Matt Heath says:
From now until next Friday on Radio Hauraki we're doing a huge album battle on-air called Spin The Black Circle, where we put different albums up against each other and listeners text vote for their favourite. It gets pretty intense towards the final. Last year it ended in a fierce battle between Tool's Aenima and Radiohead's OK Computer in the final. Tool won. Just.
The best album ever is of course Disintegration by The Cure. It changed my life. It came to me when I was a bored teenager living on my parents' farm. I'd spend my weekends clearing gorse then steal a bunch of beers from my parents, some smokes from the neighbours and sit up in the top paddock blasting it full volume right into my earholes. Opening track Plain Song never failed to ramp up my teenage angst. So epic it's almost classical and great lyrics "I think it's dark and it looks like rain, you said, And the wind is blowing like it's the end of the world, you said. And it's so cold it's like the cold if you were dead, and then you smiled for a second".
I wasn't a goth, I never spiked up my hair or wore make-up. I just loved the intense emotion in the album. No one else in my life gave it any respect. I wrote out the lyrics to the title track, Disintegration, for the creative writing section of my English exam and failed.
