The Cure: A Perfect Dream

The Crawley Concrete Void

Ian Gittins smells of stale nicotine and dead deadlines. A proper hack in the most honorable sense of the phrase. From 1985 to 1995, he spent his prime freezing in broken-down transit vans and dodging spit while freelancing for the Melody Maker. He interrogated John Lydon. He stared down an erratic Nick Cave. Gittins understands the bruised, paranoid psychology of British indie culture because he lived inside its ugly machinery. He is a survivor of a feral era. A time when music journalism possessed actual venom. Fast forward. The industry today is algorithmic fellatio. Public relations dictates every printed syllable. Yet, Gittins remains. You might know him for babysitting Nikki Sixx through The Heroin Diaries. That was a grotesque chronicle of Los Angeles chemical excess. His real pedigree, however, lies in deciphering the rain-soaked neuroses of English post-punk.

Enter A Perfect Dream. Shunted onto the market by Palazzo Editions in 2018. A calculated cash-grab designed for a lucrative 40th anniversary. It was billed as a lush, visual retrospective. A coffee-table book. That phrase alone makes any self-respecting archivist gag violently. Such cumbersome volumes are usually the refuge of lazy publishers. They exist to fleece middle-aged nostalgists with disposable income. Glossy pictures of teased hair. Vacuous platitudes about gothic architecture. A total waste of timber. Gittins, thankfully, brings his old Maker cynicism to the party. He refuses to pedal sycophantic drivel. He knows you cannot examine Robert Smith’s global empire without acknowledging the suffocating drudgery of Crawley, West Sussex. The miserable concrete nowhere that birthed them. Suburbia is a disease. The Cure was the symptom.

A Totalitarian Regime in Lipstick

Robert Smith was never a benevolent leader. He was an uncompromising tyrant. This book correctly identifies his musical project not as a democratic collective, but as a totalitarian regime built on shifting allegiances and brutal pragmatism. Gittins zeroes in on the casualties. He leaves the blood on the floor. Lol Tolhurst was the sacrificial lamb of the mythology. The founding drummer-turned-keyboardist suffered an agonizing descent into alcoholic irrelevance during the Disintegration sessions at Outside Studios in Berkshire. His reward for a decade of loyalty? A humiliating dismissal in 1989.

The subsequent 1994 High Court lawsuit is treated with the grim fascination it warrants. Tolhurst sued for unpaid royalties. He sued for joint ownership of the band's name. He lost, utterly and publicly. The legal proceedings stripped away the myth of the sad, sensitive goth weeping in the rain. Smith emerges from the court transcripts as a shrewd, ruthless CEO. He defended his intellectual property with the viciousness of a starving junkyard dog. Gittins uses this legal bloodbath to illustrate the cold reality of maintaining a legacy. You do not survive forty years in the music industry by being nice. You survive by cutting the dead weight.

We see this dictatorial control emerge early. Look at The Top from 1984. Gittins reminds us this was essentially a Smith solo vehicle masquerading as a band effort. He played nearly every instrument himself. He was frantically recording with Siouxsie and the Banshees while simultaneously keeping The Cure on life support. The sheer arrogant willpower required to orchestrate that dual existence is staggering. The book details these manic phases with a surgeon’s precision.

The Uneasy Pop Odyssey

Survival required a severe aesthetic swerve. Gittins maps the erratic transition perfectly. How do the architects of Pornography—a 1982 record birthed amidst a terrifying blizzard of LSD and insurmountable depression at RAK Studios—become the chart-busting clowns of "The Lovecats" a mere eighteen months later? Smith's sudden embrace of pure pop was a desperate, calculated move. It was a necessary mechanism to avoid a collective suicide pact. They were hurtling toward a brick wall. Smith yanked the steering wheel.

Gittins draws sharp insights from peripheral figures. Boris Williams. Roger O'Donnell. These men were not mere session hacks. They were the engine room powering a commercial zenith. The friction during the Wish era fractured whatever fragile unity remained from the late eighties. Fame brought stadium-level cash. It brought parasites. It brought rot. Gittins recounts the infamous 1987 South American tour. Riots in Argentina. Blood in the stadiums. The sheer terror of playing delicate pop songs to rabid, violent crowds.

Let us analyze the Tim Pope phenomenon. You cannot discuss the visual history of this band without acknowledging the man who directed their most iconic, absurd music videos. Pope understood exactly how to subvert Smith’s inherent gloom. He shoved him into wardrobes. He dressed him as a bear. He made him crawl around on the floor surrounded by aggressively cheerful dancers. Gittins highlights this bizarre symbiosis. Pope was the essential jester in Smith’s royal court. Without those videos, the band would have suffocated under the weight of their own misery. They provided a crucial pressure valve. MTV ate it up. The American market, previously immune to their bleak sonic architecture, suddenly found a palatable entry point. It was a masterclass in bait and switch. Sell them the funny cat video, then lock them in a room with Faith.

