The Head on the Door
The Cure
Babble, Bar Open, 15 May 2008
Side 1
In Between Days MANDY BEAUMONT
Kyoto Song ALICIA SOMETIMES
The Blood DAN LEE
Six Different Ways EMILIE ZOEY BAKER
Push KLARE LANSON
Side 2
The Baby Screams BEN POBJIE
Close to Me MONTRICE SHUMPERT
A Night Like This SEAN M WHELAN
Screw MARC TESTART
Sinking CHLOE JACKSON WILLMOTT
It starts —well... not really, but it should have started, with a wardrobe full of post-goths, tumbling off a cliff into the sea, to a jaunty riff. One of them’s called Bob. It’s 1985.
Robert Smith, who looks like a bomb went off when he was shopping at Price Attack, is The Cure. Don’t let any nerds tell you otherwise. But, sure, there were others. The Head on the Door saw the return of bassist Simon Gallup and the official re-induction of guitarist Porl Thompson, it was the first Cure album with drummer Boris Williams, who had done work with the Thompson Twins. And then, as ever, well… until the late '80s, there was Robert’s mate Lol Tolhurst on keyboards. Or Laugh Out Loud Tolhurst as he’s probably referred to today.
They probably also call The Head on the Door THOTD. And iTunes would probably call it Gothic rock, Alternative rock, New wave, Post-punk. But it was pop. Moody, maybe. Pop that mentions bleeding, screaming, and being in bed and endless references to mouths, but pop nonetheless. In fact, this was really the album when The Cure threw off its goth cloak and became a pop band. In other words, they became a version of The Cure that even Americans could understand.
Smith had done his stint in Siouxsie and the Banshees as guitarist, and formed a one-off band The Glove, with the Banshees guitarist and acid freak Steve Severin. The Cure’s previous album was the messily psychedelic The Top, fuelled by a combination of that and drummer Andy Anderson’s magic mushroom tea, and Smith’s newfound love of Captain Beefheart. The Banshees were furious when Smith’s out-of-nowhere playful songs ‘The Walk’ and ‘The Lovecats’ were actually making The Cure more popular than the Banshees.
At the start of 1985, Smith wrote The Head On The Door in two weeks flat “fuelled by beer”, and with drugs banned from the studio. Released in the summer of 1985, it was The Cure’s breakthrough album, described by Mojo as “a cunning splice of their pop nous with the more sombre tones of Sinking and Kyoto Song. It made them the world’s pre-eminent alternative rock band: accessible enough to win over radio and propel Smith into the pages of Smash Hits, peculiar enough to maintain a mystique and a loyal cult fan base”.
“I think The Cure really started again at this point,” he said later. “It felt like being in The Beatles – and I wanted to make substantial ‘Strawberry Fields’-style pop music. I wanted everything to be really catchy.”
