Never Enough Page 15

  Smith had sensed some inner-Banshee tension during their opening show in Bournemouth. After The Cure’s set, Severin and Siouxsie had been extremely sociable backstage, while McKay and Morris maintained a stony silence. As Smith recalled, “If we bumped into them and said hello, they’d just turn their heads away like superstars.”

  When The Cure finished their set at the Aberdeen show, they found that there were two Banshees missing and an advanced state of pandemonium breaking out backstage. “Get back on stage!” Stevenson shouted at them, so The Cure continued playing, debuting a still lyric-less version of ‘Seventeen Seconds’. Severin and Siouxsie then joined them for a crash-and-burn take on ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. The show was over – and so, it seemed, was the Banshees.

  Back at their hotel, Siouxsie, Severin and The Cure addressed the problem in a logical fashion: they got smashed. During the course of the night, Smith offered his services as stand-in guitarist, an act of generosity that was also tinged with desperation: it was important for The Cure’s profile that the show go on, too. Severin smiled and said that they’d prefer to go ahead with their plan to audition some new guitarists. While the Banshees tried out the usual hopefuls, The Cure returned to Holland for the New Pop Festival, where they played before 10,000 Rotterdam fans. The Banshees may have been on the skids, but the cult of The Cure was growing.

  The Banshees’ auditions for a guitarist proved futile, despite the support of the BBC’s John Peel, who sent out an appeal during his show. So they relented and decided to ask Smith to join the band as fill-in stringman. Smith’s only proviso to becoming an occasional Banshee was that The Cure retain the support slot. Severin and Siouxsie agreed. Although Lol Tolhurst, now nicknamed “The Fatman”, had offered his drumming services, the Banshees hired tub-thumper Budgie, formerly of punk outfit The Slits (and later to become Mr Siouxsie). So, with some kind of order restored, the double-header returned to the road at Leicester on September 18.

  Smith boasted that he wasn’t fazed by his dual role of opener and headliner. “I don’t remember it being difficult,” he said. “After what we’d been doing for the past two or three years, it was a piece of piss, really.” When asked his opinion by the Crawley Observer, Dempsey’s only concern was for Smith’s staying power. “I only hope Rob has enough energy,” he replied. NME’s Deanne Pearson, who’d joined the roadshow at the Leicester pit stop, suspected otherwise when she reported on the tour’s progress. “[Smith] looks ill,” she wrote, “thin and pale. [He] isn’t eating properly, isn’t sleeping properly, his mind a constant whir of activity.”

  Not the kind of guy to walk away from either a piss-up or an alliance, Smith began spending the bulk of tour downtime with Severin; Tolhurst also became part of what Smith described as a “group within the groups”. But Smith would travel separately from Tolhurst and Dempsey; he would ride in the Banshees’ cosy bus, at their insistence, while his two Cure bandmates tagged behind in The Cure’s famously unreliable green Maxi van.

  By tour’s end, the relationship between Smith and Dempsey had soured. He was out of the band immediately after the final Banshees’ show; NME announced the split on November 10. Dempsey insisted that he was “booted out” of the band – but he was also ready to sign on as bassist in The Associates. This opened the door for Simon Gallup to join the band.

  Asked about the split, Smith stated that life in The Cure had become “like a job”. “The differences were between him [Dempsey] and me. The more it went on, the more unbearable it became,” said Smith. “The Cure part of the show was always uncommunicative and teeth gritted. As soon as I got in the Banshees’ van, it was all over [with Dempsey]. I think the final straw came when I played Michael the demos for the next album and he hated them. He wanted us to be XTC part two and – if anything – I wanted us to be the Banshees part two. So he left.”

  Dempsey’s departure actually played out this way: after the tour, Smith began recording home demos of songs that would make up the bulk of Seventeen Seconds, using his sister’s Hammond organ, a drum machine and his prized Top 20 guitar. Armed with new lyrics, written mostly during one night in Newcastle where he’d come out second-best in a punch-up, Smith was ready to give Tolhurst and Dempsey a preview of the album-under-development. As Smith would report in Ten Imaginary Years, “Lol was really excited but Michael was … well … cool.”

