The Cure: A Perfect Dream by Ian Gittins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"After four decades of making some of the most restless, somber, and variegated music in pop history, the Cure's legacy remains mighty and unquestionable - both in abstract and concrete terms."
(Ian Gittins, The Cure. A Perfect Dream)

I love the Cure. I have listened to their music for 36 years, more than half of my life. Yes, they are just a rock/pop band, but their music resonates with me as strongly as Bach's sonatas for solo violin or John Coltrane's Transition. This is the fourth book about the band that I am reviewing here, after "">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Never Enough: The Story of the Cure, The Cure. Poletko Pana Boba (this one is in Polish), and "">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys. Thus, instead of repeating the history of the band, I write about the book itself.

I find Ian Gittin's The Cure. A Perfect Dream (2018) the best "biography" of the group. It is very well written and sympathetic virtually to everybody who had been in any way connected with the band. And - of course - the pictures! This is really a coffee-table kind of book, one that not only can provoke house guests to talk about popular music but also can serve as a decorative item. It is a hard-cover, large-format book, 11 by 12 inches, printed on high-quality paper, and it contains probably over 300 photographs (I did not count, but there are often two pictures on each of the 240 pages). About a half of the images depict Robert Smith, the leader of the band, author of all lyrics and the primary composer.

The story of the band, whose first sort-of-official concert, in a secondary school auditorium, took place in December of 1976, and who still performed in 2020, is presented vividly and engagingly. Mr. Gittins knows how to write well - he is a noted ghost-writer, journalist, and editor. In addition to the smooth prose, I suppose some part of my high praise of Mr. Gittin's work is due to the fact that he seems to admire the same pieces by the Cure as I do. Let me quote some samples of the author's captivating prose that may debunk the old adage "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

About The Forest from the album Seventeen Seconds, the author writes:

"[...] nearly six minutes of charged, evocative menace unfurled around a sparsely claustrophobic yet nimbly infectious guitar line."

Strange as it may seem, these orotund phrases resonate with me in the same way as the song does! Mr. Gittins writes the following about one of the most popular Cure's songs - Close To Me:

"[...] the capricious, gorgeous 'Close To Me'. Feather-light, fickle, and fervent, this touched-by-the-hand-of-God song about stage fright has become one of the Cure's signature songs."

Again, how well these pretentious-sounding words capture the essence of this light, capricious, and gorgeous song!

Then comes Disintegration (1989), the Cure's most famous album and - to me - one of the best albums in the history of rock music. The author calls it "Robert Smith's masterwork," and describes every one of the 12 songs with his trademark flowery and visual, yet aptly accurate style. He writes:

"'The Same Deep Water As You' seems like a song to be delivered from a death bed to a lover. Romanticism never sounded so bruised, forlorn and, well, yes, gothic. Here Smith aligns himself more with Percy Shelley [...]"

And:

"[...] the record's title track delivers a frenzied, chaotic mea culpa of past sins set to a killer bassline and subtle, atmospheric synths. [...] It's a fantastically clever piece of writing, the zenith of Smith's lyrics."

The book ends with a short but illuminating exposition of the influence that the Cure had on other bands and on the pop and rock music in general.

An outstanding, engrossing read!

Four-and-a-half stars.


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