From taking part in songs of suburban alienation in English church halls to symphonising the mysteries of life the world over’s most prestigious phases, the odyssey of The Remedy spans six a long time and defies rock’n’roll logic. Sure, it says: you are able to do no matter you need, on a regular basis, in your personal time, and folks will fill soccer stadiums to vindicate you. A post-punk Monet, Robert Smith has labored with a constant palette for greater than 40 years – however because of the rigour and intricacy of his craft, there’s at all times one thing new to catch your eye.
As a result of The Remedy’s tune canon is as assorted as any in pop, comparable with Smith’s hero David Bowie for inventive handbrake turns, a sonic panorama that allows DayGlo fantasy and monochrome gloom, the euphoric and the infernal, The Love Cats (“So splendidly, splendidly, splendidly, splendidly fairly!”) and One Hundred Years (“It doesn’t matter if all of us die!”). Tears, tunes and packing containers of lipstick-flavour sweets – Robert Smith dispenses all of them, candy and bitter, like Willy Wonka with a baritone guitar.
Smith introduced in 2022 {that a} new Remedy album, Songs Of A Misplaced World, was imminent. Then once more, he mentioned as a lot in 2019. Such are the perils of perfectionism. However as MOJO’s Prime 30 emphasises, the world of his band is already bursting with wonders. Simply shut your eyes and see…
30
The Hanging Backyard
(from Pornography, 1982)
A bestial apparition with a contact of evil.
For just a few years, Smith was obsessive about Siouxsie & The Banshees. He turned their touring guitarist, made an album with Steve Severin because the Glove and modelled his rag-doll picture on Siouxsie, therefore the hysterical tom-tom rhythm that drives this unhealthy journey of a tune. It’s a sweaty hallucination of animals (or folks dressed as animals) kissing, screaming and dying in a spot whose title suggests a spot of execution fairly than horticulture. LSD is one hell of a drug.
29
Why Can’t I Be You?
(from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987)
Stalker confessional disguised as chart charmer. How Remedy.
Having already pastiched The Naked Requirements with Love Cats, Robert Smith selected one other Jungle Guide hit because the template for Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’s daffy pop second. Why Can’t I Be You? was successfully I Wanna Be Like You’s Louis Prima swing transposed to a drunken fancy gown get together, a feckless cavort underpinned by Simon Gallup’s Motown bass line. The lyric had simply sufficient creepy undercurrent (“I’ll eat you all up or I’ll simply hug you to dying”) to resonate with Pornography devotees.
28
Three Imaginary Boys
(from Three Imaginary Boys, 1979)
Fey, in one of the simplest ways.
A sonic blueprint being sketched in actual time, the strains and angles of a model of The Remedy we might come to know very nicely materialise within the chorused guitars and disorientated lyrics of Three Imaginary Boys. There’s even a touch of I Am The Walrus within the growth bap beat and spitty vocal rhythm. Smith casts himself as ghost or intruder (or each) within the verses. Within the choruses, he’s underneath the mattress garments frightened by the prospect of daylight and on a regular basis despair.
27
The Finish Of The World
(from The Remedy, 2004)
Boys do cry, in any case.
The tune title suggests one other traditional tilting-at-windmills Smith complain, but Finish Of The World is definitely a love tune, from a drama queen’s viewpoint: “Not only a boy and a woman / It’s simply the tip of the world.” Smith references tears, kisses, sighs and lies as The Remedy shift into chugging, streamlined and hook-driven beat-group mode (albeit with an incongruous mid-section synth solo). It’s not as springy or iconic as Boys Don’t Cry however there’s a lineage between each singles.
26
Friday I’m In Love
(from Want, 1992)
“Actually on the market in Happyland”, famous Bob.
Echoing The Easybeats’ well-known diary-build to weekend passion, this slick, jangling ear-worm comes on like a report firm ultimatum for a single, but it nonetheless takes 30 seconds for the lead vocal to indicate. “To taxi drivers, I’m that bloke that sings Friday I’m In Love,” mentioned Smith, flagging the tune’s new demographic attain. A correct hit each side of the pond, constructed round a chord sequence so blatantly excellent The Remedy’s chief nervous he’d nicked it.
25
Killing An Arab
(Small Marvel single, 1978)
Bazaar ramifications.