  “We were around Robert’s house a lot playing early versions of ‘A Forest’ and things like that,” Tolhurst remembered. “That was the point Michael wasn’t quite into it. I’ve always liked Michael; he’s a good friend. I’ve come to the conclusion that while we really like each other, he’s hard to work with. He has very fixed ideas about where he wants things to go.”

  Annoyed by Dempsey’s cool take on these new songs, Smith jumped to his feet and sprinted to Gallup’s house, asking him on the spot if he wanted to join The Cure. When Gallup reminded him that The Cure actually had a bassist, Smith replied, “If you come and play bass, he won’t be able to, will he?” Gallup didn’t have to think too hard about his next move, because he’d just about resigned himself to his factory job and evenings at the pub with Carol Thompson. Tolhurst drew the short straw and was told that he had to phone Dempsey and break the news.

  “I called Michael up and said, ‘I don’t really think we want to play with you any more,’ it was very uncomfortable. I still liked him as a person but it was difficult to see how we could continue playing as a band. It was strange.

  “We were English and we really didn’t know how to talk to each other that much,” Tolhurst added. “We were good friends, but things close to the heart, well, we didn’t know how to say it to each other.”

  “When it was actually put to me,” said Dempsey, “it was unexpected. He [Smith] was single-minded and strong-willed enough to know what he wanted to do next. It must have been a huge relief when I wasn’t part of the band.” Dempsey told me that Smith was even thinking about dispensing with The Cure moniker. “He put it that he didn’t want to have The Cure name any more. I could have it if I wanted.”

  Dempsey felt that he and Smith were actually quite alike in some ways – and he couldn’t recall a single argument from his time with the band. “Smith and I are similar in that taciturn English manner, or at least [we were] at that time.”

  But there were key differences between Dempsey and the world of The Cure: for one, he wasn’t much of a drinker. And, as he readily confessed, he had troubles with the often sedentary life of a rock band. “You need the capacity to do nothing for a long time, which is not so much in my temperament.”

  Parry kept his distance – he figured that if he tried to prevent the inevitable, it might be the end of The Cure. “I thought they were the perfect pop trio, better than The Police, better than The Jam. But Robert wasn’t interested and he closed the doors.”

  ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’ was released just prior to Dempsey’s farewell, on November 2. The reviews were mixed. “There are hints that the formula is wearing a little thin,” commented NME, “but it’s the best of their new songs.” Writer Chris Bohn figured that, “The Cure’s biggest problem is trying to replace the innocent charm which helped flesh out the bare bones of their early singles.” More positively, reviewer Alan Lewis was seduced by the “harsh but detached tone of the song”. “Someone should get a medal for the sound quality,” he announced.

  But ‘Jumping’ wasn’t an important song for The Cure; it was more of a holding pattern as the new trio got ready for their public debut, in Liverpool on November 16. Though the songs he was writing were as black as night, things were going Robert Smith’s way: he wanted to strip back The Cure’s sound even more, and Gallup’s super-minimalist basslines would provide the perfect backbone. And he was now surrounded by two drinking buddies. Life was good.

  * Smith’s verbal assaults on Morrissey would make for some of the most quotable quotes of his inconsistent relationship with the press. “I loathe the Morrissey kind of wallowing in despair,�
�� he’d announce in 1989. “I don’t find it very entertaining to be around someone who’s morose all the time.”

  * When asked to give an interview for this book, Severin requested an “appearance fee” of £200, which was declined.

  * Such was the tension surrounding the grocer’s daughter from Grantham at this time that it was deemed necessary to install fortress-like iron gates at the entrance to Downing Street, a legacy of her confrontational political style that remains to this day.

  Chapter Five

  “If we’d become furniture movers, then we’d have got in all the people we liked: it was really a question of attitude and outlook. Simon had that; that’s always been what got people into The Cure.”

  – Lol Tolhurst

  AS Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst readied the new Cure in November 1979, they decided to hire keyboardist Matthieu Hartley as well as Gallup. It was a curious decision, given that Gallup’s lugubrious, single-note signature was designed to pare The Cure’s sound back to the absolute minimum. But the decision to hire Hartley was based on reasons not entirely musical, even though he’d been a bandmate of Gallup’s in Magspies. Not only was he a hairdresser by trade, which the band might find useful as they headed into their big-haired era – Tolhurst, though, insists he never cut the band’s hair during his brief tenure – he was also another Horley buddy of Gallup’s. The reasoning ran along these lines: how could Gallup’s drinking buddies resent them when The Cure had demonstrated that they were an equal opportunity employer?

