Simon Price’s Curepedia appeals to fans, dilettantes of the long-running English rock outfit

Simon Price. // Courtesy Price

Out this week from Dey Street Books is Curepedia: The A-Z of the Cure by music journalist Simon Price.

It’s a massive tome, checking in at over 400 pages, covering every aspect of the long-running English band. Within its pages, you’ll find “a full-scale look at the long list of band members, current and past, unknown facts, tours, summaries of every album, song, films, as well as entries on the image of the band, their influence, their style, and their enduring legacy,” and honestly, that’s barely scratching the surface.

With coverage of bootlegs, members of the road crew, sided projects, and more, Curepedia is a book which appeals to both fans and dilettantes. You can read it start-to-finish or simply hop around, following the boldfaced red type to see what other entries grab your attention.

It is, essentially, the perfect read before bed, a series of brilliant and interlocking essays which cover every aspect of a band which still matters, and this book does a very solid job of explaining why it’s so.

We hopped on Zoom with author Simon Price ahead of Curepedia‘s release to discuss all this and more.

The Pitch: How long ago did you start on this, or is the culmination of a life’s journey?

Simon Price: I should say it’s the culmination of a life’s journey, and in some ways it is, because I was that teenage Cure-damaged Goth in the late 80s but this project came about just at the start of COVID lockdown. It’s one of those lockdown projects.

I signed the contract in February of 2020 and, and got started on it. I didn’t I didn’t file my final manuscript until Easter Monday this year, so it took over three years to write. There were various factors in that, some of which had nothing to do with music or writing, but well, yeah, you’ve seen the size of it, so I’m sure you can imagine that it kind of did take that long.

What was your original outline for the book and how how did it change in the course of writing it?

Well, the idea to do an encyclopedia of the Cure was not mine, it came to me from my publishers which in the UK is White Rabbit. In the U.S., it’s Dey Street. The publishers’ve been trying to find the right fit for me–for years, really–just the right book for me to do, said to me, “Why don’t we just do The Great Big A-to-Z of The Cure?” and I was a little skeptical at first because I thought doing an A-Z is a bit of a novelty, a bit of a gimmick. Is it just gonna be a very superficial and ridiculous book if I agreed to it.

I thought, “Well, I need the work and it’s it’s a subject matter I know plenty about and it’s an era that I’m very comfortable with,” but, yeah, I was a bit skeptical, but the more I thought about it and the more I started actually writing it, I realized that it gave me freedom. It liberated me from having to write a traditional biography with a linear timeline, and it meant that I could approach things in a completely different way, in a more thematic way.

There are essays on every member of The Cure, past and present, every album, every single, all that stuff, as you’d expect, but also I managed to write essays about things like their relationship to religion, or politics, or, you know, sex, drugs, and alcohol, and all that typical rock and roll stuff, and also what seems like trivial things like hair, makeup, shoes, but turns out in some ways not to be trivial once you start digging into it.

That was the stuff I enjoyed writing the most really, those kind of non-era specific essays, drawing together little facts from different parts of their very long 45-year career.

It’s a book that is very fun. You can read it like, you know, start to finish, the first page to last, or you can do as I did, which is starting out reading it that way and then just immediately after you get through ‘A’ and maybe a little bit of ‘B,’ just start hopping around and being like, “Oh, I want to explore that more.” You seem like you’re having a lot of fun with the format as much as you are with the subject matter.

Yeah, so you, you’ll obviously have picked up on the fact that anything that’s in bold type is essentially a kind of analog version of a hyperlink. It’s to tell you, “Well, go and read that chapter,” and I hoped people would read it. in the way that you’ve been reading it, hopping about back and forth between different parts of the book. I think it really lends itself well to that. And yeah, I was having a lot of fun. It is a playful book but it also takes the band with due seriousness and I think that’s how the Cure take themselves, really.

They are a playful band a lot of the time. They’re a band who are okay about having fun at their own expense but also, they have something quite profound to say about the human condition and I was trying to reflect both of those aspects in the book.

In addition to talking about the Cure, you talk about the various artists that are in their orbit or whose orbit intertwines with theirs. You get to talk about Siouxsie, you get to talk about Depeche Mode, as well as the various offshoot bands, like the Glove and Cult Hero. Did exploring these other acts who intersected with The Cure allow you to explore the band in different ways?

