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  For my brimful of Asha

  Contents

  Information Page

  Prologue: Los Angeles Forum, July 27, 1986

  Never Enough: The Story Of The Cure

  Postscript

  Source Notes/Bibliography

  Team Cure – Who Played What & When

  Discography/Videography/Websites

  Prologue

  Los Angeles Forum

  July 27, 1986

  Jonathan Moreland did not belong here. Surrounded by teens and 20–somethings, their faces painted ghostly white, their lipstick applied haphazardly in a cosmetic tribute to Robert Smith, their new Anglo pop hero, Moreland – decked out in cowboy boots and matching hat –was a living, breathing anachronism. It seemed as though he’d taken a wrong turn at Nashville and never quite found his way back home. The Cure definitely didn’t seem like his kind of band.

  But music was the last thing on Moreland’s mind as he shouldered his way through the crowd, finding his seat inside the LA Forum, which was filled to its 18,000 capacity. The Forum definitely wasn’t a Jonathan Moreland kind of place, either. A hideous beige in colour and shaped like an upturned bowl, this venue had played host to most of the world’s biggest rock’n’roll acts, especially in the heady Seventies. You could see such stars as Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, The Faces and The Rolling Stones, often for less than 10 bucks, with a contact high guaranteed as part of the admission price – the pot smoke that hung in the air was almost thick enough to carve. (“If you’re from LA,” one knowledgeable local informed me about the Forum, “it’s part of your rock’n’roll heritage.”) It was also a venue where shows generated a huge amount of bootlegs in the pre-download world – they usually came with the guarantee: “Bore ’Em in the Forum”.

  Rock’n’roll history, however, wasn’t on Jonathan Moreland’s mind as he found his seat. He was in an even darker mood than some of The Cure’s funereal dirges. Rejected by a woman called Andrea, whom he thought was the love of his life, he’d arrived at the last date of the current Cure tour, their final US show for almost 12 months, with one goal: to make a lasting impression. To (literally) drive home his point, he’d managed to smuggle a seven-inch hunting knife past the venue’s security guards. While The Cure’s hairdryers cooled backstage, and the band added a final flourish to their industrial strength hair gel and make-up, Moreland reached for his knife as the house lights dimmed.

  The Cure may have threatened to implode almost every day of the past eight years, but 1986 had actually been a very good year. The signs were all positive: the British quintet, led by Robert Smith, mope pop’s very own Charlie Chaplin, had finally settled on a line-up that didn’t feel the need to throttle each other after each show. That wasn’t the case four years earlier, during the seemingly endless tour in support of their fourth album, the terminally bleak Pornography. During those shows, Smith and bassist Simon Gallup had even turned on the faithful, sometimes jumping headfirst into the crowd to silence those who’d made clear their objections to The Cure’s new musical direction (and obsessions). Strange days, indeed.

  But it was now 1986 and Smith seemed as content as his contrite, restless nature would allow. He’d even eased up on his boozing, while his Olympian drug-taking had now been modified to more acceptable recreational standards. At its peak, he and buddy Steve Severin, of Siouxsie & The Banshees, had once recorded an indulgence piece called Blue Sunshine while gobbling acid tabs as if they were boiled lollies. Then they’d retire to Severin’s London flat for all-night binges, while taking in his seemingly endless stash of gory horror videos. This became known as Smith’s “chemical vacation”. Around the same time, Smith was also working on new Cure material and a new Banshees album, which, not surprisingly, led to the worst of his many emotionally unstable periods. But that was now in Smith’s past.

