One of the most ridiculous misattributions that's all over the net is "I Melt With You" by The Cure, instead of Modern English.
Modern English's first big hit, and their only real hit (except for "I Melt With You '90"), is an upbeat love song, filled with both vocal and guitar harmonies, cheerful humming, start-stop rhythms, and ridiculously optimistic lyrics about how love makes everything possible.
The Cure's single at the same time was "The Hanging Garden", a song of utter despair and nihilism with psychotic hallucinatory imagery. And the song with the repeated chorus "Fall fall fall fall out of the sky, cover my face as the animals cry" was the happiest, poppiest song the label could find off the album.
So, the two bands could be nothing alike, right?
But if you step back, they're a lot closer than you'd think. Modern English is amazingly misunderstood—and that may be as much their own fault as anyone else's, it's still a shame. They went through a brilliant dark period at the exact same time as the Cure. The biggest difference is that they put their huge accidental pop song on their most depressing album, instead of releasing it six months later, a mistake the Cure didn't repeat until 1989 (at which point they could easily get away with it).
The Early Years
Both bands starts in 1976, inspired by the Sex Pistols, starting off as straightforward punk but quickly moving toward post-punk/proto-new-wave sounds. In early 1979, both were described by one reviewer as "a punk version of Joy Division", and by another as "a darker take on the Buzzcocks".Neither band truly found their sound until late 1979 (although the Cure had already released an album). The Cure was inspired by Siouxsie and the Banshees (they'd just toured as Siouxsie's opener, and Robert Smith played guitar for her band), Modern English by Bauhaus (they'd just signed to 4AD). So, both decided to become slower and darker.
Faith and Mesh & Lace
In 1980, the Cure's second album Seventeen Seconds and Modern English's EP and singles were already moving in a new direction. In early 1981, they both released singles in advance of their upcoming album, "Primary" and "Mesh & Lace". In the first week of April 1981, their albums Faith and Mesh & Lace were released.Both bands had added layered guitars, more prominent synthesizers, and generally richer production. Both had traded the panic and angst of their earlier lyrics for outright despair. Both albums were much darker than what their predecessors, or even their leading single, would lead anyone to expect.
There are certainly differences. Most notably, Robbie Grey still sang with a punk sneer, while Robert Smith had traded his in for the lethargic, weary sound he became famous for. Also, while Mesh & Lace's production is nowhere near as sparse and jagged as their early singles, it's nowhere near as lush as Faith.
But there are strong similarities, as well. Listen to the Cure's "Funeral Party" and "Doubt", then Modern English's "The Token Man" and "Just a Thought"—both bands played a pretty wide range of music on their albums, and it was almost the same range.
And then there's the lyrics. Both albums are mostly about being alone in crowds and lost in the familiar. Both use children or childhood as a recurring symbol of loss and nostalgia. The Cure's "All Cats Are Grey" uses a empty post-apocalyptic wasteland as a metaphor for personal isolation: "No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes, and no flags wave me home." Modern English's "16 Days" which uses isolation as a symbol of the horrors of a nuclear apocalypse: "16 days without sun on my back, 16 days without ideas in my head."
Some of Modern English's lines, like "Clutching garments warm and dry, an ice cold grip is on my mind" or "From my head to my heart to the space above the door" sound far more like what you expect of Robert Smith than his own lines like "Stop my flight and fight and die, and take a stand to change my life" or "Commit the sin, commit yourself."
Ultimately, in hindsight (hindhearing?), Faith sounds like a prelude to Pornography (and the non-album single "Charlotte Sometimes" and its flipside even more so), while Mesh & Lace for some reason sounds like a prelude to the "Leeds sound" bands (Sisters of Mercy, March Violets, Gang of Four, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, etc.), rather than to Modern English's own future.
Pornography and After the Snow
In the first week of May 1982, both bands released their next album.The Cure's album, Pornography, starts off with the line "It doesn't matter if we all die", and only spirals down from there. And it's not just the lyrics—the music is a series of haunting dirges drowning in a dense wall of guitars and heavily-effected overdubbed vocals. Robert Smith retroactively describes it as "moving beyond despair into nihilism." but really, he moved into the hallucinatory stage of psychotic major depression. But really, anyone who's read this far knows this album, so I don't need to describe it. Nobody has ever captured depression better.
After the Snow is very nearly a dark masterpiece as well. Not as dark or as masterful as Pornography, but it's not the pop album you expect from "I Melt With You".
Let me try to describe what it was like to put this record on for the first time in 1982.
The first track, "Someone's Calling", starts off with "Turning 'round as if in flight, I sense your breath cut like a knife. A thousand shadows all in pain, what they fear must be the same." Not quite as desperate as the Cure's "One Hundred Years", but not exactly bubblegum pop. Ultimately, it's about how hope—whether love, or a glorious revolution—is always false and misleading, as "a thousand cries of jubilation" lead to "a thousand shadows all in pain". With its more prevalent synths, richer production, and jerky rhythm changes, the song sounds more experimental than their earlier music, but at the same time it has a moody and organic feel.
