A multi-object OBJ snapshot of the scene as it stands — the lamp, the fridge, the Hoover, the wall socket, the ground. Each mesh is written as its own o block so you can isolate parts in your modeller. No materials, no normals, no UVs. The Hoover's cable is excluded — remodel it your way.
Positions are in world space at the moment of export — if the Hoover is mid-roll or the fridge door is open, that's what gets baked.
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 a hot saturated pink ground — 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 Toys is the fourth piece in BeSides — a small catalog of album-cover lifts. It drops a letter from the album's title, the same trick Lost Word and Monday Decoder play on their own sleeves. Bill Smith stood household objects in for the band; here those objects are also toys you can pick up and shake.
The lamp, fridge, and Hoover were modelled by hand in Rhino, exported as OBJ, then split here by connected component so the parts behave the way each ought to. The fridge door swings out from a hinge on its right edge, with the handle (on its left) and the round badge riding along. The lampshade is translucent with a point light inside, so the bulb actually glows through warm orange. The fridge handle is brushed aluminum; the Hoover's bag, chrome handle, and brown enamel base each read in their own register. Every surface carries a faint procedural grit so nothing looks freshly minted.
This is a band that fought a lot. The trio shuffles around the stage on independent phases, bumping into each other and recoiling; their two cords whip around like microphone leads at a small-club show. The fridge door slams open on its own occasionally, on the beat. The camera circles the stage slowly — you can drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, and the auto-rotate speed and direction shift with the music.
Click each object to surface the small wall-label. Use AUDIO to start the jangly post-punk-shaped loop — the trio's motion is driven by the FFT of the live signal, so the lamp brightens, the Hoover rolls, and the fridge slams open on the beat. DATA cycles four registers the scene listens to instead of (or alongside) the soundtrack: soundtrack, UK bank rate (Bank of England base rate Jan 1979 → Dec 1989, spiking under early-Thatcher monetarism), The Cure activity (album-and-tour intensity year by year), and Tolhurst (a 1978-2011 curve in Cured's register — rising through the 80s, peak before he's fired in '89, decade of sobriety, reconciles 2011). A small monospace ticker bottom-right shows what's playing. EXPORT writes the scene out as a multi-object OBJ (cables excluded) for any modeller.
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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