  And having worked their way through several US labels, in a seemingly futile effort to replicate their slowly building UK success, it seemed as though The Cure’s fourth and latest American home, Elektra, actually had the band’s best interests at heart. Robert Smith, like so many others before and after him, had learned early on that music is a business where losing control (both creative and commercial) can be disastrous. He’d allowed the artwork of their debut album, 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys, to represent the trio as a lampshade, a refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner and had been living it down ever since. But even before then, when the then Easy Cure was signed by German label Ariola/Hansa in 1977 (when the trio were still teenagers), they’d been instructed to record an assortment of rock chestnuts and greatest hits, rather than their own material, which led to one of the quickest terminations of contract this side of a Britney Spears marriage vow. Robert Smith truly had learned by experience. Now their first best-of collection, Standing On A Beach: The Singles, was on the fast track to US chart success. And MTV had taken to the eccentric Tim Pope-directed clip for ‘Inbetween Days’, which featured dancing fluoro socks, like some long-lost sibling.

  Their biggest-ever Stateside tour had opened three weeks earlier, when the good ship Cure docked at the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts. OK, it wasn’t Madison Square Garden, but the cult of The Cure – which would soon reach frantic, sometimes frightening levels of adoration – was clearly building. Fans rushed the stage when the band appeared, even trying to work their way past security for a personal audience with Smith, their new pop idol. This concert – and those that followed – wasn’t so much a rock show as a gathering, a fact that wasn’t lost on the Maiden Evening News. The local rag observed the serious devotion that Cure lovers felt towards their object of desire, noting how “teenie-bopper girls dressed in black and white with punky hairdos risked their lives trying to get past a group of gruff security monsters to give Smith a kiss”.

  Over the ensuing weeks, such high-profile rags as Rolling Stone turned their spotlight on The Cure and, in particular, their seductively odd frontman. Smith was christened “the male Kate Bush”, “the thinking teen’s pin-up”, “the security blanket of the bedsit set” – even “a dark version of Boy George” – while The Cure caravan rolled on through New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco, playing to increasingly larger and ever more fervent crowds. It wasn’t Beatlemania, sure, but it was a clear sign that The Cure were destined for bigger things than their stop-start success so far suggested. Hell, they might even make it home without beating the stuffing out of each other.

  By the night of July 27, as the band (and bandwagon) rolled into Los Angeles for their farewell headliner at the Forum, Smith – who’d just hacked off most of his trademark bird’s-nest of hair, simply for shock value – was warming to both the tour and his bandmates. This was a significant development for a man who’d threatened t
o kill off The Cure virtually every time they took a forward step. In fact, he’d almost brought his contrary plan to fruition in 1982. After the punishing, depressing Pornography tour, he’d shelved the band for months and hidden away in his bedroom at his parents’ home in Crawley, Sussex. He’d then turned his back on The Cure, defecting to the Banshees camp, craving the near-anonymity of being just another guy in the band, rather than life as the creative force and focal point of The Cure.

  Smith had to be persuaded back to Cureworld by long-time manager Chris Parry, and even then only under the proviso that he could release the seemingly throwaway ‘Let’s Go To Bed’. It was a song that was actually designed by Smith to either kill off the band forever or at least alienate every young mopeful who’d likened The Cure’s gloomy moodscapes to those of Joy Division and the doomed Ian Curtis. Much to Smith’s bewilderment, the very unCure-like ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ became an accidental hit, while its sequel, the equally disposable – at least to Smith’s ears – ‘The Lovecats’, went even larger, becoming their biggest UK single. What was a confused 23-year-old Robert Smith to do? When he realised that The Cure were the band that refused to die, he chose simply to let it be. Now here he was in America receiving the full star treatment.

  Cure co-founder (and occasional whipping boy) Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst took the time to sum up neatly the buoyant mood inside Camp Cure. “I think this is The Cure that you’ll see until it stops being The Cure,” he told a reporter. “I can’t see anybody else coming into the band. It’s really always been a band made up of friends more than anything else. But I don’t think we have any friends left who can play anything.” Robert Smith agreed. He told the Aquarian Weekly that this version of The Cure was built to last – maybe. “Unless something really drastic happens on the American tour, like if someone flips out completely, I know that this line-up will make the next record.” Smith didn’t realise the tragic prescience of his comments.