Yes, it did. Exploring Siouxsie and the Banshees, for example–I mean, the extract on Siouxsie and the Banshees is almost a little book in itself. Sort of presents a parallel universe, a kind of counterfactual world in which Robert had decided to stay with them and carried on making music as a Banshee because his all too-brief-stay in that band, I think, produced some really fantastic music.

The album–or two albums, really, because there was the live album, Nocturne, and the studio album, Hyæna, singles like “Dazzle,” “Swimming Horses,” “Dear Prudence.” It’s a wonderful period of the Banshees’ career, where they’re starting to bring in orchestral sounds and so on, and it does make you wonder what might have happened if he’d stuck around.

But I think when you see photos of the Banshees at that time, quite often, photographers would make Robert and Siouxsie just pose next to each other and forget about the other two. It was clear that it’d become a band essentially with two front persons. two egos, two stars, and I suppose that that couldn’t hold.

What new things did you discover that surprised even you?

Well, the first thing that happened was that I found myself spiraling out of control in terms of my research. With any given Cure album or Cure song, I would find out what inspired it or some kind of fact around it, and then I would follow that thread to the point of extremeness and absurdity. So, for example, learning about the song “Lullaby,” which on a basic level would seem to be about arachnophobia in humans.

I had to find out what’s the deal with arachnophobia? Does it have any evolutionary value? What are other expressions of this? I found out about this strange mass panic in medieval Italy where people believed that they were suffering from some disease that involves spider bites and expressed itself in the form of a medieval dance called tarantism, obviously with the same root as the word tarantula or tarantella. Stuff like that.

I remember handing it into the publishers thinking, “Have I gone too far? Are they going to send this back to me and say, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, this can’t be in the book’?” But thankfully, they left it in and I hope that the results of that make it an interesting book for people, because I found that the further out I got from the center, I was spiraling outwards from the core subject, which obviously is the Cure. In a weird way, I think I was finding out some kind of truth about them, which is that they are so culturally rich as a band. It’s like it’s like they’re handing you a treasure chest, handing you a box with a key and you open the box, and when you open it, all these things come flooding out of the box that seemed bigger than the box itself.

Most of my favorite bands operate like that–they’re a kind of education in themselves. I mean, for example, in, in the Cure’s case about the literary influences, there’d be things like Albert Camus about whom I knew quite a lot already because I’d written my A thesis in my university degree about him, but then gothic literature, things like the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake or the novel Charlotte Sometimes on which the, the song is based and the influence of poets like Baudelaire and Dylan Thomas and First World War poetry, as well.

And all of this from what a lot of people would just dismiss as a a trivial pop song, albeit a somewhat gloomy, trivial pop song.

When we spoke with Mick Wall earlier this year about his book on the Eagles, that was also very much a COVID project and one of the things that he brought up is the idea that when you’re writing on a band that’s been around for this long and you’re living in this modern age, the danger is that you have so much material that you could spend weeks or months just watching footage on YouTube. Did that surplus of material ever start to become a bit of a problem and contribute to that spiraling out?

Yeah. My previous book, which was 23-24 years ago, was about the Manic Street Preachers and that was written almost in the pre-internet age. The internet was just kind of starting but you couldn’t really use it as a research tool much, so that book involved spending long hours in the local library and doing things like that. When I wrote this book, it’s an entirely different world in which almost everything is available to you at the click of a pad.

I did wonder if it was ever going to end. I did set myself this preposterous, insane challenge to try and sift through the entire global knowledge about the Cure–just to go through it all or at least to leave very few stones unturned, let’s put it that way, to try and find the perfect quote from Robert or from Simon or from Lol that might unlock what they were thinking at a given time about what was going on.

I’d be illegally downloading cassette-only interviews that they did in Australia, and watching TV interviews from Swiss television that only had a couple of hundred views on YouTube. In addition to that, I have a massive archive myself. I’m a hoarder. I can’t throw anything away. So the camera’s facing the wrong way, but I can now see in the garden shed, which is full of old music magazines and the attic has got loads of music books. That’s how I live and how I operate. It’s a blessing and a curse because on the one hand, what a wealth of material to have at your disposal, but on the other hand, it means it’s difficult to know when to stop.

Simon Price’s Curepedia: The A-Z of the Cure  is out this week from Dey Street Books.