“By comparison, Ian Curtis is the funniest guy in the room.” “This is the auditory equivalent of a toothache.” “It’s the sound of a band destroying itself and taking everyone with it.” Reviews of ‘Pornography’ at the time (these are from Rip It Up, Rolling Stone and Alternative Press) were not particularly good. They were the only songs at their concerts where people got angry or even threw things at them, as Robert Smith would later say, explaining that the time of creating the album was one of the worst (if not the worst) of his career… and, without a doubt, However, he considers that making the album was “the key point of my life.” He says: “I had lost all my friends, without exception, I was a monstrous and selfish person. And at that moment I had two options: give up permanently and end everything, or make an album about what I had inside and try to get it out of me. I channeled all the self-destructive elements of my personality into creating something, and discovered that something could be created even from nothing, from the well. At that moment it would have been very easy to curl up into a ball and disappear.” Fortunately, he didn’t. And, fortunately, critics ended up changing their minds about ‘Pornography’, now a cult album, one of the favorites of fans, and of Smith himself. Later, Lol Torhurst would even consider it “the best thing we have ever done.”
Their fourth album (in a way third, if we take into account that they barely had creative control on their debut) is also the first of a non-consecutive trilogy that Smith would later shape: along with ‘Disintegration’ (1989) and ‘Bloodflowers ‘ (2000), would form the live performances of ‘The Trilogy Concerts’ in Berlin. All three have especially dark content, but it is undoubtedly ‘Pornography’ that takes the cake. And no, it doesn’t talk about porn. “Just as ‘Killing an Arab’ was not a racist song,” Smith ironized, “’Pornography’ speaks more of the obscenity of violence, exploitation and abuses of power.”
It is clear that this is a dense album, and not only because there are only two songs under four and a half minutes (three of them exceeding six minutes). Their label was quite concerned about the commercial performance that this work could have, between that title and the lack of obvious singles, so they pushed to give a minimal single patina to ‘The Hanging Garden’, perhaps the most accessible. But the worries proved not to be necessary, with Crowley’s team reaching the top 10 of the islands for the first time. It is curious that the producer chosen for this album, Phil Tornalley (who would later be his bassist for a time), was the architect of another success later: he wrote ‘Torn’ with Nathalie Imbruglia.
Tornalley and the band went hand in hand in creating the atmosphere of this album, which NME described as “Phil Spector but in Hell”. Distortion, psychedelia, synthpop, sinister guitars, percussion that seemed to chase you, and a tinge that was no longer dark but suffocating from the first song, the excellent ‘One Hundred Years’. An album that begins by saying “it doesn’t matter if we all die” cannot be said to hide its intentions. Side A is completed with the psychedelia of ‘A Short Term Effect’, the aforementioned single ‘The Hanging Garden’ and another marvel, ‘Siamese Twins’. This could be – no pun intended – the evil twin of the later ‘Pictures of You’: with a similar beginning, we quickly go to the decadence that dominates the album, with the rhythm and the drum beats reminding us of those of a ritual.
It is incredible that Robert Smith was not the original vocalist of The Cure, not only because of his looks, not because he ended up being the only member of the original line-up, but because of his characteristic and imitated way of performing, which here is key to that everything is even more suffocating. His voice is a guide, but a guide through passages that function like the descent into Hell in ‘Apocalypse Now’. Side B, in fact, begins directly with a monster: ‘The Figurehead’ takes its inspiration from a skull that was taken from the abandoned asylum where they had filmed a video clip (this phrase could be part of its vocalist’s ‘Celebrities’, but it’s real). The repetitions of “you mean nothing” or “I will never be clean again” sound even more desperate in Smith’s voice.
The Brit cited Siouxsie and the Banshees, the debut of Psychedelic Furs, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and psychoanalysis books (?) as influences, but the biggest influence seemed to be the rage and depression that surrounded him. “The lyrics range from extremely personal observations about friends and people around me, to general rants about the futility of everyone and everything, to the horrors that were inside me… it is difficult to explain those songs, there are several layers of ideas that logically they had no connection with each other,” he would later comment in a fanzine. In ‘Cold’ there are verses like “a shallow grave, a monument to the ruined age / ice in my eyes and eyes like ice don’t move / screaming at the moon, another past time.”
And then there’s the title cut, one of their least accessible songs. “A hand in my mouth, a life spills into the flowers / we all look so perfect as we fall down (…) one more day like today and I’ll kill you / a desire for flesh and real blood” is one of the pearls of a song that mixes dialogues from Fritz Lang’s film ‘You Only Live Once’ with BBC promos played backwards, with the band’s own instruments and the singer’s voice distorted.
At times, ‘Pornography’ seems straight up a hallucination. However, the only light on the album seems to be at the end of this cut and, therefore, at the end itself. Robert Smith seems to come out minimally to say that he must “fight this disease” and “find a cure.” The veiled mention of the group’s name may also refer to what the album itself meant, since, as he said in the statements we collected at the beginning, perhaps the leader of The Cure would not still be here if he had not vomited all this. Maybe sometimes we need to throw up to keep going. Although no one understands it.