The Remedy’s first single – and an interesting hostage to fortune. So-called “Gypsy scales” immediately, engagingly, evoke the souk. But it surely’s the depiction of the homicide scene from Albert Camus’s The Outsider that’s proved controversial – significantly with a tune title so open to jingoistic misinterpretation. Seeing himself mirrored within the useless Arab’s eyes, the tune’s narrator is extra sympathetic than Camus’s anti-hero, however this hasn’t cease Killing An Arab turning into one half albatross, three elements compelling existential signature tune.
24
Beneath The Stars
(from 4:13 Dream, 2008)
Dreamy long-form skygazer channels Loopy Horse!
Shades of Disintegration within the protracted intro to this opener from Smith’s most up-to-date assortment of all-new materials, whose fraught genesis concerned Morrissey-esque net broadsides in opposition to his label. The deliberate tempo and cavernously reverbed fuzz chords echo Neil Younger’s Cortez The Killer, till at 1:50 a quintessentially Remedy-y riff chimes in, and we’re in Robert’s World of Romance, the wispy results round his vocals’ edges approximating celestial ether, as goth’s first couple take pleasure in a wondrous star-gazing clinch. “The kiss is infinite”, certainly.
23
Lullaby
(from Disintegration, 1989)
Spiderman, simply not the Marvel sort…
“I screamed for what appeared like days,” Smith advised NME of his uncle’s grim bedside tales and the recurring arachnid nightmares they induced. Lullaby made them flesh; Smith’s whispering dread escalating above a stifling, claustrophobic beat and the ghostly intrusions of Roger O’Donnell’s sticky synth-strings. A pure second when The Remedy’s pop and darkish sides coalesced amid Disintegration’s deathly soul-purging, the Freudian present of Smith devouring himself in Tim Pope’s lurid, Polanski-inspired video burrowed it into the UK Prime 5.
22
Hearth In Cairo
(from Three Imaginary Boys, 1979)
Spells it out: The Remedy have been going to be totally different.
What hearth in Cairo? And why has Smith’s thoughts wandered to North Africa once more? With little concrete to light up it, Hearth In Cairo retains a bizarre, unsettling mystique: for starters, is the fleeting lovers’ triste right here, quickly dissolving like a mirage, actual or a merely imagined? The Jap-sounding chord change within the bridge and parched guitar stabs evocatively color this desert story, nevertheless it’s the intelligent, tongue-twisting spelling-out of the title within the refrain that insinuates Smith’s unusual present for prosody in tune.
21
Charlotte Generally
(single, 1981)
Up to now, a gateway to the longer term.
Impressed by Penelope’ Farmer’s 1969 youngsters’s fantasy novel of the identical title, the temper of The Remedy’s seventh single was drizzly-grey and despondent, with Tolhurst’s regular digital pulsebeat icy and exact. But at its core, the tune glowed. Smith as soon as described Farmer’s e book as, “very romantic”, and his tribute radiated a new-found heat from Smith’s flanged guitar and choral harmonies, with a wraparound ambient hum within the background. The Remedy would transfer on to their bleakest album, Religion, from right here, however Charlotte Generally supplied a well timed refuge for these instances when unwelcome guests make their presence felt.
20
The Stroll
(Fiction single, 1983)
Straight away, it modified ev-ry-thing…
The Remedy turned a streamlined synthpop twosome following the momentary departure of bassist Simon Gallup, although followers may’ve assumed that Peter Hook had changed him on this shiny, pulsing observe. The Remedy’s dance-duo period was short-lived, and this clubby business breakthrough – with its wolf-whistling vocals, crazy lyrics, and drummer-turned-keyboardist Lol Tolhurst’s chirping, circling circus-music riff – might’ve been only a whimsical one-off within the band’s in any other case doomy discography. But The Stroll unexpectedly, established the pleased/unhappy aesthetic of the numerous smash singles that adopted.
19
A Unusual Day
(from Pornography, 1982)
Dying on a seaside.
Amid Pornography’s churning horrorscapes, A Unusual Day strikes a lonely beatific observe. So that is how the world ends: to a spiralling guitar plaint, tectonic bass, last-gasp beats (Lol Tolhurst purchased a 10-inch deep snare drum from The Specials’ John Bradbury) and Robert Smith floating into the apocalypse because the solar hums, the ocean grows, “and the sky and the not possible explode”. With nuclear dread a post-punk staple, The Remedy re-cast Armageddon as the final word heartbreak.