  As Tolhurst told me, “We asked Simon’s friend Matthieu along as well because we figured he’d feel more comfortable about joining the band.” (Smith would be even pithier: “They’ve added a new dimension to the group – pissheads.”) Tolhurst admitted that Gallup’s playing was not the most important reason for his joining the band. “I’d see over the whole life of The Cure that an attitude was more important than anything else,” he said. “If you had the right attitude and can play a little bit, that was more important than anything else. If we’d become furniture movers, then we’d have got in all the people we liked: it was really a question of attitude and outlook. Simon had that; that’s always been what got people into The Cure.”

  As for Hartley, Smith had no idea whether his synth lines would be useful, or even necessary, for The Cure’s sound, but his somewhat accidental decision proved crucial: towering walls of synths (though not necessarily played by Hartley) would have a monumental impact on The Cure’s future sonic direction.

  Born on February 4, 1960, in Smallfield in Surrey, Hartley, like so many of those in The Cure, was the youngest of three; exposure to their older siblings’ record collections would shape the career direction of many Cure members, Hartley included. He’d lived in Smallfield until 1968, then the family shifted to Horley, where he attended Balcome Road Comprehensive between 1972 and 1976, alongside Simon Gallup. When Robert Smith decided Hartley was right for the band, he’d spent the previous four years as an apprentice hairdresser.

  Hartley had no hesitation in signing on for The Cure. But he was also under no illusions about his role in the band. “I said yes immediately because the prospect was so exciting. My role was reasonably detached, though. I just did what Robert told me to.”

  Lugging his Korg Duophonic synthesizer – the perfect machine for the sound Smith was after, as it turns out, because it was virtually impossible to play more than a couple of notes at once – Hartley, along with Gallup, was broken in during a fairly heavy end-of-year touring schedule. Their first gig – the opening night of the Future Pastimes Tour – was on November 16 at Eric’s in Liverpool. Not the kind of man to miss an opportunity, Parry loaded the bill with his other protégés, The Associates, whose line-up now included Michael Dempsey, which must have made for some uncomfortable silences backstage. “There was a certain awkwardness to it,” Dempsey agreed. “But it was OK.” The Passions were also on the bill.

  It was hardly a dazzling debut for the new Cure: they arrived late and discovered there were only about 100 punters left at the gig. Undeterred, the quartet bellied up to the bar, ordered more drinks – they’d enjoyed a sociable few on the drive to Liverpool – and played on, regardless of the meagre attendance. Even though a slurring Smith had some trouble associating certain lyrics with their rightful songs, he declared that the band’s debut wasn’t just successful, it was “a new start”. As for fresh recruit Gallup, he was impressed by the free beer, which was a whole new experience for him.

  Smith talked up the new Cure in a discussion with Record Mirror, a conversation that also contained a few not-that-subtle digs at the distance between himself and Dempsey. “If you’re in a band,” Smith said, “and you’re playing together for a concentrated period of time, you have to get on with each other – unless you’re only in it for the money, which we’re not. It’s not so much the unity of thinking, because everybody thinks differently, but the unity of ideas. And despite what the press think there’s no hierarchy in The Cure. If there’s one drink on the table we all fight for it.”

  Smith may have played up The Cure as a hierarchy-free zone, but the reality was that he was gradually moving further towards his role as band leader. It was a tough ask for a 20-year-old, but it was a role that Smith would grow into over the next few years, to the point where he virtually became The Cure. Parry, for one, would have liked Smith to step forward much sooner, as Tolhurst explained to me. “I can remember meetings with Chris – I don’t think he enjoyed having meetings with me and Robert. I think it was divide and conquer. The two of us could gang up on him, more than anything else, and he would have to acquiesce to whatever it was we wanted. Robert resisted [becoming band leader] until the middle of the Eighties.”

