Breakthrough top 40 hit A Forest (number 31 in March 1980) distilled all of the album’s strongest elements into one near-six minute slice of post-punk perfection. It’s still one of the greatest ’80s singles of all time. Roberts guitar sound here made me change my own guitar set up. I went out and bought a digital echo unit, placed upon the top of a mike stand, so I could easily manipulate the controls in real time during a live performance. I did not need to use any other effect pedals at all, just layers of tumbling echo. The Cure: Pornography" (Press release). Fiction Records . Retrieved 11 September 2013. From on-fiction.com In its place were cryptically opaque, bleached out and foggy soundscapes built on sparse instrumentation: Dempsey’s replacement Simon Gallup’s simple basslines, new member Matthieu Hartley’s unobtrusive synth drones, and robotic machine-like drumming from Tolhurst, topped with Smith’s distant, almost disembodied vocals and his economical off-kilter guitar. For me at least, The Cure had always been this unassuming new wave act who had that brilliant first top 40 hit A Forest in the glorious year of 1980 (who were labelmates with The Passions, who had their only hit, I’m In Love With A German Film Star, in 1981) and then abruptly disappeared again…. but I was obviously not paying much attention. Maybe I thought they were just Joy Division copyists?

Beaujon, Andrew (April 2005). "66.6 Greatest Moments in Goth". Spin. Vol.21, no.4. pp.70–73 . Retrieved 27 October 2012. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Recording sessions were chaotically stop-start, with the band getting ever more immersed in the twin evils of drink and drugs (the most infamous outcome of this ongoing overindulgence was the giant mountain/pyramid of empty beer cans they had assembled in one corner of the studio).God this is a great album. I bought it the first weekend it was released here in the uk, I was a huge alt. Indie fan at the time and a guitarist in a local indie band myself. I recall buying it but having some very strange looks from fellow bus passengers as I looked at the album cover on the way home. It must have been the word " Pornography" on the cover ?!?! Weird bus passengers ???? Me weird, oh no !!

The band, Smith in particular, wanted to make the album with a different producer than Mike Hedges, who had produced Seventeen Seconds and Faith. According to Lol Tolhurst, Smith and Tolhurst briefly met with the producer Conny Plank at Fiction's offices in the hopes of having him produce the album since they were both fans of his work with Kraftwerk, [11] however, the group soon settled on Phil Thornalley. [8] Pornography is the last Cure album to feature Tolhurst as the band's drummer (he then became the band's keyboardist), and also marked the first time he played keyboards on a Cure release. [8] The album was recorded at RAK Studios from January to April 1982. [12]Not an album for the faint hearted I would add. There's no Love Cats or Inbetween Days here folks, just sheer misery but such wondrous grand misery, the music peels out in a glorious manner. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Apter, Jeff (2006). Never Enough: The Story of The Cure. Omnibus Press. ISBN 1-84449-827-1.