The Cure: "A Letter to Elise"

30 September 1992 (carrying on over on the next page)

"Sombre, beautiful, packed with ideas...I've gone all cheery! There's a big sloppy grin on my face!"

— Rob Newman

I recently quit Twitter. It was a day or so after the stupid X rebrand but it had been a long time coming. And it wasn't all the fault of that dipshit Musk. I was bored. Others found Music Twitter to be a welcoming place where opinions could be shared and everyone could discover new acts to follow but all too often I found it to be a place where I'd go to be ghosted. And, in a way, fair enough: if people didn't want to hit that 'like' button then I just had to deal with it. Plus, the challenges had begun to get to me. One month it would be 'Post a song about travel', then the next it would be 'Post an album that defined your teenage years' and so on ad infinitum.

I didn't bother to announce my departure, nor did I bother to join a rival social network. (A couple weeks' prior to quitting, a guy I follow posted a survey asking if we were planning to join (a) Bluesky, (b) Mastodon, (c) another network whose name escapes me or (d) just stick with Twitter till it breathes its last dying breath. I would have chosen option (e) ('To hell with social media') but, alas, it wasn't provided)

One of the (many) weaknesses of Music Twitter was that it got me sick to death of acts that I don't normally have anything against. I had my David Bowie phase back in 1998 when I went on and on about Ziggy Stardust and Low but I have since moved on, yet on a daily basis I would be greeted with tweets about the alleged virtues of Hunky Dory, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, Scary Monsters and, ludicrously, Tin Machine. My Joy Division period was even earlier than my dalliance with Dame David and didn't really result in much so I quickly tired of seeing the memorable cover of the overrated Unknown Pleasures regularly popping up on my feed. Music Twitter is (was?) also flush with Fall fans, people who seem unaware that if you've heard one album recorded by Mark E. Smith and his ever-changing line-up then you've heard them all. I once liked Depeche Mode quite a bit until I got sick of them constantly popping up on my feed. And then there's The Cure: the world's best band that I've never been all that fussed about.

I've known some Cure fans. They're pretty much the same as any other group of people who are into something that I am not: nice people on the whole though I don't have a whole lot in common with them. What I was unaware of is how many of them there are. Music Twitter seems to have a lot of time for Pornography and Disintegration, albums that have always provoked not much more than mild disinterest. But I'm probably just jealous: Twitter Cure and Twitter Mode and Twitter New Order are much more popular than Twitter Pet Shop Boys or Twitter Beautiful South — and, yet, fans of those bands are far more likely to mark themselves down as outsiders.

A Smiths fan since the early nineties, I went along with that made up rivalry with The Cure. Apparently, we just had to choose between the two. This was absolute nonsense and I for one should have known better since I dug "Love Song" every bit as much as I was into "Everyday Is Like Sunday". Yet, my antipathy remained, even after I had moved on from my late-teens worship of Morrissey and Marr. Goth Cure left me feeling cold and unmoved, while jangly Pop Cure could depress me a lot more than their darkest stuff. Beyond Smith and co.'s mastery of the music video, there hadn't been much for me.

This blog has corrected this misjudgment on my part, though only to an extent. "The Lovecats" and "The Caterpillar" are both brilliant singles and I'd have a higher opinion of "In Between Days" if it wasn't such a prototypical Cure outing. None of these singles had been unfamiliar to me prior to when I started up VER HITS but fresh ears can do a world of good. "Jumping Someone Else's Train" isn't so bad itself, even if it isn't quite up to the standards of early efforts like "Killing an Arab" and "Boys Don't Cry".

Yet, "A Letter to Elise" tests the patience and provides a welcome reminder that while I may respect Robert Smith's considerable talents and dig some of his work, I'll never love his band. Rob Newman makes a good case for it virtues which would no doubt be echoed by many Cure fanatics out there. Actually, he probably makes a better pitch for them than devotees ever could, unless, of course, big sloppy grins are much more commonplace than I ever would have guessed. A "great testament to human survival against the banal in these times" is about the nicest thing I've ever heard said about The Cure, even if I don't understand it myself.

Maybe it's my state of mind at the moment but I'm struggling to think of a record previously covered here that I felt so numb towards. I've disliked plenty of others far more but few have inspired such an uninspired state. I've been listening to it for weeks yet I can't recall anything about it. I know that Newman is correct about the lyrics being so thoughtfully considered — it's actually one of Smith's strengths as a songwriter — but I couldn't tell you without looking them up what any of them mean or what this letter from Robert to Elise is all about. It's useful mainly as a reminder of what a slog their ninth album Wish has always been. Convinced I'd be into it, I borrowed my sister's copy only to discover that its more than sixty-six minutes of running time was way more Cure than I could hope to handle. But that's being a Cure neutral in a world of Cure Twitter: I don't need them in my life even if I'm glad they're still around.

 

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

R.E.M.: "Drive"

"I loved Losing My Religion and hated Shiny Happy People", Newman states. Indeed, much of his review of "Drive" consists of him deriding the latter's "breakfast time jolliness" while also knocking R.E.M.'s fanbase for being far too precious and snobby. Perhaps this explains why he gave their latest single just one out of five despite having a "bit of genuine emotion and depth". Sounds like three out of five to me. Then again, what were they doing putting out "Drive" as a single when they had four or five better 45's on the way from their forthcoming masterpiece Automatic for the People as well as deep cuts like "Try Not to Breathe" and "Sweetness Follows". "Drive" is a perfect opener to such a brilliant album but I would never have considered it for singlehood. Not unlike "A Letter to Elise".