Continuing our series on critics wrong-footed in real time, here's Nick Kent immune to The Cure's Seventeen Seconds
To be honest, this is not so much a "wrong" opinion - certainly not an opinion shown up by the passage of time, by History having come to a different view - so much as an opinion that differs from my own opinion!
The aspects that Kent finds frustrating - the vagueness, the tentativeness, the foggy pensiveness, a sense of things being withheld, emotional indeterminacy - are exactly the qualities of the album I find intriguing and attractive.
I feel like it's a record that could only come out of English suburbia... (Crawley is almost exactly the same distance from London as my hometown Berkhamsted is, just on the other side of the metropolis).
Yet having said that, the atmosphere sometimes puts me in mind of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet
Because of my life experience it inevitably conjures Home Counties memories of listlessness-as-bliss... mystical mundanity...
A Thursday afternoon in an unseasonably damp, overcast August. Poor visibility, light drizzle muffling the sense of distance.
The mood reminds me of this scene in Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club - an ecstasy of ennui enfolds the main character, an introspective teenage schoolboy... Time stands still.
Interesting that Kent detects an Eno-ish aspect here and there, because the record sometimes reminds me too of the washed-out ambience and washed-up characters in certain songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science.
I'd always thought The Cure on Seventeen Seconds were trying to pick up on the ethereal drift of side 2 of Closer - but checking the dates I see that they were making this record at around about the same time as Joy Division were working on their own second album.
Seventeen Seconds is all about that translucent sound.... the new toys they've got for the guitar... the subtle tricks that Mike Hedges came up with (the triggered drum whooosh in "A Forest").
Yes, for me, Seventeen Seconds is the only Cure album that I would actively put on.
Like with New Order, the Cure's best album is obviously going to be a best-of, a singles compilation.
Seventeen Seconds, though, is a consummate album-album... it corresponds to Trevor Horn's dictum that a great album consists of ten to twelve songs that all sound similar, just different enough- chips off the same lustrous block, as I said of Juju and a line probably recycled about various other albums over the years. (Trev's own example was Hats by The Blue Nile). It's
Having said it's an album album, Seventeen Seconds does also contain The Cure's most singular single: "A Forest", six minutes of gauche glory that sounds like nothing else in music before or since,
Kent closes his Seventeen Seconds review with a statement of being disappointed this time round but highly intrigued to know what their next move will be - I wonder if he did carry on following the Cure's arc and what he made of the subsequent albums, career triumphs, ever-growing megacult popularity? Did he bother to listen to this year's "towering, best album since ____" ? (I didn't).
I had a friend who used to look out at those bleak damp English suburban landscapes, shake his head and say: "Thatcher's Britain". Cracked us up every time.
ReplyDelete'The Rotter's Club' is a perfect fit for that mood and place: an album from another grey southern town. I've never really got into Hatfield & the North, but I have always loved the cover of their first album: another grey humdrum vista (from Iceland, it turns out), with the outlines of heroic naked figures battling over it. The passionate dreams of the residents of those modest fenland homes, erupting into the skies.
Hatfield & the North is a great name for a band with that subject matter, too: a routine announcement for commuters on their way back to the suburbs, or travellers on their way to some unexciting destination.
Hatfield and the North are coming from a similar place as The Cure, just with a completely different level of chops and set of influences. I tried to get that at this in the piece on Canterbury and the Cup of Tea.... https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/02/canterbury-and-cuppa-tea.html
Delete... a sort of middleclasslessness, living on the peripheries of the action... a mum-protected, mum-nurtured idyll in some ways, but also suppressed, softly seething as you say with unrequited dreams.
The speaking voice of Robert Smith is quite close to the speaking voice of Robert Wyatt and all those other types (well apart from Kevin Ayers who is actively posh). Middle class but softened, tentative, un-elocuted, and above all evacuated of the lordly self-confidence of the genuinely upper class.
Grammar school or maybe minor public school...
One of the fun footnotes to 80s indie culture has been Robert Smith’s thorough vindication in his long-running antipathy to Morrissey. Absolutely epitomizes that contrast between the mild-mannered middle-class suburbanite and the (self-appointed) aristocrat.
DeleteI saw some critics putting the latest Cure record on their “best of” lists for 2024, which I can only interpret as a gesture of affection for Smith personally.
"Thatcher's Britain" - cracked you up because it has nothing to do with Thatcher? It was no different under Wilson, Callaghan... Even now, despite mobile phones, coffee culture, Wellness centers, cyclists wearing flashy cycling gear, etc, that Reginald Perrin sort of humdrumness still abides.
ReplyDeleteExactly. We knew that Glum Britain had existed long before Thatcher, and would continue long after she had gone. But it was sort-of half-true: the mere fact that Thatcher existed somehow made the drabness even drabber.
DeleteThis is the first time I've seen Nick Kent's name mentioned in aeons. He used to be a really big deal, a living legend, a cultural warrior with the scars to prove it. One of the very few music critics that you would see on TV.
ReplyDeleteYes there's a great clip of him on TV in I think the late '70s - talking about the role of the music press. If I remember right, Rick Wakeman is on representing musicians injured by the music press.
DeleteHe wrote a memoir not so long ago, Apathy for the Devil.