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. 

Review: Lol Tolhurst's 'Goth: A History'

If you'd asked one of the original punk groups in the seventies--say, the Clash or the Sex Pistols--if they were punks, they would have sneered at you and damned the very idea of being labeled. Same goes for the original Goths--say, Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure. Lol Tolhurst, drummer of the latter group, says as much in Goth: A History. But with time comes a certain perspective, and today Tolhurst obviously embraces that old label, hence his new book celebrating some fifty years of pallor, gloomy songs, wiry hairstyles, black garb, and black moods. 

Review: 'Gothic: An Illustrated History'

Gothic is a bit like that old pornography rubric: I know it when I see it. Dracula? Gothic. King Kong? Not Gothic. The Cure? Gothic. Metallica? Not Gothic. Gothic isn't just the monstrous, or the dark, or the nihilistic. It is ruined structures. It is shadows. It is urbane yet corrupt. It is beautiful and ugly in such close proximity that it is impossible to decipher which specific features are beautiful and which are ugly. Robert Smith tripping on acid with his jet-black bird's nest, smeared lipstick, and vulnerable pout is Gothic. James Hetfield guzzling Bud in denim is not.

Roger Luckhurst keeps his definitions much more specific and academic in his new book Gothic: An Illustrated History. Yes, he agrees that Gothic involves ruined structures, monsters, and blurred borderlines, but he has no problem defining King Kong or Godzilla as Gothic characters because they're monsters and monsters are Gothic. I don't know where he comes down on the big "Is Metallica Gothic?" question because he completely ignores Gothic music. He does address architecture, art, literature, design, and film, so Gothic: An Illustrated History, so it would be unfair to call the book limited, and the writer does cover these topics with authoritative command and novel organization: the chapters are largely organized according to locations, which allows a great deal of discussion of ethnicity and cultures, revealing the racism at the heart of a good deal of what might be considered Gothic. However, by ignoring Gothic music and fashion, Luckhurst leaves a major gaping hole in his book and fails to complete the definition he valiantly works to construct.

The illustrated format of Gothic would have also lended itself very well to discussions of Gothic music and style, since both of those strands are so closely entwined--after all, Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux are probably the Goths most Goths strive to emulate. There are no images of those two Gothic icons, but there are plenty of images of architecture, furniture design, fine art, and horror movie stills that make each turn of the page a thrill. 

Review: 'The Cure: A Perfect Dream'

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.

Review: 'Silhouettes and Statues: A Gothic Revolution 1978- 86'

Goth was a distinctively eighties movement, pushing its furrowed brow against the gleeful superficiality of Duran Duran or Animotion in the same way the definitively-nineties grungesters bucked the hair metalists in the next decade. Despite that, you could probably trace Goth back to the sixties with Procol Harum and Nico, and if you want to get cute, a lot further back than that to the Gregorian chanters. But if Goth ain’t one thing, it’s cute, and Cherry Red’s new box set Silhouettes and Statues: A Gothic Revolution 1978- 86 provides five discs of proof.

Goth never caught on as a mainstream-newsworthy item the way grunge did, so it only produced a few couple of superstars, namely The Cure and Siouxsie Sioux, and because everyone did not get the chance to burn out on Goth as they did on grunge, Goth had much longer, spidery legs. Consequently, there was so much to choose from in compiling Silhouettes and Statues that key artists such as Siouxsie, Killing Joke, and Christian Death could be sidelined in favor of a slew of more obscure artists.

There are gradations in this set’s overwhelming grey. While I might not go so far as to call them poppy, tracks such as Joy Division’s “Shadowplay”, Southern Death Cult’s “Moya”, Zero Le Creche’s “Last Year’s Wife”, Cocteau Twins’ “In Our Angelhood”, Balaam and the Angels’ “The Darklands”, The Damned’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, All About Eve’s “D Is for Desire” (which takes some of the sting out of the absence of the movement’s definitive diva, Siouxsie Sioux), and quite a few others are as accessible as the best of the legit New Wavers who never shot a video on a yacht. There are also alluringly spooky numbers from Dead Can Dance, Bushido, Adam & the Ants, and original Goth maestro Nico, while toothy tracks by Actifed, UK Decay, Penetration, and Flesh for Lulu straddle the line between Goth and punk invigoratingly.

Silhouettes and Statues most certainly does not play it safe, though, and excessively abrasive or otherwise difficult tracks by The Birthday Party, Portion Control, Schliemer K, In the Nursery, Bone Orchard, Part 1, and nine-and-a-half minutes of Anorexic Dread will wash away the less dedicated like a gloomy, doomy tsunami. Of course playing it safe is not very Goth, while washing stuff away like a gloomy, doomy tsunami is, so anyone who still sprays their black locks up like a starfish and slathers on the pancake makeup will delight in Silhouettes and Statues. Well, maybe “delight” is the wrong word, but you get the picture.

