In 2000, the Philadelphia-based hardcore label Too Damn Hype released a tribute album to The Cure titled Disintegrate. Opening with Cave In’s take on Plainsong, the opening song on The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, the album featured contributions from Chimaira, Voice Of Reason, Where Fear And Weapons Meet, Together We Fall and more, with the biggest talking point for hardcore fans being Converge’s interpretation of the title track from Disintegration.
Converge frontman Jacob Bannon also contributed the album’s artwork, and in a recent interview with The Quietus, he revealed that The Cure had a seismic effect on his life and his band’s music.
Bannon admits in the interview that, although many of his friends in high school raved about Disintegration he had decided, without listening to the record, that it wasn’t for him.
“That record was gushed over at the time, and I was like, Nah, I can’t do it,” he said. “And I didn’t give it a chance. I judged it.”
The singer’s conversion began with a viewing of the video for the album’s second single, Fascination Street.
“I would tape videos from TV late at night when they would play good stuff,” he said. “I was watching back some stuff that I taped one Sunday morning, and the Fascination Street video was on there. I took some time with it, and I was like, wow, this is not what I thought it was. Because I thought it was going to be Boys Don’t Cry. I thought it was going to have more of a pop sensibility to it. I didn’t really fully understand the band because I never gave it a chance.”
When he finally got around to giving the album a fair hearing, “it changed everything,” he told writer Dan Franklin.
“For me, it was such an emotional listen, such a personal and heartbreaking listen,” he said. “I looked at that and I said, this person is speaking with honesty and this band is writing with honesty and openness and vulnerability that, at the time, as a kid, I was fearful to have. I was trying to get there. I was trying to learn. I was trying to write about my life. But I would do it in veiled ways. I wasn’t really fully doing that. When I heard that record, it made me feel like it was okay to do that – where I could write from a personal perspective and not feel like the world was going to end, because I put out all of the things that were weighing on me as a person.
“I go back to that record over and over and over again,” Bannon continued, “and every song has connected with me in a different way at different parts of my life. And I listened to it from that point on basically throughout art school, nearly every day. And it just became a presence in my life all of the time, musically. I’m so thankful that my stubbornness went away and I allowed that band in. I dug in deep after that, but that was really the album that specifically got me and really opened my eyes to that band and how they were doing things, and it definitely shaped the way we are as a band.”
