a fine document of one of rock's finest bands, but it's also a superb exposition of what can be accomplished with a little lipstick and a whole lot of hairspray.

The Cure: A Perfect Dream was originally published in 2018, and is now being updated with additional images and info detailing what the group has been up to over the past seven years, which includes their most recent album, Songs of a Lost World.