The Cure. Poletko Pana Boba by Jerzy Rzewuski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Jupiter Crash is another song by The Cure borne of fascination with the immensity of the sea. One could refer here to onomatopoeic perfection - the wave effect obtained through multi-track recording of guitar sound and the multivoiced vocal track emphasize the narrator's painful melancholy."
(My own translation from Polish)

Yet another English-language review of a book in Polish. A very good book which serves as an antidote after major disappointments of the two other music biographies I have recently read ( Pearl , a sensationalist biography of Janis Joplin and the atrocious Stairway To Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored). Jerzy Rzewuski's The Cure. Poletko Pana Boba (1997) is a great example of how to write about rock/pop bands without focusing on the dirt, drugs, and sex-filled lives of the rich and famous musicians.

The title, which translated to English would be Bob's Little Acre, is a cool pun on the title of Erskine Caldwell's famous novel. Robert Smith ("Bob") has always been the moving spirit, the heart, soul, and face of The Cure and the band has always been his little acre. Most of success and fame that the band has achieved is due to Mr. Smith.

Although the band had been formed in 1976 as The Easy Cure, the book traces the history of The Cure since September 1977, when Robert Smith, with his distinctive, rather high pitched voice, decided to take on the role of a vocalist of the band. We read about their first brush with wider audiences and fame in 1977 and their first breakthrough, when they signed with Chris Parry's label Fiction. The author provides a lot of meticulously researched details of The Cure's early years and constant personnel changes.

The 1982 album Pornography established The Cure's image as a gothic rock band. Robert Smith wouldn't tolerate being categorized so The Cure soon changed the genre of their music and produced some wonderful pop hits like The Caterpillar, The Walk, or The Love Cats (it may sound as an oxymoron but these are the prime examples of ambitious pop music). After that came the hit-filled albums The Head on the Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Then came another complete change of style. The album Disintegration, both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, introduced The Cure's new style: multilayered orchestral, almost symphonic sound.

The book ends in 1997, at the time of The Cure's 20th anniversary. The band, now 42-year old, is still around and going strong, giving great live concerts (my daughter and I attended their concert in San Diego in 2000 and loved it).

Wonderful biography that focuses on the band's music and lyrics rather than on their alcoholic and other excesses. If I were to criticize the author, Mr. Rzewuski, for anything it would be too much emphasis of trying to analyze the lyrics. The passages about the loss of childhood and coming of age as central motifs in Robert Smith's texts or about similarity of themes to Ingmar Bergmann's great movie Wild Strawberries provide fascinating read yet they can probably be attributed more to Mr. Rzewuski's rich interpretation than to Mr. Smith's intentions.

A highly recommended book and I hope some fan of The Cure who can write in English better than this reviewer will translate it.

Four and a quarter stars.

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