The Top by The Cure

Here’s an article I wrote for a recent “The Cure Special” issue of the fanzine Lunchtime For The Wild Youth.

Fanzine editor Russell says about the issue:

“Enjoy this trip through the back catalogue of albums, plus one compilation, Steve’s piece on seeing them live at Crystal Palace Bowl, a gig I was at myself (see issue 3) and an extract from John Robb’s book The Art Of Darkness.”

I chose to write about the album that was my introduction to The Cure in 1984. (You can buy the whole fanzine for an absolute bargain £1 here)

Some of those articles where they rank a particular groups albums or songs, you know the ones, can really get under my skin. I suspect they only exist as clickbait anyway, tempting the reader to share it with their friends saying “Have you seen this list of best songs by Snotty & The Nosepickers? What a load of bollocks!” When said friend reads it, it registers as another hit on the website and everyone’s a winner.

The Top is often an unfairly demeaned victim of this kind of article. Received wisdom seems to place it very low in the rankings of “Best Cure albums in the world EVER!!!1!!1!” Usually it’s placed lower than any other album from the band’s “imperial phase” which the mass of critical and public opinion seems to define as running from the first album up to the early 1990s.

It’s perhaps not difficult to see how The Top has ended up being dismissed as the unloved stepchild of the bands albums from that period. It’s partly due to its chronological place in the band’s discography.  It was preceded by the majestic “goth” trilogy Seventeen Seconds / Faith / Pornography. Those were the only albums recorded by the Smith / Tolhurst / Gallup trio and they share a similar sound palette. They gave us spindly guitar lines, breathy synths, drums heavy on the tom toms, drum machines heavy on the snare and very prominent bass guitar parts. You could take any song from those 3 albums and swap it to one of the other albums without it sounding particularly out of place.

Then you’ve got the most commercially successful albums that followed after The Top, the albums that generally feature right at the top in the online rankings and include nearly all the band’s best-known songs (The Head On The Door, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Disintegration and Wish, each one of those a multi-million seller.)

So The Top sits awkwardly sandwiched between those 2 more easily digested eras. Here’s an extract from “Cured,” the brilliant book by Lol Tolhurst: “This was The Cure Mark 2. This version was more expansive and less stripped down than the previous iteration, the Pornography Cure, as it were.”

Simon Gallup had parted ways with The Cure by now after a notorious punch-up with Smith in Strasbourg and a fractious final gig in Brussels. The Cure were effectively now down to just two, Smith and his childhood pal Tolhurst. They took a left-turn into out-and-out pop music with their 3 singles in 1982/1983, Let’s Go To Bed, The Walk and The Love Cats, scoring actual big hit singles with those last 2 making it to number 12 and number 7 respectively. Aged 12 and an avid listener to the Top 40, The Love Cats was the first time I can remember hearing The Cure. With its jazzy double bass and piano chords, it stood out as something very different from the rest of the charts just as much as it stands out from every other song in The Cure’s entire career. They would never again record a song that sounds like something from the soundtrack of the Disney film The Aristocats and as fun as that song is, most would probably agree that’s very much for the best.

Meanwhile Robert Smith was also playing with Siouxsie & The Banshees. When Siouxsie & Budgie went off to record as The Creatures and flirted with their own jazz tendencies, Smith teamed up with his new bassplaying pal Steve Severin and vocalist / dancer Jeanette Landray as The Glove and recorded the album Blue Sunshine going in an altogether different musical direction. Blue Sunshine is as bizarre and psychedelic as you’d expect an album recorded whilst binging on hallucinogens and old B-movies to be and it sounds like a bit of a stepping stone between Pornography and The Top.

Like many 13 year olds I used to record my favourite songs from the Top 40 countdown onto a tape for re-listening later and I loved the “do do do” chorus of The Caterpillar and its scrapy violin noises. For such a peculiar song, it’s incredibly catchy and I loved it so much I bought the 7” single. A little while after that, I discovered that my local library in Haslemere lent out tapes so I could use my elder brother’s fancy new JVC tape-to-tape player to make my own copies. (Incidentally, that library is just 8 miles from Chestnut Studios where The Cure recorded their first demos.)

So I soon ended up with a C90 that had Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain on one side and The Top on the other. There was even room to fit on the b-side of my Caterpillar single Happy The Man. So many joyful teenage hours spent listening to both sides of that tape.

Happy The Man, like the whole of The Top, is quite a peculiar little thing. Another extract from Lol Tolhurst’s book: “There was always a psychedelic side to Robert that he explored in depth on The Top¸ which to all intents and purposes is a psychedelic album, albeit a couple of decades after the original psychedelic era.” In the spirit of that original era, it’s also genuinely experimental and just quite odd. Maybe that’s another reason why it doesn’t get the praise that other Cure albums from around that time do? It’s unpigeonholeable.

The album kicks off aggressively with crashing drums and waves of guitar on Shake Dog Shake. One of many songs on this album where the lyrics are coming from quite a dark place, “anger” “spit” “cough” “scrape my skin with razor blades” before we’ve even made it to the first chorus! Over the coming years, this song would be played live way more than any other from this album and quite often as the opening song (including in the brilliant Live At Orange film.) It’s the only song from The Top that’s being played on the current US tour and they’ve played it pretty much every night. Shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake dog shake!

