Three Imaginary Boys, FIX 1 on Fiction Records, was released on 8 May 1979. It's the Cure's debut album, the band's first record, and the only one in their long catalogue where the cover was decided for them.
The concept came from Bill Smith, a designer at Polydor (Fiction's distributor); the photograph was made by Martyn Goddard. Smith staged three ageing household objects on an ice-cream-pink background — a standard lamp, a refrigerator, a Hoover. No band members. No band name on the sleeve. No song titles on the rear; the back cover used pictograms.
Fiction's owner, Chris Parry, had decided the artwork, the running order, and even which songs went on the album, all without the band's input. Robert Smith was, by his own later admission, mortified.
FIX 1 · FICTION RECORDS · 8 MAY 1979The three objects on the cover stand in for the three band members:
The standard lamp is Robert Smith, guitar and voice. Tall, lit, the orange shade glowing. The thing in the room you keep on.
The refrigerator is Lol Tolhurst, drums. Square, cold, white. In Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys (Tolhurst's 2016 memoir), he notes simply that nobody wanted to be the fridge.
The Hoover is Michael Dempsey, bass and voice. Upright, ungainly, mechanical. Dempsey would leave the band by year's end, replaced by Simon Gallup; the cover stands as a record of the original trio.
"Nobody wanted to be the fridge." — Lol Tolhurst, Cured, 2016.
Click each object on the screen to surface its small wall-label.
Robert Smith has been candid in interviews over the decades about how thoroughly he disliked the cover. The band didn't choose it; they weren't consulted on the track order; some of the songs were deep cuts they would never have picked themselves; the title was a track they'd written but hadn't planned to lead on. They were nineteen, twenty, signed to a label whose owner was used to taking decisions for his groups, and post-punk in 1979 had not yet settled on what the relationship between band and sleeve was supposed to be.
The 2004 deluxe reissue offered a remastered second disc and Smith's full notes, but the famous Bill Smith / Goddard cover stayed on the front. The 1979 sleeve became, almost despite Robert Smith, iconic. Every Cure history has to reckon with it; every Cure reissue has had to either honour or work around it. There is no neutral position on a pink lamp.
Twelve tracks, recorded at Morgan Studios in Willesden, North London, late 1978 / early 1979, with Chris Parry producing and Mike Hedges engineering. Tight, jangly, post-punk-shaped, mostly in major keys, none of the chamber-gothic register that would arrive within a year on Seventeen Seconds. The band would later disown several tracks (Foxy Lady, in particular, was a Hendrix cover joke Parry kept against the band's wishes).
This trio — Smith / Tolhurst / Dempsey — played their last set together in October 1979. Dempsey left in November; Simon Gallup came in on bass; Tolhurst would later move from drums to keyboards. Three Imaginary Boys is the band's only album with this exact lineup.
Morgan Studios, NW10 · Parry & HedgesThree Imaginary Boys is the fourth piece in BeSides — a small catalog of album-cover lifts. It takes Bill Smith's substitution game at its word: three household objects on a pink ground, click each, learn which boy it stood for.
The three objects on screen are procedural — a lamp, a fridge, a Hoover, modelled directly in three.js, not derived from the photograph. Their proportions and colour palette are pulled from descriptions, not from the sleeve itself. We're after the spirit of Goddard's still life, not a forensic reconstruction; the actual photograph is on the album, which you should buy.
Smith, Tolhurst, Dempsey, Parry, Bill Smith, Goddard, Gallup — all alive. Anything that sounds like one of them is paraphrased from a public interview or memoir, not invented in their voice.
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