walking upstream…
The Cure
sourcesLong Live Vinyl — The Making of The Cure's Seventeen Seconds (Smith naming Bowie, Drake, Hendrix, Van Morrison, Khachaturian as the album's blueprint) · Far Out Magazine — The two albums that define psychedelia, according to Robert Smith (1993 Triple J interview on "Purple Haze") · Far Out Magazine — The one musician Robert Smith said informs everything The Cure ever do ("Would David do that?" quote) · Far Out Magazine — The one song The Cure's Robert Smith wishes he wrote (Ziggy Stardust, "Life on Mars?" quotes) · The Quietus — Disintegration · The Word (repub. craigjparker.blogspot.com) — Robert Smith interview (childhood listening, Starman, Drake/Van Morrison touchstones, "integrity" quote) · Wikipedia — The Cure (formation dates, discography background)
The Cure formed in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1976 — first as Malice, then Easy Cure — around singer-guitarist Robert Smith and drummer Lol Tolhurst, the band's only constant across four decades. Their 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys, felt to Smith more like a compilation than a record he'd chosen. The real beginning came a year later, after months as Siouxsie and the Banshees' emergency touring guitarist left him "overcome, overwhelmed and very alone." Holed up at his parents' house, he explained: "I was listening to Bowie's Low, Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, Jimi Hendrix's live Isle Of Wight, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Khachaturian's Gayane Ballet Suite. I wanted The Cure to create a weird kind of hybrid music." The result, Seventeen Seconds, invented the icy, minimal "Cure sound" that shaped gothic rock — Smith spent the next four decades widening it, from Pornography's despair to Disintegration's grandeur.
the sound in question
1987
Just Like HeavenThe Cure
walk the tributaries ↓
Jimi Hendrix1960s · Rock / Blues rock / Psychedelic rock
Robert Smith was eight when his older brother brought home a single that would not leave him alone. "I must have played it 20 times a day, day in, day out. I drove everyone in the house mad," he said of "Purple Haze" — a song that, alongside Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, "sums up psychedelia" for him. Three years later, an 11-year-old Smith stood in the crowd at the Isle of Wight for one of Hendrix's final shows. In 1993, The Cure covered "Purple Haze" itself, its riff run through their own synths and sampled guitar.
listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — How Jimi Hendrix inspired The Cure's Robert Smith to start a band (Isle of Wight 1970, Purple Haze cover on Stone Free) ↗
1967
Purple HazeJimi Hendrix
1993
Purple HazeThe Cure
listen forHendrix's original rides a fuzzed, tritone riff — four notes stated, bent, and restated until the wah pedal turns it hallucinatory. The Cure's 1993 version, cut for the tribute album Stone Free, keeps that riff's shape but drowns it in the icy synths and sampled textures that built Smith's own sound. It is not a straight cover — it is Hendrix's psychedelic guitar sung back to him in the language Seventeen Seconds and "A Forest" taught The Cure to speak, tribute and transformation at once.
David Bowie1970s · Art rock / Glam rock
Forty years into the band, Smith still runs decisions through the same test. "Bowie obviously always informs everything: 'Would David do that?' 'Life On Mars' had a huge impact on me," he's said. The debt turned specific in early 1980, while making Seventeen Seconds. "I wanted it to be inspired by Nick Drake with the clear, finished sound of Bowie's Low," Smith explained. "I imagined it sounding rather acoustic... I thought it would be good to have drums, bass and guitar with a huge hole in the middle" — Low's spartan, synth-shadowed productions, rebuilt as a blueprint for The Cure's own sound.
listen: upstream & here
1977
A New Career in a New TownDavid Bowie
1980
A ForestThe Cure
listen forPlay Bowie's "A New Career in a New Town" — its motorik, synth-cold pulse rolling on for two minutes before a stray harmonica is the first human sound to break through — against "A Forest," where Smith's chorus-drenched bass line loops for nearly as long before his voice arrives, buried in reverb. Both build atmosphere from one repeating figure and the empty space left around it rather than a hook. The "huge hole in the middle" Smith wanted for Seventeen Seconds is Low's architecture, just colder and further from home.
Nick Drake1970s · Folk / Chamber folk / Folk-pop
Drake is an influence Smith names as much for character as for sound. "Nick Drake and Van Morrison were my touchstones," he said of the winter he spent writing what became Seventeen Seconds. "I wanted to incorporate all that into an album, and that was what Seventeen Seconds was all about." Elsewhere he's blunter about why: "That's why I liked Alex Harvey and Nick Drake and Jimi Hendrix, because they had integrity." Drake, dead by suicide in 1974 at 26, became less a sound for Smith to copy than a standard of refusal to live up to.
listen: upstream & heresource: Albumism — The Cure's 'Seventeen Seconds' Turns 45 ("clear, finished sound of Bowie's Low" / Nick Drake blueprint quote) ↗
1969
River ManNick Drake
1980
In Your HouseThe Cure
listen forBoth tracks work by emptying themselves out. Drake's "River Man" sets a hushed, unhurried vocal over a spare guitar figure and a slip of string arrangement, the melody drifting rather than resolving. "In Your House" runs the same trick with less: Smith's voice barely rises above a murmur, one guitar line rings out into reverb, and the bass carries most of the tension. Neither song announces its sadness — both simply decline to fill the silence around it, the discipline Smith credited to Drake's "integrity" when he named him a touchstone for the record.