  Back inside the LA Forum, The Cure’s crew checked their watches, as Smith prepared to lead the 1986 version of the band – Smith, old friends Tolhurst, Simon Gallup and Porl Thompson, plus the recently recruited Boris Williams – out of the backstage darkness and onto the stage. It was then that Jonathan Moreland made his move, at the exact moment when the crowd’s Cure-fever was almost tangible. Leaping out of his seat, Moreland removed his hunting knife and began to stab himself furiously in the chest and stomach, splattering blood over anyone unfortunate enough to be seated near him. Just before the onset of shock, or the realisation of just how deep and dangerous his wounds were, Moreland stood on his chair, stripped off his shirt and continued to plunge the blade into his tattooed chest. The crowd around him were both bloody and confused. Thinking that this must be part of the performance of a band renowned for their obsession with dark music and even darker themes, some of the crowd cheered Moreland on as his blood loss increased to a dangerous level. But when police and security enveloped Moreland, the truth sank in: this was no act, this was a real suicide attempt. As word leaked backstage of Moreland’s grisly self-mutilation, Robert Smith started to wonder whether The Cure was cursed: for every bit of forward momentum, there was another bizarre incident, or walkout, or breakdown.

  Perry Bamonte, then Cure roadie and later a member of the band, was on stage when the stabbing took place. “I saw the commotion,” he told me in 2005, “and heard screaming and the crowd clearing as the guy jumped onto his seat and began plunging a knife into his gut. It was surreal and disturbing. [Then] a cop fired a tazer [stun gun] at him and he went down.”

  Stunned, the local police sergeant, Norman Brewer, spoke with Moreland as he was being hauled away to an ambulance. Moreland had told him that The Cure faithful encouraged him in his bloodlust. “As the crowd grew louder,” Brewer stated, “he stabbed himself deeper and harder.” As he was rushed to hospital, the critically injured More-land moaned a confession. “I did it because I won’t ever be able to have the woman I love.” He died soon after.

  Somehow, the show went on and The Cure reached the end of both their set and the tour. But Smith’s uncharacteristically upbeat mood had soured considerably. By the time they returned to London, a spokesman for Fiction Records – the label headed by Chris Parry, a man who’d taken a chance in 1978 on a four-track Easy Cure cassette that had been lobbed into his postbox – issued a statement. “They could not believe anyone would do that at one of their gigs,” the statement read. “It was a bitter ending for them because it happened on the last night of what has been a successful US tour.”

  But the Forum disaster was yet another bump in the road for The Cure. Even by 1986, their career had run an incredibly haphazard course – sometimes caused by the band, other times by forces outside of their control – ever since Smith and Tolhurst had started fumbling with guitar and drums at the Notre Dame Middle School in 1972. For every high such as ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ or a headlining show, there was another spate of band infighting, a new Smith meltdown or a sacking – or something as perverse as Moreland’s suicide. For the erstwhile Three Imaginary Boys, it was a reminder of how unpredictable – and sometimes downright dangerous – the pop life could be.

  Chapter One

  “Crawley is grey and uninspiring with an undercurrent of violence. It’s like a pimple on the side of Croydon.”

  – Robert Smith

  IT may be located halfway between London – 35 miles away to the north – and Brighton on the south coast, but Crawley is hardly the kind of town where the seeds of musical revolution are grown. According to one writer, Crawley was “the doormat you wipe your feet on before leaving the countryside for London”. When the Smith family relocated there from Blackpool in 1966, the clubs of London – such as The Marquee, where in the mid-Sixties The Who promised (and delivered) “Maximum R&B”, and The Bag O’Nails, where Jimi Hendrix began his supernova rise – might as well have been located on another planet. It was not very likely that you’d see Carnaby Street’s dedicated followers of fashion strolling like peacocks up and down the High Street. Mind you, in the late 20th century, Crawley would house some unusual residents, including Robin Goodridge, the drummer for Nirvana clones Bush, and Adam Carr, a man whose claim to fame was being voted Homosexual Author of the Year by The Gay Times (twice, no less).

