u/OnlyKey5675

If you're Gen X and if you were a fan of the band back then you likely remember the Cure mania 89-92 years. During those years the Cure were one of the biggest bands in the world (probably only behind U2) and there was a huge explosion of popularity in America after the release of Disintegration (this popularity had been building for awhile especially after KMx3).

I think a lot of things worked in the Cure's favor back then, For one, Disintegration was in the music culture zeitgeist for an extended time. I remember that the whole release (singles and albums) took up parts of both my sophomore and junior year of high school. Lullaby was released in April of 89' as the first single. The album came out a month later. Love song was released as a single that August and reached #2 on the charts with heavy rotation on top 40 radio. Then a full year later Pictures of You was released as a single. All these videos got heavy airplay on MTV. All of a sudden the Cure was a stadium band. The first show of the Prayer Tour with 60k at Giants stadium.

This seems nuts when you consider at the start of the decade they were playing tiny NYC venues. There's that famous photo of the band looking all baby faced being mad dogged by NYPD beat cops. Who would have thought that less than a decade later they would called the Monsters of Goth and playing Giants stadium.

I think Robert being aloof and avoiding the press also worked in their favor. Robert was during this time a rock star in a very theatrical sense. Robert Smith might has well been from mars. That's how much different he seemed to everyone else. The image and the mystery went a long way to make him feel like he was a god among men.

The first US TV performance at the MTV awards in 89'. You have Arsenio Hall introducing them then the band comes out and Robert is in prime rock star mode.,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3ZcmuSXVeo

I went to high school in Los Angeles and the Cure was massively popular amongst all types of kids. But I think the outsider kids really took to the image more. I remember coming back from summer break and there were quite a few Robert clones and just about every girl I knew had a Cure t shirt.

Wish was the commercial peak. Another stadium tour. Rose Bowl, Texas stadium. #2 album in the US.

And then it was all kind of over. Robert broke up the band essentially at their commercial peak. Porl and Boris were gone. Roger had left before Wish. By the end of the decade the Cure were considered has beens. They would eventually recover but the post Wish 90's was not a great time for the band.

I bring this up because I think general music fans are sort of unaware that there ever was a Cure mania in America. I saw someone say the other day that the Cure were an indie band in the 80's. In truth they were one of the biggest bands in the world (and some would argue they were #1 for a brief period). In a way by the end of the 90's Robert sort of got his way and the words from End "please stop loving me" became self fulfilling. A lot of the youth and young adult culture that treated Robert like a music god had moved on.

EDIT: A few comments have taken issue with the use of the word mania. I'm not drawing parallels with Beatlemania. I'm using the word in the context when a band from one country, in this case the UK, goes to another country (the US) and becomes massively popular and more popular than their home country. This is the case with the Cure between 89-92. I'm not the first one to use Cure mania to describe this timeframe for the band in America.,