18
Let’s Go To Mattress
(Fiction single, 1982)
The professionals and cons of getting it on.
Put up Pornography, Smith detoxed within the Lake District and, refreshed, set about scrubbing up much-demoed outtake Temptation, previously deemed too light-weight, right into a intentionally extra extrovert alt-disco format, full with Lol Tolhurst’s whip-cracking syndrums and an irresistible “doo doo-doo doo” refrain. Amid Edward Lear surrealism (“excellent like cats”, “shaking like milk”, and so forth), Smith appears to be lampooning the ennui of promiscuity (“I don’t care when you don’t”; “It’s simply the identical, a silly sport”), however the silky synth-pop groove is, paradoxically, horny as hell.
17
Catch
(from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987)
Immediately US-friendly, Remedy go gorgeously tender.
Unlikely contenders (because the music weeklies had it) to “SLAY STATES”, one thing went proper in ’87 among the many grab-bag 18 tracks on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, successful The Remedy Billboard Prime 40 kudos. Lack of an organising precept allowed disparate singles, together with this dreamily-strummed, deeply analgesic ditty, impressed by the childbirth/coma scene in Rocky 2 (no, actually) and lushly romanticised in a French Riviera-set promo – Smith and co. taking goth coiffs and studio tans for a sacrilegious flip within the sunshine. Emily Dickinson verses have been pinned across the Manor studio for reference.
16
Major
(from Religion, 1981)
The adolescent angst begins to curdle.
The primary observe recorded for Religion and the album’s sole single nails that interval Remedy’s preoccupation with lack of innocence and seek for some emotional substitute for Smith and Tolhurst’s childhood Catholicism (each encounter grief for the primary time in the course of the album’s protracted recording). The tune has sleeping youngsters wearing white, a worrying suicide fixation and no guitars (Smith performs six-string bass). Excessive-speed, helicoptering ominousness offsets all pomposity, largely because of Simon Gallup whose efficiency is so energetic you see his blusher sliding off within the video.
15
Lovesong
(from Disintegration, 1989)
A pessimist’s concession to true romance.
Smith started relationship Mary Poole when he was 14 nevertheless it took him 15 years to marry her and write her, as a present, a simple love tune devoid of metaphor or whimsy (“She would have most well-liked diamonds,” he quipped). Uniquely on Disintegration, Lovesong will get straight all the way down to enterprise, Gallup’s gymnastic bassline setting off a sequence response of hooks whereas Smith expresses unqualified gratitude and timeless constancy, till it concludes as crisply because it started. Higher than diamonds in any case.
14
Play For As we speak
(from Seventeen Seconds, 1980)
A cold kitchen-sink drama.
That is the sound of metamorphosis. The primary tune Robert Smith wrote for The Remedy’s second album, Play For As we speak was additionally his final composition with the identical form of angst-pop dynamics heard on their debut. Frosty drum results helped to bridge the hole between the band’s previous and its current. Named after the long-running BBC drama anthology, Smith succinctly described his personal three-minute tragedy as addressing “the fraudulent points of an insincere relationship.” A narrative as outdated as time.
13
The Love Cats
(Fiction single, 1983)
Playful wheeze morphs to purrfect pop.
“A joke composed drunk”, claimed Smith, however alleycat meows and purrs, ‘milk-bottle’ percussion and large moggie costumes (see video) solely cemented The Love Cats’ attraction. Half uxorious love tune, half curious Remedy tour into skiffle-ish jazz, all of it hangs on Phil Thornalley’s fats double bass, plus Smith’s slinky piano and hitherto hidden aptitude for bouncing, Django Reinhardt-style guitar chords. Lol Tolhurst’s contribution? Vibraphone. Their first UK Prime Ten single, and about as gothic as Prime Cat.
12
A Evening Like This
(The Head On The Door, 1985)
A band known as Malice break America.
