Paul Morley and The Cure

 

'Ahhh! More alert and anguished young men chalking up more sanctioned and sanctimonious marks.  Do not applaud them.'

In 1979 in the pages of the NME, Paul Morley, (on his way to becoming, in Nick Kent's words, 'the world's most pretentious man,') wrote an utterly scathing review of The Cure's debut album Three Imaginary Boys. It's an amusing, interesting read though very unkind as well as quite unfair, given that the record itself was a decent formative effort, if offering little indication of the global stomping Goth dinosaurs that the band were to become in less than a decade.

The Cure clearly aspired to the solemnity of Joy Division, though they equally clearly weren't quite there yet but there was plenty of pop nous on display on Three Imaginary Boys which Morley perhaps wiflully, fails to notice. The record evidently is not the 'insubstantial froth' that he dismisses it as and to be savaged so relentlessly in NME of all places was clearly bound to sting. Judging by what came next, it did.

On the day the issue with Morley's review came out, The Cure were encamped in the BBC studio's in Maida Vale recording a session for John Peel. In response to their critical panning, Robert Smith rewrote the lyrics to Grinding Halt and they included the results as a bonus track for the session. entitling it Desperate Journalist in Ongoing Meaningful Review. It was a deft and perfectly justified response, making it apparrent that Smith could have, had he wished, been a perfectly competent music critic. We've yet to hear precisely what Paul Morley is capable of behind the mic.