This is followed by "Life in the Gladhouse", a song that perfects everything the first album was going for—the bitter nostalgia for a past that you know was even worse than the present. It's Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Happy House", but without the escape into manic insanity.
The remaining two songs on the side are mellower, almost peaceful. But, even though "Dawn Chorus" seems to be about lying in a summer meadow and experiencing the majesty of nature (given the rest of the album, it's probably intended to have a darker meaning anyway… but if so, I've never figured it out…), it feels more like wallowing in depression than basking in the sun.
Then you flip over the record, and… there's "I Melt With You". Right from the start, it sounds a lot like "Someone's Calling"—the same minor chord pads, the same guitar sound, the same stop-starts and rhythmic change-ups. But somehow, the same sounds feel impossibly upbeat instead of haunting. And the lyrics should fit right in with the rest of the album. The opening verse is about the beginning of a nuclear war, so the chorus about love conquering all, hope being real, and the future being open wide should be as ironic and bitter as "Calling". But it's not. It's so catchy and infectious that you can't help but be optimistic. Sure, the bombs are falling, but it's OK because they're in love; this moment will last forever and "it's getting better all the time". I have no idea how they pulled this off. Neither does Robbie Grey, and he wrote it. But it's brilliant.
The problem is, this ruins the rest of the album.
"Melt" is followed by "After the Snow", another deceptive-optimism song that takes place in a nuclear winter. (At this point, you're probably thinking it was a concept album about nuclear war, but that's because you don't remember what the early 80s were like. Half of Modern English's songs were always about nuclear war, going back to their first single, and the same was true of nearly every other post-punk and new wave band.) This time, they pull it off—"I can see beauty, after the snow" feels empty and chilly, as it should.
The remaining two songs repeat the same feat, and the way they repeatedly interrupt the upbeat guitar riff with a dark bridge in "Tables Turning" really ought to work.
But after having failed so spectacularly that they achieved perfection in the opposite direction, it just doesn't move you when they pull off what they're going for. And then, the next time you listen to "Someone's Calling", you can't help but hear "I Melt With You". It's the same song turned inside out. That should remind you of the irony in "Melt", but instead it just makes "Calling" feel unnecessarily somber.
So, Modern English almost crafted a beautifully dark and chilly album, but they went and ruined it by accidentally writing one of the catchiest pop songs ever. It still wouldn't have been as perfectly dark as Pornography, but then nothing else ever was.
The Followup
Modern English desperately tried to repeat the magic of "I Melt With You". 4AD wanted them to continue to make more music like they'd been making, but they didn't want to solidify their existing fan base, they wanted to be pop stars, so they refused to work on any of their existing music. (They did grudgingly join in after 4AD created a supergroup, This Mortal Coil, to record a cover of "16 Days/Gathering Dust" because Modern English wouldn't record a new version, and they turned over one outtake when they were a year later on their album—but otherwise.)When they returned after 2 years, they'd ditched their black clothes to dress like soul-era Spandau Ballet, and they had a new song, "Hands Across the Sea", a jangly pop song about, in Grey's words, "true love means that hope is always real". They followed it up with an album, Ricochet Days, mostly in the same vein. Some of the songs weren't bad, but it nobody took it seriously. After one more album, they called it quits, reunited to release a new version of "I Melt With You" and an accompanying album, and broke up again.
Meanwhile, only a few months after Pornography, The Cure released "Let's Go to Bed". It was intentionally designed to be the antithesis of everything Pornography was about—an insanely catchy pop song about sex, filled with vocal and guitar harmonies, cheerful "do-doo-do-doo"s, and jagged rhythms which became a much bigger hit than they ever expected. Kind of like "I Melt With You".
Like Modern English, they tried to follow it up with more of the same. Unlike Modern English, they succeeded, with two equally-catchy and popular bouncy pop songs, "The Walk" and "The Love Cats", and enough decent flip sides to gather together into an album, Japanese Whispers.
And, after a brief neo-psychedelic interlude while reorganizing the band, they went right back to crafting pop songs. While the darkness crept back into the lyrics, they successfully disguised it behind catchy pop hooks in songs like "In Between Days", "Close to Me", and "Why Can't I Be You", effectively pulling off everything Modern English had always tried but never been able to reproduce.
Of course Robert Smith then freaked out about turning 30, tried to kill himself, took a whole lot of LSD, and recorded his followup to Pornography, Disintegration—a nearly perfectly depressing album, except for "Lovesong", the sappiest pop song he ever wrote. But that wasn't a failure to be ironic, it was intentionally designed to be a jarring contrast to the rest of the album. And then, as everyone knows, he fought Mecha-Streisand and saved the world.
