The Cure – The Head On The Door – Reissue liner notes

The Head On The Door reissue 2006

In 2006 The Cure album The Head On The Door was re-released. The recordings were remastered, demo and live recordings were added and Johnny Black wrote the liner notes to the release. Those can be found below.

The Cure started as a band re-born.

Throughout the previous eighteen months, in Robert Smith’s own words, “we were constantly living beyond the threshold.” To be a little more precise, Smith himself was living beyond the threshold, running himself ragged by trying to juggle two simultaneous careers – leader of The Cure and guitarist in Siouxsie And The Banshees.

A self-destructive recipe of too much work, not enough sleep and too many drugs had almost been his undoing. Forced by ill health to quit the Banshees he decided to clean up his act, renouncing smoking, spirits and various other chemicals overnight… But completing The Cure’s lengthy touring schedule was still a real struggle.

Back in the UK, recording demos for the album that would become The Head On The Door, Smith made another significant decision. He resolved to renew his friendship with Simon Gallup.

The definitive Cure bassist, Gallup was Smith’s closest friend for many years until the intensity and violence of the Pornography period, culminating in a drunken brawl after a gig in Strasbourg, tore them apart. Determined to put his self-destructive urges behind him, Smith now realised that Gallup’s presence in the band was more important than any change of habits. “A mutual friend got us together, and we picked up as if we’d just had a slight misunderstanding the weekend before. We realised how ludicrous the whole thing had been… I think, we’d both grown up a bit.”

The departure of Phil Thornalley and Andy Anderson during the course of 1984 had also played its part in rejuvenating The Cure. Another old friend, guitarist Pol Thompson, had been welcomed back into the fold, and the arrival of former Thompson Twins’ drummer Boris Williams brought with it a welcome realisation for Smith. “I was having so much fun playing with a drummer who was so natural and imaginative. Boris, Porl and Simon clicked right away, and despite Lol’s increasingly erratic behaviour, I at last felt we had a genuinely happy and very musical group. It totally changed my idea of what The Cure could be.”

In effect, the band would approach their next album as an almost entirely different entity from the one that had released The Top seven months earlier.

Working in his London flat, Smith found himself moving in entirely new directions. “Realizing I had outgrown a lot of my musical prejudices was a big part of the change. The demo of Inbetween Days is a good example of this. Up until then I’d always thought of the acoustic guitar as a bit of a hippy instrument. Not really something The Cure should use… But now I was determined to explore every possibilty.”

Other instruments that would dramatically alter the album’s sonic landscape were new keyboards the Yamaha DX7, the Emulator 2 and the Ensonic Mirage. “I had these three in my flat and every day I’d find a new sound, a new voice. Songs like Close To Me and Six Different Ways almost seemed to happen without me!”

The home demos were further refined at F2 And Fitz Studios in London, before the band moved a little further out to Angel Studios in Islington for the start of serious recording.

“The Cure felt like it started again at this point,” says Smith. “I had a sense of being in a proper band for the first time since Pornography. It was really exciting – and I wanted to make pop music that captured this excitement. I wanted everything to be bright and catchy and new.”

His optimism was well founded, because work with co-producer Dave Allen proceeded at a dizzying pace. “That was mainly because we’d demo’d the songs, so a lot of the arrangements and sounds had been worked on,” points out Smith. “However at Angel we weren’t so much trying to recreate the notes we’d played as keep the spirit of what we’d done.” Final mixes of The Head On The Door took place in April 1985 at the Townhouse in Shepherd’s Bush.

The album’s title was derived from a line in Smith’s grand Guignol pop song, Close To Me. “This was a childhood image. A recurring nightmare of a disembodied head leering at me from the top of my bedroom door… It unsettled me, and invariably gave me a sense of impending doom. I thought it somehow fit the slightly skewed pop record we were making!”

At first listen, the album can seem a mirror reflection of the exhilarating spirit in which it was recorded, but Smith points out that, “it does have a dark side. Sinking, The Baby Screams, A Night Like This… these are not lyrically happy songs, and Close To Me is pretty much wishing I wasn’t born with a groovy bass line! I was trying to create a sort of attractive tension by marrying slightly bitter words to really sweet tunes.”

The album was released on 30 August and, for once, the critics were unanimous in declaring a Cure album an unmitigated success. Melody Maker reckoned it was “perfection of sorts”, while Sounds reasoned that, “it makes you wish more pop stars were hip enough to stay in bed all day.” It was Smash Hits, however, that got to the core of the thing by pointing out that “Robert Smith does tend to go on about things like screaming babies and the blood of christ … but don’t let that put you off.”

Entering the UK album chart a week later, it quickly rose to peak at no7, but the album’s real achievement was that it established The Cure as a major act in the USA. “It was perfect for us because we went to America with The Head On The Door and everything just fell into place,” recalls Smith. “The songs were right for the radio, the videos suited MTV, we were an exciting live band with a seriously good repertoire to draw on, and we were developing fast. We weren’t just out there promoting one album, we were promoting The Cure.”

The stadiums were calling and the platinum albums were about to start rolling in but, for Smith, the really siginificant factor was that The Cure was finally operating at the peak of its powers. “The sound was really vibrant and the band was really happy. It was a joy to make the record and I thought to myself, ‘This album is going to make a difference…'”

How right he was.

Liner notes The Head On The Door Deluxe Edition, Johnny Black, 2006