Never Enough Page 17

  At their first New York gig, The Cure opened their show with ‘A Forest’, a sure-fire mood-setter. The rest of their set balanced such standards as ‘10.15’, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Plastic Passion’, with roughly half of Seventeen Seconds. The band and Parry knew there was no great logic in playing too many songs that weren’t available in US record stores, especially in those pre-download days. Jon Young, a writer for US mag Trouser Press, was in the thick of a crowd that he would describe as “restive”. Smith struggled to deal with a loudmouth who was “shouting incoherently as if he’d expected Bruce Springsteen”. Eventually he stopped the band and simply asked the punter what he wanted, which Smith would interpret as “piss over Portobello Road – or something”. But Smith had the last laugh when the heckler came backstage afterwards and sucked up to the band.

  While Smith might have displayed enviable levels of confidence both in the studio and when it came to dealing with the great unwashed, he wasn’t so sure that they’d be offered another US junket in any great hurry. So while Stateside, the band played tourist, staying up all night and then kicking on at first light to soak up the sights. Simon Gallup, meanwhile, remained impressed by the relatively new sensation (for him) of backstage riders – while in North America, his tipple of choice was Southern Comfort. Smith’s 21st birthday fell while they were in Boston; the band and Parry partied with prejudice at what Smith recalls as “some art media event”. Smith toasted the day by turning up for their final US show 90 minutes late, then taking a very stoned ride on the bonnet of a car driven by an equally wasted Parry. When Smith tried to change a flat tyre, he broke his thumb, although it took some time for the signal to travel from Smith’s digit to his brain. “I’d just reduced it to pulp,” he later said.

  Back in the UK immediately after their Boston show (via an unplanned detour to Cape Cod), Smith was already showing signs of wariness when it came to dealing with the press. (This would reach chronic proportions as the band went larger and larger Stateside.) Speaking with Record Mirror, Smith exhibited mixed feelings about their first US tour. “[We were] being bombarded by people who all ask the same questions and all want to shake your hand,” Smith reported. “You just find yourself getting sucked into the whole rock’n’roll trip which we’re trying so hard to get away from.”

  Smith’s comments were a touch disingenuous, because on April 24 The Cure were lined up for their debut Top Of The Pops appearance. Starring on this weekly pop institution was hardly the kind of move that would guarantee a band street cred but it did expose The Cure to several million viewers, which couldn’t hurt their gradually improving career, even if the sight of Smith’s Elephant Man-sized thumb was enough to scare off impressionable teens.

  Smith had conflicting emotions about appearing on Top Of The Pops. His conscience was pricked by what he described as the “anti-everything” side of his nature, telling him that the show represented all that was wrong with music: it peddled cookie-cutter pop as lip-synced by airbrushed stars. (It should be made clear, however, that The Cure kept good company on their Pops debut: Blondie, The Undertones, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Bad Manners also appeared.) But there was also a more pragmatic side to Smith’s nature. “I was convinced we should do Top Of The Pops because I realised, even then, that if we didn’t do it, someone else would – and it made no difference to the majority of people watching whether we played or not.” What Smith didn’t know was that future NME writer Andrew Collins became one of many new Cure converts via their debut Top Of The Pops spot, in almost the same way that Smith fell for Bowie eight years earlier. “I first fell in love with The Cure, aged 15, on April 24, 1980,” Collins wrote. “They were … a trio [sic] all disconsolate and shy and looking at their feet, and yet producing this strangely beautiful pop song which I must have first heard on John Peel, as that’s where I heard everything first.” So the band’s time wasn’t completely wasted.

  (Robert Smith would maintain many unsteady relationships during The Cure’s long life, none more so than that between him, his band and this not-so-venerable UK pop institution. Smith always felt uncomfortable appearing there. In 1985, he stated that his discomfort was “mainly because I can see the audience and they always look so fed up. I always feel sorry for them. They go expecting a big party – and it’s the most awful experience; you can see it on their faces. Besides, I’m not much good at pretending I’m having fun.” Almost all Cure cameos on the show would be swiftly followed by the single they were trying to flog taking a chart nosedive. “Our records always go down after we do Top Of The Pops. We actually do the show as a career move to stop ourselves from becoming too famous,” Smith figured.)