Bird Mad Girl starts with acoustic guitars, a relative rarity on The Cure’s album up until this point. There are bits of piano and various percussion, including the staple of every primary school music lesson, the claves. It’s another incredibly catchy song, one of my favourites on the album. It feels a bit like a companion piece to Mr. Alphabet Says, one of only 2 songs on the Blue Sunshine album where Smith sings the lead vocals (and also to Six Different Ways on The Head On The Door.)

Similarly, Wailing Wall with its Eastern-tinged melody and cymbals shares some of its sound with a song by The Glove (Orgy) as well as a Cure song from a future album (If Only Tonight We Could Sleep from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.)

Yet more dark and aggressive lyrics to kick off Give Me It: “get away from me, get your fingers out of my face” (Smith still annoyed about the punch-up with Gallup??) Layers of squealing lead guitar and drums that are almost proto-“baggy” it’s definitely the heaviest song they’d recorded so far in their career, and arguably wouldn’t get this heavy again until the 2000s.

The pace drops for Dressing Up, a lovely gentle song that’s almost entirely synth-based. Listen to it on headphones and there’s just so much going on here. Smith wrote this one about putting on make-up & getting ready for a gig. He told Rolling Stone that it was “actually done as a Glove song, and then I didn’t play it to (Steve) Severin because I thought, I like this one too much.”

After The Caterpillar (still flickering, still beautiful on every listen and still in my top 3 Cure songs) comes Piggy In The Mirror, another of my favourites on the album. It’s a superb song with a memorable melody, a great organ part and a charming acoustic guitar solo. Just when you think it’s coming to end, here comes the coda as Smith sings “as I dance, dance back” and repeats the songtitle over the syncopated synth riff. Just brilliant. Once again, there’s a song on Blue Sunshine that sounds like a bit of a pre-cursor to this, the dizzying This Green City with its distorted twisting guitar and woodwind-like synths lurking in the background.

There’s more of those woodwind synth sounds on the next track The Empty World which starts off with military drums to match the lyrics “she talked about the armies that marched inside her head.” Smith has described this song as “the flip side to Charlotte Sometimes” and the female subjects of both songs appear to be struggling to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Partly inspired by a short story by J.D. Salinger “A perfect day for Bananafish” there’s a great singalong chorus on Bananafishbones: “Oh kill me kiss me once and then we’ll throw it away” Had they chosen to release a second single from this album, then I think this would’ve been a good choice. It’s another song that sounds straightforward, but when you listen on headphones there’s so many interesting little melodic hooks to reel you in. A bouncy synth bassline, some great Hammond organ sounds and at least 3 different guitar parts contrasting with each other.

The album closes with the title track The Top, just under 7 minutes long and comfortably the longest song on the album. There’s a recording of a spinning top at the start followed by very sparse verses with a weirdly dissonant bass riff. The lyrics of the chorus take us back into the world of fantasy (“this top is the place where nobody goes, you just imagine, you just imagine it all”) but the music that accompanies those words is strangely uplifting, as if yearning for a peaceful resolution to all the confusion and conflict that has gone before.

So there it is. Ten very diverse songs, none sounding quite like the others, none sounding quite like anything The Cure had released up to this point.

And all of it has come from the mind of just One Imaginary Boy.

More than any other album, this is the closest we have ever got to hearing a Robert Smith solo album. Apart from Andy Anderson’s drumming, you’ve got Lol Tolhurst’s keyboards on just 3 songs. Porl Thompson, who would later join as full-time guitarist, plays the saxophone on Give Me It. Apart from that, every single sound you hear is played by Robert Smith, who himself described The Top as “the solo album I never made.”

My affection for this album grew even stronger after I went to see The Cure at the Hammersmith Odeon on 22nd December 2014. Taken from the band’s announcement of these gig dates: “The band will be performing a 150 minute show playing songs drawn from their entire 37 year old catalogue including deep cuts, pop songs, fan favourites and surprises galore.” The band And Also The Trees were supporting, just as they had done at the same venue when The Cure had first played it 30 years earlier.

Every other Cure gig I’ve been to has been either a festival or in an arena / enormodome, so I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see them in a more intimate venue. If the reference to the 1984 Odeon gigs was a clue to what they would be playing then it went completely over my head at the time so I was both excited and surprised when after opening the gig with 2 of my favourite songs from The Top (Shake Dog Shake, Piggy In The Mirror) Robert revealed that in celebration of the 30^th anniversary of their first gig at that venue, they would be playing all the songs from The Top during the set. Re-fucking-sult!!

That Hammersmith gig is a very special memory and definitely my favourite of all The Cure gigs I’ve been to, in no small part because I got to hear the whole of the album that made me a fan in the first place!

Just look at this 40 song setlist (songs from The Top underlined) …

Shake Dog Shake / Piggy in the Mirror / A Night Like This / Push / In Between Days / Just Like Heaven / Bananafishbones / The Caterpillar / The Walk / A Man Inside My Mouth / Wailing Wall /Three Imaginary Boys / Never Enough / Wrong Number / Birdmad Girl / Lovesong / Like Cockatoos / From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea / Kyoto Song / alt.end / Want / The Hungry Ghost / One Hundred Years / Give Me It / The Top

Encore 1: The Empty World / Charlotte Sometimes / Primary

Encore 2: M / Play for Today / A Forest

Encore 3: Pictures of You / Lullaby / Fascination Street

Encore 4: Dressing Up / The Lovecats / Close to Me / Why Can’t I Be You? / Boys Don’t Cry / Hey You!!!