Good Curepop, filled with scowling, romantic remorse. The lyric was written within the rain, Smith mentioned (“I used to be upset”) whereas the Roxy-ish chord construction was a slowed down model of Plastic Ardour from Three Imaginary Boys. Its origins stretch again so far as December 1976 when Malice – the varsity band whose line-up included Smith, Porl Thompson, Lol Tolhurst and Michael Dempsey – performed an antecedent of Plastic Ardour, entitled A Evening Like This, at St Wilfrid’s College Corridor in Crawley.
11
Photos Of You
(from Disintegration, 1989)
Love and loss, frosty and glacial – Smith’s excessive watermark I frazzled numbness.
In Autumn 1988, a home hearth destroyed Robert Smith’s house in Sussex. Freshly married that summer season to his childhood sweetheart, Mary Poole, the singer raked by means of the wreckage and came across a pockets crammed with images relationship again by means of the ten-plus years they’d been collectively. One had graced the duvet of 1981’s Charlotte Generally, distorted and reversed into detrimental, however could be displayed in full readability for the sleeve of Photos Of You – the elegantly poised seven-minute masterpiece that discovering this cache of photos impressed – when it was launched because the fourth single off Disintegration in March 1990. This glacially-paced weepie was, nonetheless, something however a current bridegroom’s rush of euphoria. Right here, a funereal beat establishes a slo-mo groove, which, overlaid with frostily sustained synth chords and a mild, flanged strum, broods for nearly two minutes earlier than Smith launches right into a litany of woe, recounting the reminiscences of a misplaced love evoked by simply such a stack of photographs, which he finally tears to items in despair. As a loser-in-love’s anthem, it’s unparalleled.
10
The Caterpillar
(from The Prime, 1984)
The mushroom tea kicks in…
A neo-psychedelic campfire tune that grew out of a much more ominous (and *Pornography-like) demo, with heavy rolling tom-toms and lyrical spiders excised. The Caterpillar revelled in flamenco-ish pop: all castanets and congas, scratchy violin and madhouse piano. Smith’s vocal piled on the anguished emotion (he later confessed he fretted he’d gone “too far” as he sang it). However, fittingly, romantic deception and doable guilt lay at its coronary heart – when our narrator stops protecting up his “lemon lies”, the lady will fly away.
9
All Cats Are Gray
(from Religion, 1981)
“When all candles be out all cattes be grey.” – sixteenth century proverb.
Impressed by a cave-dweller in Mervyn Peake’s gothic Gormenghast books, in addition to the dying of Robert Smith’s grandmother, All Cats Are Gray is however amongst The Remedy’s most pleasingly ambient and psychedelic works. Heat, tender synths unfurl as Smith croons distantly about all cats being gray: a proverb Benjamin Franklin popularised to clarify his promiscuousness. Hmm. The tune discovered renewed attraction as a rave-era chill-out room staple, with Gentle Cell’s Marc Almond enthusing about listening to it the primary time he took ecstasy in New York.
8
Shut To Me
(The Head On The Door, 1985)
Via the wardrobe to the Curepop renaissance.
Whereas nobody might blame Robert Smith for retreating to childhood after the gloom trilogy, the handclaps and xylophone scales right here provide solely superficial consolation. Within the studio, Smith paired the music with a pre-existing lyric that relived the sense of dread and hallucinatory confusion he felt throughout an toddler bout of hen pox (the identical “nightmare visions” gave the album its title). Tim Pope’s video famously channeled the observe’s claustrophobia by locking The Remedy in a wardrobe and throwing it off Beachy Head.
7
Leaping Somebody Else’s Prepare
(Fiction single, 1979)
Final stand for bassist Michael Dempsey.
After a present in June ’79 with the Merton Parkas, Robert Smith penned The Remedy’s standalone third single, a swipe on the mod/ska revivals. A careening smartpop piece that threatens to derail at any second, the disdain palpable all through, from the sharp lyric (“In case you choose up on it fast/ you possibly can say you have been there”) and indifferent supply to the “sub Townshend” opening guitar chord, accelerating rhythm and superb topping: Lol Tolhurst’s onomatopoeic speeding-down-the-track drum coda.
6
One Hundred Years
(from Pornography, 1982)
Placing the creepy into Crawley.
