Seventeen
Seconds
A Reflection
Play For Today
Secrets
In Your House
Three
The Final Sound
A Forest
M
At Night
Seventeen Seconds
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Robert
on 'Seventeen Seconds'...
A lot of people are like us. Everybody I know has gone through the
emotional trauma of Seventeen Seconds, which is learning you can't
trust people as implicitly as you'd thought when you were younger.
(Trouser Press 1981).
On tour in Newcastle, October 1979 Robert got into a fight with three
businessmen in his hotel. "I wrote virtually three-quarters of
the '17 seconds' album that night. I just stayed up for seven or eight
hours and wrote because I was so unhappy. It was one of those nights
when I felt filled with all the horror of the world." (Ten Imaginary
Years - 1988)
"After the tour I spent time making tapes on my own at home.
I used my sister's Hammond organ which had bass pedals and a little
drum machine and I wrote almost all of '17 seconds' with a bossa nova
or swing beat. I had the words from Newcastle, I strummed out the
chords on the Top 20 and I'd built up six or seven songs within a
week". (Ten Imaginary Years - 1988)
"To get that us-against-the-world feeling, we actually slept
on the studio floor under news-papers! Seventeen Seconds is a very
personal record, and it's also when I felt the cure really started,
because we did it on our own and everything about it was exactly what
I wanted. I produced it, although they said I wasn't capable. Then
we jumped on a plane to New Zealand and Australia, and I realised
that the world was a very small place because all the people we met
were empathising with us. It was reassuring at that juncture because
I was getting lots of flak for following a melancholy strain after
'Boy's Don't Cry'. Since we made that album, the number 17 keeps coming
up as an arbitrary figure. Very weird...." (Cure News 19 - May
1998)
"When I listen to it today, I think: it's so simple. But when
I made it, it was the music that I loved making, and I was simple.
In fact I think that this minimalism saved us from becoming just like
all the other bands in the early Cure days." (Gaffa (Danish music
magazine) Feb.2000) |
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