Disintegration - The best album ever!

When I put out the call for Right This Blog! submissions, Alastair Ross wanted to write about how Disintegration by The Cure was "the best album ever". He even wrote me a note to ask if I had seen his submission. I told him that it was such an absurd suggestion, so preposterous, that he must write it up immediately. There was no way he was being chosen for the Right This Blog! series - but could he write up his attempted justification for this mighty claim anyway? That sort of lunacy had to stand alone. He agreed to write it up. He wrote it up. And here it is. Thanks Alastair.

Season one, episode 12 of South Park, after an animated Robert Smith disposes of Mecha Streisand, Kyle utters the immortal words "Disintegration is the best album ever", prescient words indeed and ones that caught my devoted ears. This was 1998, nine years after the album's release and proof of its ongoing cultural cachet. Today the album is 22 years old, last year re-released in a deluxe three-CD set and for the first time on double vinyl containing all of the tracks; it previously missed two when it was first released in 1989. I still remember clearly the day in May of 1989, while on school holidays, I begged my mother to buy me the album on cassette (yes, cassette).

I had been introduced to the band a couple of years earlier on the bus to school camp and was immediately hooked, soaking up everything on offer. I can still recall the exact day I held Disintegration in my hand for the first time on the floor in the lounge, with my Walkman and a notebook and proceeded to listen to the album over and over again, writing notes about the music to myself. This was my watershed moment; we all have them, the album that opens the gateway to a world of possibilities.

While some might suggest it is the earlier albums, Faith, Seventeen Seconds and Pornography, that get the jowls wet for musical purists, I argue that Disintegration is their raison d'être, this is the album they were destined to make, it is their absolute pinnacle. From the moment the faint tinkle of the chimes, to the burst of sound that follows in the towering and grand opening track Plainsong it is clear this is a journey to be taken in a full sitting, none of this fannying about with the fast-forward button. Disintegration is a musical degustation, to be enjoyed slowly over the full 71:47 minute running time, even longer if you play it on vinyl, scrabbling to turn the album over, spilling your wine, beer, snakebite (insert drink here) in a joyous panic.

The album has pop hits that no one but The Cure could write, the lovely wedding gift of Lovesong written for his childhood sweetheart (and wife) Mary, lyrically and musically the song is a marriage of yearning and comfort, speaking of the safety and joy to be found in the arms of your loved one. To the rockier motifs of the New Orleans Mardi Gras- inspired Fascination Street, the galloping drums, the shimmering layers of guitar, a roiling cacophony of beauty, it is the complete package. And Pictures of You, which is dreamy and by turns joyous and melancholic, and features a video with a man dressed as a polar bear in the desert - don't say the band has no sense of humour. And of course on the subject of hits, we find ourselves presented with Lullaby the anti-goodnight/sleep- tight song.

The first time I heard Lullaby was on the syndicated radio show Rock Over London (you can listen to a bit of it here), a radio show that played up-to-the-minute music from the UK, I sat hovering over the tape deck waiting to hit record; the rest of the evening was spent replaying the track over and over again.

I hadn't heard something so bewitching and addictive. Like any fan, I felt the band was speaking directly to me; the song haunted me for weeks until I managed to hear the whole album. The number of phone calls to the record store for updates on when the single and the album were out drove the guy behind the counter to distraction; he rolled his eyes when he saw me coming in. Lullaby was the single that kick-started a collecting obsession that hasn't abated since.

I bought the 7" & 12" singles, the cassingle and, years later in London, a pink and a clear 7" (much to the amusement, or is that horror, of my wife - whoops, that money was for the rent). I remember lightly hyperventilating when I found the Pictures of You 7" & 12" singles on purple and green vinyl. There was no question, I had to have them.

Of course everyone knows the hits but it's not these slabs of pop brilliance that maketh the album, it is the slower languor of tracks like Prayers for Rain with the thundering drums of Boris Williams and the unparalleled brilliance of Simon Gallup's bass pulling you into the framework of the song, the guitar and the keyboards layered so delicately and perfectly.

Any true fan will tell you the keyboards in The Cure are an essential element; a fact even Mr Smith tried to pretend wasn't true, till he came to his senses and recently brought them back into the mix.

Underpinning every grand moment on the album is the peerless synth work of Roger O'Donnell, his flourishes and artistry forming the skeleton of the album, embellishing its finest moments.

Prayers for Rain with its warped backwards conclusion fades into the beginning of a rainstorm for the fantastical fan favourite The Same Deep Water As You, a song that features that trademark guitar sound that evokes the feeling of being under a body of water or soaked to the skin in the middle of a storm. The song is so enveloping and outrageously gorgeous, it has few parallels.

This brings me to Homesick, perhaps the greatest song ever written. Who writes lyrics as bleak yet beautiful as this: "and I forget when to move when my mouth is this dry and my eyes are bursting hearts in a blood stained sky"? The answer of course is no one does. This is gilt-edged pop music, dismissed by musical historians as gothic and therefore po-faced and somehow not to be taken seriously. Homesick is the real deal, the music perfectly complementing the desperation and longing in Smiths lyrics, the song powered along by the beautiful keyboards, it is impossible not to lie back and luxuriate in the beauty of it all.

Disintegration remains, 22 years after its release, the one album I can come back to any time I feel done with music, something any lover of music can relate to, when we just look at our collections and our eyes glaze over and think, God what to listen to? For me, it is always Disintegration. It remains a timeless work that stirs memories, inspires and still sends tingles down my spine. For myself and millions of others "Disintegration is the best album ever!"

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