Had I known, I wouldnt have started this website.

I scanned item #0001 on September 7, 2004. If someone had told me then that this site would surpass 7,000 records and that I would spend an average of 40 minutes on each of them, I would have run the other way. Despite being from Barcelona—like Antoni Gaudí and the Sagrada Família—I wouldnt embark on a project that I would never see finished. I have done the math: 280,000 minutes—thats 2.6 years of full-time work. Nearly three years of my life spent documenting The Cure discography: scanning, editing, uploading. However, looking back, Im glad I didnt know. Because thecurerecords.com has taken pieces of my life and turned them into joy - ever since that fateful September 7. It has even led me to real friendships with some of you.

The real story began in September 1998. I was 24, leaving my parents home for the first time. At that time, the collection my brother Silvio (zakiaaa, on the right) and I shared consisted of about 150 records. An insane large number, I thought. Although dividing the collection was one of the hardest parts of leaving home, the agreement was easy. In my room, we had analog formats —vinyls, cassettes, tapes—; in Silvios, the digital ones —CD and CVD. That ended up being the division.

In 2002, while searching eBay for an original Fender VI String Bass guitar as a wedding gift for Silvio, I typed "The Cure". My mind was blown. Every day, records appeared at auction that werent even listed on the beloved websites on-fiction.com and plainsong.net, my favorite places on the Internet—and in the world—at the time. I also found those impossible-to-get records that you only saw in Daren Butlers book The Cure On Record. I still remember the shock of seeing the Australian 7” single of A Forest up for auction or the Japanese promo 7” of The Lovecats... with a folder! Ultimately, eBay was like a traditional annual record fair, but daily and multiplied by ten, where filtering The Cure took just a click.

Our collection began to grow at an unprecedented pace and I found it increasingly frustrating not seeing everything together. Then, one cursed morning in September 2004, I had the fateful idea to buy a scanner and start digitizing—without telling my brother. I just went for it. Some weeks later, I showed him some mockups of a private site I was building, so we could reunite the collection. He barely reacted.

Everything changed on January 6, 2005. That year, the “Reyes Magos”—the Spanish equivalent of Santa Claus—brought me about 20 different Kiss me vinyl records. I did not see that coming. Silvio had gone wild. I felt annoyed by receiving so many nearly identical vinyls just for the sake of owning them. I guess I was overwhelmed by the idea of having to scan them all. Unbeknownst to me, the news of the future website I was working on had turned Silvio into a completist. He threw himself into it, Indiana Jones-style, searching for unseen rarities. He had correctly envisioned what the site would eventually become: an illustrated Wikipedia of The Cures discography. He joined and gladly agreed to share the (considerable) development costs of the site.

The enormous task of editing, one by one, every single angle of each record (now 43,000+ images and counting), combined with the financial effort of web development, inevitably led me to reconsider the original mission of the website. It would no longer be a private page for our enjoyment. With a bit of extra effort, we could open it to everyone. Other collectors could benefit from it and contribute as well. In the end, happiness is sharing, and my brothers vision materialized. And I, a victim of that fateful day when I decided to buy a scanner, ended up becoming another completist. My username was going to be tsao, an acronym for the same all over, from the refrain of the song “Purity”, by The God Machine.

When the first version of the site was finally completed and went online in February 2007, it contained around 3,200 records. This included our collection, which had grown to about 600 records, plus the content of the previously mentioned websites. Naively, I thought the website had almost everything that could possibly exist. Then, the inevitable happened: many of you began scanning your records and sending them to the site. A gigantic tsunami of work overwhelmed me, and it continues to this day. Many of you rightly lament that records you submitted years ago are still waiting to be listed. I understand how frustrating this must be and I can only thank you for your patience. The long list of pending records is a stone in my shoe that I constantly carry.

When I have time—my scarcest resource, as it is for most of us with young children—to dedicate to the site, my priorities are as follows: First, I upload records from my collection. Not to inflate my collection counter at the expense of others but because its my way of keeping an organizational grip on what I receive. I assure you, scanning a compilation of various artists doesnt excite me. But if it lands on my desk, I need to get it out of the way, and the only way to do that is by giving it priority. Once my desk is clear, I go through the list of pending submissions and usually pick the most noteworthy, well-scanned, and complete record I find.

At times, some of you have suggested opening the site to others for record creation or simply listing records without images. I never found these ideas appealing. We are not Discogs.com, which is an incredible, comprehensive, and extremely useful information source that lacks quality control. Nor have I ever wanted to prioritize creating records without images. Though it may seem simple, adding a new record to the database, even without images, is tedious and time-consuming. I need the visuals to motivate me.

Im not Antoni Gaudí, nor is this site the Sagrada Família, but it fulfills me entirely as it is. With its exasperating slowness but also the satisfaction and beauty of a job well done. I dont know how many artists are fortunate enough to have websites like the before mentioned or the great cure-concerts.de, to name some examples. When Songs Of A Lost World was released, Robert Smith spoke in an interview about the uniqueness of Cure fans. He mentioned how, at other artists concerts, he doesnt see the sense of community he sees among his fans. It made me think of all these fansites.

Some might lament that the time I spent writing this text could have been used to upload a record from the waiting list. Once again, they would be right. But for some reason, 20 years after buying that scanner, I realized I had never told our story—the story of thecurerecords.com. It was about time.

Ignasi (tsao)
January 26, 2025