  The Future Pastimes Tour rolled on, filling the London School of Economics, then, in back-to-back shows from November 20 to 24, they played Preston, Manchester, Bradford, Newport and Coventry. After winding through venues in Birmingham, Portsmouth, Norwich, Durham and Wolverhampton, the tour came to a close at Crawley College on December 7, a homecoming of sorts for the band. But it wasn’t all gravy – some local skinheads started smashing the place up while The Cure played. As for Gallup, earlier in the day he’d been given a taste of small-town jealousy when he’d wandered into a record store and was informed that “my mate’s much fucking better than you are [as a bassist]. I don’t know why you got the job.” The band wouldn’t play another home-town show for four months.

  In a post-tour post-mortem, Smith admitted that life on the bus – the three bands shared a ride – had been “good fun”, which was hardly surprising now that he was surrounded by not just his old playground sidekick, Tolhurst, but Gallup as well. The soundtrack to Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book had been on repeat in the van, so all the bands could now belt out ‘The Bear Necessities’ without a lyric sheet. Although Fiction-mates The Cure and The Associates got along swimmingly, Smith learned that The Passions had “peculiar ideologies” that didn’t sit well with him and the rest of The Cure.

  But that was a minor concern. The now four-piece Cure weren’t just sounding like a “proper” band, but on stage they were beginning to resemble a group of serious young post-punkers, rather than a gang of barely legal suburbanites who weren’t quite sure whether – or where – they belonged. Smith was growing more assured as a frontman, while Gallup’s not-quite-so-wasted Sid Vicious looks gave the band sizeable cred with the polytechnic crowds. While their set still included such tunes from their Three Imaginary Boys period as ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, ‘Fire In Cairo’, ‘Accuracy’ and ‘10.15 Saturday Night’, they were also breaking in such newer, moodier pieces as ‘M’ (Smith’s pet name for his girlfriend Mary Poole), ‘Play For Today’, ‘Seventeen Seconds’ and, crucially, ‘A Forest’.

  The band was now sufficiently confident (and in demand) to head to Europe again, playing 11 shows that included stops in Paris, Amsterdam and Eindhoven. By mid-January of the new year, they returned to the now familiar Morgan Studios with Mike H
edges to begin work on what would become their second long-player, Seventeen Seconds.

  During the making of the album, Smith would play a cassette over and over again: it was virtually all he was listening to at the time. The tape contained four totally disparate and seemingly unrelated songs, which Smith later confessed all contained elements of what he was trying to recreate with The Cure’s second coming. One song was Van Morrison’s sprawling, mesmerising ‘Madame George’, from his landmark 1968 album Astral Weeks. This much praised work was a sustained study of introspection, a journey deep into the mystic from the bellicose bard of Belfast. The next track was ‘Fruit Tree’, a sadly beautiful cut from Nick Drake’s 1970 album Five Leaves Left. The sparse, dimly lit beauty of the song gelled perfectly with the heavy atmospherics Smith was trying to bring to life on Seventeen Seconds. “It’s a morbid romanticism,” Smith confessed when asked about his Nick Drake obsession, “but there is something attractive about that.”

  The third track on Smith’s perfect mix tape was the Aram Khachaturian ballet piece, ‘Gayaneh Ballet Suite No. 1. Adagio’, that appeared on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was another bleak, minimalist masterpiece, much fancied by Smith. As with Nick Drake, it was Smith’s brother Richard (‘The Guru’) who’d turned him on to the seminal Kubrick odyssey. And the final track on the tape must have conjured up some mixed memories for Robert Smith – it was Jimi Hendrix’s live take on Dylan’s rock’n’roll Armageddon, ‘All Along The Watchtower’. The cut was taken from Hendrix’s UK swansong, his festival-closing set at the Isle of Wight Festival. That was also Smith’s first true rock’n’roll experience, an event he recalled as “two days of orange tent and dope smoke”. When not wearing out this four-track cassette, Smith also had Bowie’s Low on repeat. The high point of the Thin White Duke’s “Berlin phase”, whence he retreated to escape the coke-induced ennui of a prolonged spell in LA, the Brian Eno-produced Low fluctuated between such glorious high IQed pop as ‘Sound And Vision’ and introverted, experimental instrumentals. It was very clearly a key album for Smith and Seventeen Seconds, an epic downer that somehow still managed to sound startlingly original and icy cool.