"Fascination"

It was a handful of moments that cumulatively pushed me over the brink into full-on fandom....In 1989, I was mainly a metal-only kinda guy, but was ever so slowly warming up to things like Siouxsie and piL....thing is, I hated stuff that was commercial and I always thought The Cure were some effeminate haircut band, fluffy pop for girls....

Then one night I was flipping through the channels on tv and saw the band on PBS playing live (thinking back now, it had to be In Orange, and the song had to be Faith). I remember thinking the vibe was incredibly heavy and somber, not at all the silly pop band i had thought they were.a little later, Disintegration came out and i saw the Fascination St video on MTV. It was incredibly dark and heavy in its own way and it definitely appealed to me. around the same time i caught an MTV interview bit with Robert on the Week in Rock -- the one where he's standing outside some enormodome on a cloudy day and announcing that after the Disintegration tour, the band would break up because The Cure had never wanted to get so popular.

I thought (naively), "how noble! what integrity!" little did I know....anyway, the final straw was when I went over to a friend's house a month or two later and, while waiting for her to get out of the shower, found a copy of Disintegration and put it on. The bells and chimes and then, whooosh -- Plainsong. I was absolutely enchanted. The walls fell down. I bought Disintegration and from that point forward I started aggressively exploring the back catalog, becoming more and more fascinated all the time. The Cure also proved to be the gateway to so many other bands: Depeche Mode, New Order, the Smiths, and loads and loads of other genres of music that I had ignored for years. Even though they've sullied their legacy in recent years, The Cure remain probably my favorite band of all time.

(from: andy - Pennsylvania, USA)