Out of interdepartmental chaos – medication, sauce, points – the Remedy’s make-or-forsake fourth LP groans like a stricken liner amid death-rattle digital beat and caterwauling guitar. Smith will get to the purpose: “It doesn’t matter if all of us die.” Poe-infused imagery dances macabrely to bunking-off nihilism: “One thing small falls out of your mouth… the dying of her father pushing her.” Wickedly addictive, squalling, determined, terrifying, off what was – naturally – their first Prime 10 album. Smith took a restorative tenting vacation. Critics, happy, danced on the Remedy’s grave.
5
10:15 On A Saturday Evening
(Three Imaginary Boys, 1979)
Suburban alienation will get its theme-tune.
The deluxe version of The Remedy’s debut has an illuminating house demo of its opening observe. Slowed down and performed on his sister Janet’s Hammond organ, it reveals Robert Smith’s Bowie fixation; on this case, roughly, the guitar half to Be My Spouse. Whereas the album model is a metronomic race by means of suburban isolation imagery – strip lighting, faucet dripping, phone staying silent – that befits its hasty creation: The Remedy smuggled in at evening to the studio the place The Jam have been making All Mod Cons.
4
Simply Like Heaven
(from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987)
So good that Dinosaur Jr acquired away from bed to cowl it.
Sufficient occurs within the instrumental prelude to affirm Simply Like Heaven’s greatness: the auspicious Gallup-Williams rhythm intro, craving synth and giddy descendant lead guitar create a whole plotline in 49 seconds, whereupon Robert Smith’s vocal merely rides the euphoric wave to an everlasting blue horizon: “Why are you so far-off?” the lady asks the narrator, too misplaced in himself to note. An ideal instance of the muscular mid-’80s Remedy’s capability for powering Smith’s interior mild to the world.
3
Boys Don’t Cry
(Fiction single, 1979)
Stiff-upper-lip England debunked.
Featured on the demo that secured The Remedy’s take care of Fiction, and later resonant sufficient to command its personal episode of BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music, Boys Don’t Cry loosed the emotional repression of late ‘70s Crawley, and helped lads in all places really feel emotions. Hatched within the party-room extension of Robert Smith’s mother and father’ home, it ekes singular magic from Lol Tolhurst’s ritardando drum hook and Smith’s easy, rising guitar chords. The faux-naif temper masks actual emotional intelligence.
2
In Between Days
(The Head On The Door, 1985)
Caterpillar turn out to be butterfly
In Between Days was The Remedy’s fourth consecutive Prime 20 hit within the UK, but when its predecessor, The Caterpillar, felt like hothouse exotics, all cats, bugs and eccentric elaborations, In Between Days felt much less fretful about subverting the hit-writing course of. From Boris Williams’s opening drum burst to the ultimate forlorn fade, it was an unmistakably superb pop tune, one damaged relationship crushed into two verses and three minutes. It feels beneficiant, ample, the intro quickly layering drums, bass and acoustic guitar, earlier than the synth riff lifts the entire tune up by its corners, throwing it into the blue. Younger and outdated, pleased and unhappy: In Between Days exists in a state of excellent unresolved craving, oscillating in its personal endless story. “Simply stroll away,” sings Smith, “Come again to me.” A love tune, a hate tune, a pop tune, a tragic tune. All the pieces in between.
1
A Forest
(Fiction single, 1980)
A ghost story from the brothers grim – one to envelope all of them.
“It’s at all times the identical” is such an archetypal Remedy sentiment that earlier than it appeared in A Forest it featured in 10:15 Saturday Evening. In a single tune Robert Smith is ready for one thing that can by no means occur; within the different he’s searching for somebody who isn’t there. In actual life, Smith was admirably prolific and impressive however in his songs, the largest Camus fan in Crawley steered that motion and inaction had the identical consequence. He crystallised this existential quandary most brilliantly in A Forest: the sound of a band turning into themselves, even when they’d later turn out to be many different issues.
In late 1979, dissatisfied with the scratchy, primitive Three Imaginary Boys, Smith had an icily clear thought of what he needed the Remedy’s second album to be. Writing the demos on a Woolworths guitar, a drum machine and his sister’s Hammond organ, his touchstones have been David Bowie’s Low, Nick Drake’s Fruit Tree, Van Morrison’s Madame George, Jimi Hendrix’s efficiency of All Alongside The Watchtower on the Isle of Wight competition and the Adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s 1942 ballet Gayane, made well-known by 2001: A House Odyssey. Aside from the second facet of Low – clear, fashionable, emptied-out – Seventeen Seconds doesn’t sound very similar to any of these however they acquired him the place he wanted to go.