Review: 'Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys'

No one understands the shadowy mystique of The Cure better than Robert Smith, so the press release accompanying a new book about the band probably isn’t merely speculating when it implies that he will never dilute the myth with an autobiography. Yet Cure fans are some of the most hardcore fans out there, and many still want an inside portrait of their favorite band’s story. Drummer/keyboardist Lol Tolhurst, who was The Cure’s only constant member besides Smith from the beginning and through their eighties golden era, is surely the next best candidate to tell that story. Since he’d known Smith since childhood, The Cure’s two constants are also constant figures throughout Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys. They meet as five-year olds; geek out over Hendrix; attend punk shows together; form their own band, Malice, which morphs into The Cure, which leads them to true cult stardom. The son of an alcoholic father haunted by his experiences during World War II (the elder Tolhurst witnessed the horrifying aftermath of the Rape of Nanking), Lol Tolhurst ultimately followed the path into substance abuse, and his own excessive drinking resulted in his firing from The Cure after making their key album, Disintegration.

There is a grim, often tragic lining to many of the author’s stories, and he begins the book in a morose style perfectly in tune with his band’s tone (“I came into this world the day the music died… The music had died in Horley, the town where I was born, long before that” is a deliciously dark opening salvo). However, he soon moves into a lighter, more conversational, more typical memoir voice, and a number of the stories are downright comical (the time he peed on Billy Idol; the time his band was forced to wing a Tony Orlando song for the orderlies at a hospital staff party; the time he woke up to find himself being assaulted with cabbages, etc.). This drains Cured of its unique voice but is probably more befitting a man in his fifties who has been through the darkness and is now apparently in a much happier place. As its title implies, Cured has a happy ending. Happy endings may not be very Cure-like, but Tolhurst is a man, not a Goth cartoon character, and his book does a good job of scrubbing away the makeup and hairspray to reveal the human being beneath the stage persona. And since he doesn’t get too deeply into stripping Smith to his core, that Cure mystique remains very much in place.

21 Underrated Songs by Siouxsie and the Banshees You Need to Hear Now!

I know, I know. As far as most people are concerned, they’re all underrated. Siouxsie and the Banshees have always had a cultier audience than their stadium-filling peers in The Cure. They slink in several slots behind The Sex Pistols and The Clash during discussions of British punk’s genesis, even though they were there from the start. Siouxsie Sioux was conspicuously, fabulously present when Steve Jones dropped the live-T.V. profanity bombs that ignited the filthy, furious war between the Pistols and proper (i.e.: tedious) society.

Of course, Siouxsie and the Banshees are hardly obscurities in the new wave collective consciousness. Siouxsie, who turns 55 today, is still as iconic for her terrifying trill as she is for her exotic, immensely influential sense of style. The band’s equally otherworldly music has been profiled on three greatest hits compilations. None of the tracks contained therein are included here. Instead, Psychobabble digs a little deeper into the dark wells of the band’s catalogue, reemerges a little dazed, a little roughed up, but clutching 21 underrated songs by Siouxsie and the Banshees you need to hear now.

1. “Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)” (from the album The Scream) 1978

In classic punk fashion, Siouxsie and the Banshees began their career doing everything in their power to be as off-putting as possible: interminably massacring “The Lord’s Prayer” at their debut show, adopting disturbing Third Reich imagery, allowing Sid Vicious to drum. Those who know the group from pleasantly poppy crossovers like “Cities in Dust” and “Kiss Them for Me” might be shocked to hear their early work. Disjointed, strident, far scarier than anything in Johnny Rotten’s imagination. “Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)” from their debut embodies this as well as any other track, instantly placing Siouxsie’s swastikas in ironic quotes with a dedication to anti-Nazi artist John Heartfeld, then lamenting/celebrating an increasing mechanized society to a shudder-inducing mechanical rhythm. Siouxsie’s conflicting messages clash just as hard as the vertiginous beat.


2. “Jigsaw Feeling” (from the album The Scream) 1978

Like “Metal Postcard”, “Jigsaw Feeling” draws its immense power from intense Sturm and Drang, but there’s also some fiery guitar work from John McKay to melt the ice around Siouxsie’s shout. Still, that does little to sooth the savagely paranoid lyric.


3. “Nictotine Stain” (from the album The Scream) 1978

Psychobabble’s Ten Greatest Singles of 1985

The music scene had gotten pretty rough by 1985. Top-notch artists like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Rolling Stones, and Stevie Wonder were making the most appalling music of their respective careers, while Foreigner, Chicago, REO Speedwagon, and USA for Africa were otherwise shitting up the charts. Yet, as in every year since the dawn of Rock & Roll, great singles could still be detected amid the muck. Here are ten…



10. “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements

With Tim the constrictions of ‘80s pop production started to have their way with The Replacements, who had recently made the leap from small time Twin/Tone records to bigger time Sire. Well, you can gate Chris Mars’s drums all you like and you can shoot a spiffy MTV-ready music video (and the accompanying video was mighty spiffy), but you can never tame Westerberg’s whiskey yowl. It is in furious form on “Bastards of Young”, perhaps the most insightful teen anthem of the ‘80s.


9. “So Far Away”by Dire Straits

Some seven years had past since square British Blues combo Dire Straits had a hit in the US. As we all know, that changed most assuredly when they dropped the ultra-slick, DDD monster Brothers in Arms in ’85. That year you couldn’t blow your nose without having “Money for Nothing” blare out of your nostrils. However the truly great single from the band’s comeback triumph was its first. “So Far Away” barely sneaked into the top twenty, but it’s as hooky and alluring as anything Dire Straights ever did, their taut rhythm section pulsing beneath an utterly sublime guitar lick. Mark Knopfler’s six-string impersonates a Hawaiian pedal steel and fools me completely.

8. “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers