Happy 40th Anniversary to The Cure’s third studio album Faith, originally released April 14, 1981.
To this day, Faith, the middle passage in The Cure’s early-career trilogy hasn’t received its due. At the time of its release in April 1981, critical reaction was mixed. And the accompanying Picture Tour proved long and unruly, with showgoers on both sides of the equator taking audible issue with the dirgeful ambiance, still pining for the pop-punk speed of the band’s two-year-old debut, Three Imaginary Boys (1979).
The shameful truth is even I am guilty. Not that I haven’t revered Faith from the beginning. To some degree, however, I’ve taken my constant companion for granted. And it’s a wrong I right today.
In many ways, Faith is the album I most identified with as a freshman in college, certainly in those first few disorienting months. Away from my parents’ home, amidst thousands of chattering strangers on campus and still hundreds more in the dorms, I often retreated within, blinking back the unnatural glare of this newfound LA world (“lost forever in a happy crowd”). Thankfully, I had in my quiver two reliable forms of escape—headphones and walks. On frequent occasion, they coincided.
With the press of a Walkman button, I slipped beyond the stately UCLA walls to the misty ether of Faith, The Cure’s third album.
A haunting waltz, an indefinite sound, like I was there, traversing shared grayish oblivion. It felt an unlikely correspondence—that this artist born in a different time, raised in an industrial English town, could so intuitively know my own sense of unbelonging. But, so it was.
Just four years my senior at the time of Faith’s conception, Cure frontman Robert Smith had divined the words at the foot of churches in search of that elusive something. The sudden deaths of family and friends and recently diagnosed terminal illness of drummer Lol Tolhurst’s mother had caused the band to turn increasingly inward—into themselves individually and the insularity of the group as a whole.
Smith sought refuge in past sanctuary—the ceremony of his Catholic upbringing. In the liner notes of the 2005 Faith reissue, Smith recalls, “I wanted to feel whatever it was others were feeling. I wanted something to believe in.”
And though he visited many houses of worship, that feeling never came. Instead, the places that should’ve delivered hope only led to greater longing. The Cure’s new record then would center on a new perspective on faith—as much a conscious disavowal of youth-instilled beliefs as a requiem for those dearly departed.
Richer in texture than spare trilogy opener Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith signifies further sophistication for the young band, ushering them from blasé adolescent ennui to deep spiritual exploration. Despite paring back to a skeletal threesome following the departure of keyboardist Matthieu Hartley, The Cure’s third record was the most layered and complex to date—a plaintive pause, which would fast collapse into the spiraling howl of Pornography (1982).
Reflecting on Faith shortly after its release during a May 1981 interview with UK music paper Record Mirror, Smith noted, “I’ve always tried to make records that are of one piece, that explore a certain kind of atmosphere to the fullest. If you’re going to fully explore something, you need more than one song to do it. That’s why I always liked Nick Drake’s albums or Pink Floyd records like Ummagumma.”
For all its elegiac grace and grandeur, Faith was a painfully prolonged endeavor, coming together in fits and starts. In fact, unlike Seventeen Seconds, which coalesced in the space of a week, Faith saw The Cure constantly retooling.
Extensive touring had left the band—now consisting of Smith (vocals/guitar/other instruments), Simon Gallup (bassist) and Tolhurst (drummer)—scant time to craft the tracks. Add to that certain pernicious influences and, well, Faith nearly went off the rails entirely. In the reissue liner notes, Smith hazily recounts, “I was starting to feel very fractured around that time. I remember trying to sing ‘The Drowning Man,’ and I was waiting for the vocals to start, forgetting that I was the singer…”
But, though only on album three, Smith had already gleaned The Cure’s intrinsic value to his own emotional fortitude. Despite the heavy air of loss, disillusionment and doubt—not to mention the daze of chemically induced detachment—Smith remained committed to overcome all uncertainty and find resolution.
In the making of Faith, a process that began in September 1980 and ended in March 1981, The Cure had tippled and toppled through five studios around London, drawing both impatience and concern from manager Chris Parry and producer/engineer Mike Hedges. But, after the long winter, the revelatory moment finally arrived: Smith had achieved his long-desired sound, with each instrument a lasting imprint on an unending echo.
Perfectly emblematic of the somber sonicscapes inside, a fog-ensconced, centuries-old building makes up the cover art of Faith—the smudgy likeness of Bolton Priory, as preserved in Smith’s childhood memory. The delicate gesture again seemed to signal a deliberate parting, with The Cure collectively ruing the loss of a faraway innocence that can never be reclaimed.
Penned amidst the pews of a Catholic church in Crawley, where Smith grew up, opening track “The Holy Hour” is a depiction of religious ritual at its most rote. While attending mass, he goes through the motions mechanically, observing a lifelessness to these ceremonial proceedings. At the same time, he acknowledges the power of the illusion (“A promise of salvation makes me stay”). Far from feeling fulfilled, he rails against the futility of this mindless devotion (“I stand and hear my voice / Cry out / A wordless scream at ancient power”)—his fevered voice bright in a cool catacomb of sound. By the end of “The Holy Hour,” The Cure’s position is clear: All pretense is gone (“I cannot hold what you devour”). But, where to go from here?
In the reissue liner notes, Smith reflects, “I understood that, above all, people were in church because they believed in a personal ‘eternity.’ I began to realize that I didn’t believe in this eternity at all, and I was scared. On the day I wrote the words to ‘Faith,’ I knew I had the title track.”
Though this rejection of youth-ingrained teachings felt necessary, it also meant bidding farewell to a simpler time. In his 2016 memoir Cured, Tolhurst recalls, “Robert and I had both been brought up Catholic, and while we had moved on from the beliefs of our early years, we were actively looking for something new, something different to replace what we had been taught as children. It started with the single, the first thing we recorded from the new album: ‘Primary.’”
As the album’s only single, the rapid-tempo “Primary” may seem an uncharacteristically perky spin in an otherwise woeful procession. But, the wry chorus careens like a carousel whirring a frame too fast (“The further we go / And older we grow / The more we know / The less we show”). Rife with allusion to the primary colors, the song bemoans the inevitability of aging and the impossibility of permanence.
Throughout Faith, the lyrics emphasize a sort of communicative paralysis, unintelligible utterances, forgotten language—a strangled inability to speak and be heard. Undoubtedly, the stifling imagery adds to the feelings of desolation, making third track “Other Voices” particularly conspicuous. For one, the title alone suggests an energy from another source beyond the spiritual realm. Even more telling are the song’s introductory lines upon Smith’s wordless wail: “Whisper your name in an empty room / You brush past my skin / As soft as fur / Taking hold / I taste your scent.”
For the first time on Faith, Smith finds tangible connection in something—a flirtatious, if not unabashedly romantic, encounter. Redolent of the mysterious intrigue surrounding Seventeen Seconds, “Other Voices” flaunts spine-tingling bass that lulls you into false promise. But, these indulgences don’t come freely and are immediately met with self-denial and consternation, revealing the profundity of Smith’s questioning at the time—or maybe just the wonderful dissociation of drugs.
If the second and third songs on Faith offer a bit of lighter meandering after the weighty “The Holy Hour,” “All Cats Are Grey” is full-immersion depression—certainly the bleakest Cure track to date and even now, 40 years later, it remains among their most anguished. It’s also quite the reality check for early twentysomethings who generally entertain an air of invincibility: Trapped in our corporeal construct, we are finite beings destined for the grave.
Hopeless and staid though “All Cats Are Grey” may sound, there’s an easy calmness to it. A peace in accepting the natural course of life—a resignation that would eventually give way to despondent existential rage in Pornography (1982).
With “All Cats Are Grey” dismally reaffirming a shared foregone conclusion, the majestic drama of “The Funeral Party” undoes any semblance of composure, overwhelming with poetic and melodic beauty. Over the years, I’ve toyed with various interpretations of this gorgeous song, at times envisioning a wedding of sorts, with two figures joining in eternity. And, maybe one day that sense of romance will return to me, if only in imagination. For now, I’m inclined to take a more direct tack and appreciate it as an emotional retelling of a funereal scene, conjuring the surreal sadness of such occasion.
“I heard a song / And turned away” still cuts me to the core, speaking to the suffering of the bereaved—a memory perhaps of the deceased too painful to bear. The whole of life seems to pass through this song, and it’s incredible to imagine 22-year-old Tolhurst performing this alongside his two bandmates at his mother’s funeral. I question the soul that hears “The Funeral Party” and shuffles on, dry-eyed.
Never a group to settle on convention, the inconsolably manic “Doubt” follows the loveliness, bringing forth the album’s most visceral moments. Although much faster and angrier than anything else on Faith, the song seems a necessary cathartic cleanser, annihilating once and for all the previous notion of faith, ostensibly making room for new inspiration.
Immediately returning us to the formless vastness is the gothic saga of “The Drowning Man.” Inspired by English author Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, the swirling song is thematically somewhere between “All Cats Are Grey” and “The Funeral Party,” as it witnesses the taking of life—and aches in the desperate desire to save it.
In considering the aesthetic of Faith, Smith reflected to Record Mirror, “I like a lot of music that is built around repetitions. Benedictine chants particularly and Indian mantras. These musics are built around slow changes, they allow you to draw things out.”
Indeed, the transformation that takes shape over the expanse of Faith unfolds like a series of slow changes. If album intro “The Holy Hour” conveys the vacuous nature of religious routine, concluding with outright rejection, then the words to closing track “Faith” serve as a foil, roundly fill the void.
Like the British Romantic poets he admired, Smith ultimately chooses the power of his own mind versus some abstract god. Far from mainstream, especially at the time, this view would only reinforce any outsider feelings (and undoubtedly lead to several more Cure albums). However, as all introverts know, the emptiness of alienation makes space for a solitary comfort.
Even in the realm of Cure songs, “Faith” resides in its own special category. Due to the intensity it awakens, the band rarely perform “Faith” live anymore. However, in June 1989, on the evening of the Tiananmen Square massacre, The Cure tore into a now infamous extended version of “Faith.” Smith prefaced the performance by saying “I need to sing a song called ‘Faith.’ And someone says you can’t sing it…”
When I first got ahold of that recording, I couldn’t stop listening. For weeks, the tape stayed in my Walkman, reminding me of my own strength, even on days I felt most fragile. Just thinking about it now still gives me chills.
More than anything, “Faith” is a testament to self-conviction and courage—trust in oneself, no matter the circumstances. It’s knowing that all too often in life, you have to walk away alone “With nothing left / But faith.” It’s maybe not the only thing that can get us by, but it’s the only thing that lasts.
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