  But in the main, middle-class Crawley in Sussex was sensible, solid and unchanging. As Robert Smith once observed of his home, some 30-odd years and 30 million record sales since he and band co-founder Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst first exchanged glances on a school bus on the way to primary school in 1964: “Crawley is grey and uninspiring with an undercurrent of violence. It’s right on the edge of a green belt, next to Gatwick Airport. It’s a dreadful place. There’s nothing there. My dad work[ed] for Upjohns pharmaceutical company. He had to move down to Sussex for his job. They’re based in Croydon. All my schooling took place around Crawley. It’s like a pimple on the side of Croydon.”

  Driving Smith’s point home just that little bit further, a recent examination of all things Crawley noted: “There is loads to do in Crawley provided you only want to get drunk or fit, both at considerable expense.” Today, at least 14 pubs line the High Street, which keep well-known tippler Robert Smith pleasantly occupied on the occasions when he returns from his home in Bognor to check in on his parents, Alex and Rita, who still call Crawley home.

  Mind you, Crawley was a town with a plan. It was officially designated a “New Town” on January 9, 1947, not long after the end of the Second World War, with a design capacity built into the planned infrastructure for 50,000 residents. (Today, around 85,000 live in Crawley.) During its post-war growth spurt, the small local villages of Ifield to the west, Worth to the east, Pease Pottage to the south and Lowfield Heath to the north were gradually engulfed by this “New Town”. It was expanding quickly.

  As characterless as this town of offices and engineering firms appears, the recorded history of this “New Town” – though hardly the stuff of famous battles or daring disco
very – does date back over 1,000 years. In fact, the first development in the area is thought to have occurred as far back in time as 500 BC. Some 400 years later, the first simple furnaces began to be used in the area. The roots of a long-held tradition in the Sussex area were thus sown, as documented by the name of one of Crawley’s neighbourhoods, the rhapsodically titled Furnace Green. By AD 100, those utilitarian Romans had settled in the area and begun to extend and improve the furnaces. By the ninth century, Worth Church was erected; it’s now situated in the west of the New Town area and is thought to be one of the oldest buildings of its kind in the UK. It’s believed that the fleeing armies of King Harold may have taken refuge there, after being defeated at Hastings in 1066. But in keeping with the area’s uninspiring history, they were just passing through on their way elsewhere.

  And so the relatively mundane development of the town (and this travelogue) progressed through the ages. Twenty years after King Harold took that fateful arrow in his eye at Hastings, the Doomsday Records failed to mention the hamlet (although nearby Ifield and Worth rated an entry, being valued by King William’s recorders at a princely 20 shillings apiece). Then, in 1203, the Manor of Crawley was awarded a licence to hold a weekly market in the High Street; one Michael de Poyninges is recorded as having given King John a Norwegian goshawk there during the very same year. Less than 50 years later, the Church of St Margaret was established in Ifield; it still stands in the Ifield Village Conservation Area. It was only in 1316 that records first showed Crawley under its Saxon-derived current name. It was formerly known as Crawleah and Crauleia. And the etymology? “Craw” meaning “crow” and “leah” meaning pasture. Not so glamorous.

  By 1450, the George Hotel was established in the High Street, offering stables and room for carriages to allow horsemen and their passengers an overnight stay on the way to somewhere more exciting. (Several centuries later, the George would be used by infamous Crawley local, John George Haigh, the so-called “Acid Bath Murderer”, to pick up at least one of his victims.) Crawley was still very much a transit point, little more than a village in a forest clearing. The horse-drawn carriages, when not stopping overnight at the George Hotel, were charged a toll to travel along the road – the original Toll House once stood in the north of the town. Some of the old timber-framed coaching houses from the period can still be found in the High Street (albeit in a renovated state, occupied by thoroughly modern businesses).