In comparison with the dispiriting seven-month slog of creating Religion just a few months later, the Seventeen Seconds periods with producer Mike Hedges at Morgan Studios in Willesden in January 1980 have been just about a celebration. Smith, drummer Lol Tolhurst and new recruits Simon Gallup (bass) and Matthieu Hartley (keyboards) recorded it in eight days and combined it in seven, sleeping on the ground to save lots of money and time. The watchword was minimalism. “Anybody who needed to play multiple piano observe might go and do it someplace else,” Smith defined.
A Forest turns despair into ecstasy and straitened solitude into communal movement.
This bare-bones aesthetic prolonged to the phrases. Most songs have scant or inaudible lyrics, two have none in any respect, and the palette of images is monochrome: empty rooms, night-time, chilly, silence, time passing slowly. It’s an album about absence and futility, the place the one choices are going by means of the motions or doing nothing in any respect. Nonetheless solely 20, Smith was already making an attempt to articulate in these cheerless songs the sensation that will quickly overwhelm him. “I felt actually outdated,” he remembered. “I felt life was pointless. I had no religion in something.” The final tune within the session, the one which took essentially the most time, was A Forest.
A Forest is much less a tune than an environment. Smith as soon as mentioned that it stemmed from a dream about being trapped within the woods and it does have that tantalising dream-quality of pursuing one thing simply out of attain, mixed with the depressive’s sensation of being caught with no hope that something will, and even can, change. The lyric is self-negating. Within the first verse, a siren name beckons the narrator into the bushes: “Discover the lady, when you can.” Then he takes over the story, doing as he’s advised, solely to search out himself misplaced and alone. “The lady was by no means there/ It’s at all times the identical/ I’m working in the direction of nothing.” Sameness, nothingness, neverness: these are the anti-qualities of which the younger Robert Smith was the grasp. Motion results in one other form of stasis; change is worse than staying put. The impact is purgatorial. Like its protagonist, the tune doesn’t actually go wherever however loops in chilly, gray circles, “many times and many times…”
One factor that distinguishes A Forest from a stone-cold bummer like All Cats Are Gray is that it strikes at a good outdated clip, propelled by Gallup’s indelible four-note bassline and Tolhurst’s clipped, motorik beat: “concurrently dashing ahead and standing nonetheless,” the drummer mentioned just lately. It could go nowhere nevertheless it goes nowhere quick. As numerous remixes and canopy variations have revealed, it features very successfully as dance music, the repetition trance-like and addictive. Though the tune does correctly finish fairly than fading out, it gives the look that it’s been happening ceaselessly and also you’ve simply tuned in for six minutes. Even within the studio, Gallup didn’t know when it had truly completed. “The drums would cease, Robert would keep on taking part in guitar and I used to be by no means positive when he was going to cease so I’d simply keep on after him,” he recalled.
The tune additionally feels too large to be claustrophobic. Utilizing each impact at their disposal — flangers, reverb, refrain pedals, reggae-inspired tape delay — Smith and Hedges created the phantasm of three-dimensional house, wherein the music and lyrics have been always describing one another. A Forest feels like a forest: the rhythm part working near the bottom, the synths hovering on the treeline alongside Smith’s frosty moan, the guitar circling like birds. No marvel the video and sleeve artwork have been so literal. Because the novelist Ian Rankin has mentioned, “It seems like a movie ready to be made, virtually definitely in black and white.” It’s both that or one thing like The Blair Witch Venture. A Forest is, in any case, a form of ghost story.
A Forest gave the Remedy their first Prime 40 hit nevertheless it actually lives on stage, the place it’s by far essentially the most carried out tune of their catalogue. Its psychedelic-jam high quality signifies that it may be extended indefinitely and nonetheless really feel too quick, turning despair into ecstasy and straitened solitude into communal movement. Smith has written stronger melodies and sharper lyrics however nothing so inexhaustibly compelling — nothing that insists so forcefully on being heard many times and many times.
Image: Rob Verhost/Getty