Chemical Dependencies and Backstage Rot

Visual excess lubricates the narrative throughout the book. Over 250 high-resolution photographs litter these heavy pages. Hyper-saturated relics of the MTV era contrast violently with the austere, black-and-white gloom of the early Fiction Records days. The evolution of Smith’s hair alone is a study in calculated branding. From the shorn, aggressive post-punk crop to the towering, gravity-defying bird's nest that became his permanent trademark.

Gittins strips the romanticism from the touring myth. He documents the grim, repetitive reality of chemical hangovers. Every lineup change acts as a vital shift in the band's chemical composition. Simon Gallup’s temporary exile following a violent fistfight with Smith in a Strasbourg nightclub in 1982. Porl Thompson’s swirling guitar histrionics dominating the massive live arenas of the Disintegration tour. Perry Bamonte’s quiet reliability anchoring the chaotic backstage atmosphere when everything else threatened to disintegrate. These are not biographical footnotes. They are the bloody gear-shifts of a massive machine refusing to stall.

The financial toll was equally catastrophic. Gittins touches upon the sheer expense of maintaining this chaotic lifestyle. Studio budgets ballooned. Fiction Records owner Chris Parry was essentially underwriting a traveling circus of maladjusted musicians. The recording sessions for Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me at Studio Miraval in Southern France sound like a deranged bacchanal. Buckets of local wine. Endless studio hours resulting in a sprawling, chaotic double album. The discipline was gone. Replaced by a sprawling, self-indulgent methodology that somehow yielded massive commercial returns. It defies logic. A band recording in a drunken stupor producing some of the sharpest pop singles of the decade. "Just Like Heaven" was birthed in this absolute mess. Proof that sometimes, chaos is an adequate substitute for professionalism.

Consider the recording of Disintegration. Gittins highlights Smith’s crippling existential panic upon approaching his thirtieth birthday. He was convinced he was a failure. He responded by consuming staggering amounts of hallucinogens and crafting a suffocating masterpiece. The book captures the irony perfectly. The more depressed Smith became, the more records Fiction Records sold. The label monetized his despair. Gittins does not let anyone off the hook. Not the record executives. Not the ravenous fanbase. And certainly not Smith himself.

Narrative Exhaustion Post-1992

Hardcore completists dismiss this volume outright. The kind of miserable sods who collect Japanese b-side bootlegs and argue about snare frequencies on internet forums consider it a glossy primer for tourists. This ignores the uncompromising prose smuggled inside the commercial packaging. When you publish an anniversary retrospective, publishers demand hagiography. A glowing tribute to a treasured British institution. Gittins delivers the required visual feast. He gives them the pretty pictures. But he also smuggles in the poison. Petty squabbles and brutal firings remain front and center. This approach prevents complete sanitization by the nostalgia industry. Rock history is not a clean progression of pristine genius. It is a messy, spite-driven slog through the mud.

"The Cure became a stadium band almost entirely by accident, dragged kicking and screaming into the daylight by a frontman who secretly craved the adoration he publicly despised." — Ian Gittins, A Perfect Dream

Critics point out a glaring void. The narrative depth plummets dramatically after the release of Wish. The wilderness years of Wild Mood Swings. The patchy, unfocused Bloodflowers. The self-titled 2004 disaster produced by Ross Robinson. These eras are treated with a palpable sense of exhaustion. Gittins rushes through them. Perhaps he simply lost interest. The story of wealthy men arguing over Pro Tools sessions completely lacks the romantic grime of starving in a Crawley pub. This narrative imbalance argues a harsh truth. The relevant history ended in 1992. Everything since is a protracted, highly lucrative epilogue.

Consider the modern state of alternative rock. It is a barren wasteland of focus-grouped indie bands terrified of causing offense. The Cure represents a completely different philosophy. They were dangerous. They were deeply uncomfortable in their own skin. Gittins captures this discomfort perfectly. He does not try to smooth out the rough edges. He forces the reader to stare at the wreckage. That is why this book matters. It is a historical document proving that commercial success used to require actual blood. You had to sacrifice pieces of your sanity to write a song like "A Forest." You had to ruin relationships. You had to alienate your closest friends. The price of admission was impossibly high.

Smith’s aesthetic was a viral contagion. The smeared red lipstick. The violently teased hair. The oversized black clothing. It infected millions of disaffected suburban kids globally. A Perfect Dream serves as an anthropological record of this specific infection. In an era where music journalism has been entirely defanged, this heavy volume acts as a necessary piece of shrapnel. A Trojan horse masquerading as a harmless gift for aging goths. The real story is in the text. Buried beneath the layers of hairspray. Tolhurst lost his court case on a Tuesday in October. Smith didn't even blink.

The Personnel

• Robert Smith (Vocals, Guitar, Dictator)
• Simon Gallup (Bass, Occasional Fistfighter)
• Lol Tolhurst (Drums, Keyboards, Plaintiff)
• Porl Thompson (Guitar, Saxophone)
• Boris Williams (Drums)
• Roger O'Donnell (Keyboards)
• Perry Bamonte (Guitar, Keyboards)

Essential Discography

• Seventeen Seconds (1980)
• Faith (1981)
• Pornography (1982)
• The Head on the Door (1985)
• Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
• Disintegration (1989)
• Wish (1992)