  Gallup and Hartley, meanwhile, were much more enthused than Smith about appearing. The laconic Tolhurst laughed it off. “All you could see on the telly,” Tolhurst said afterwards, “was Robert’s huge bandage moving up and down the neck of his guitar. It was hysterical.”

  The footage from their Top Of The Pops cameo was intertwined with images of a forest, for the Dave Hillier-directed video for ‘A Forest’. Smith’s thumb was by far the star of the clip, the band’s first. “We came across looking very morose and disinterested,” said Smith, “which we were.”

  Despite the throbbing in Smith’s thumb, The Cure returned to the road, starting yet another British tour at the West Runton Pavilion in Cromer on the night following their TV debut. Ending at the Rainbow Theatre in London on May 11, the band played 16 dates in as many days. ‘A Forest’, meanwhile, surreptitiously made its way to number 31 on the UK single chart, their highest position by far. As The Cure bandwagon rolled on, reviews began to trickle in for Seventeen Seconds.

  The response from Record Mirror’s Chris Westwood typified the uncertainty that critics felt towards the album: no one was really quite sure what to make of this brand new Cure. “Why don’t The Cure come out of their shell?” Westwood asked. “This is a reclusive, disturbed Cure, sitting in cold, dark, empty rooms, watching clocks.” In a typically arch Nick Kent review for NME entitled ‘Why science can’t find Cure for vagueness’, the critic wasn’t totally convinced by the band’s impenetrably dark side, even if he did open with the valid point that The Cure were a band in a hurry. “Few have covered so much territory in such a brief space of time,” he observed. Kent was right: in roughly the same time that many bands take to master ‘Louie Louie’, The Cure had delivered a handful of singles of increasing quality, played upwards of 100 shows and cut two long-players. Kent, however, felt that the album failed to deliver fully the type of pent-up tension at which most of the songs hinted. Referring specifically to ‘A Forest’, Kent wrote that “the scenario, once created, soon sounds limp, devoid of any tension or mystery. It’s a symptom throughout Seventeen Seconds.”

  “To many,” Kent concluded, “Seventeen Seconds may seem a valid progression. I, however, find it depressingly regressive. Even so, I await their next move with great interest.”

  On May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis, the Joy Division frontman crowned “one of the most talented performers and writers in contemporary rock music” by NME, committed suicide. Curtis’ final video, the haunting, darkly beautiful ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, had been shot only a couple of days after the release of Seventeen Seconds. Closer, an album that was equal parts farewell to Joy Division and eulogy for Curtis, appeared in July. Robert Smith was, frankly, stunned.

  “I remember hearing Closer for the first time and thinking, ‘I can’t ever imagine making something as powerful as this.’ I thought I’d have to kill myself to make a convincing record.”

  But Robert Smith wasn’t quite ready to top himself just yet. After their final UK show at The Rainbow in London’s Finsbury Park, The Cure crossed the Channel for their first full European tour, playing a festival in France alongside The Clash and UFO that fell apart in a volley of riots and tear gas, and then being arrested (but not charged) for indecent exposure during a late-night romp in Rotterdam. While still in Holland for a series of o
utdoor dates, NME ran a piece called ‘Days Of Wine And Poses’, written by Paul Morley, the same stringer who’d written off Three Imaginary Boys as “fatigue music”. Writer and star-in-the-making were far more polite this time around: as it turned out, Morley was a fan of Seventeen Seconds.

  The article provides some insight into Smith’s hot-and-cold affair with the press. When Morley effectively pissed all over Three Imaginary Boys, Smith and band responded by writing the critic a vitriolic reply and then, during a Peel session, turning ‘Grinding Halt’ into a poison-pen letter directed at the black heart of the NME scribe. But when they met, Smith had a confession to make: he wasn’t that big a fan of their debut LP either; he’d listened to the album maybe “three times” before moving on to Seventeen Seconds. As Smith and Morley loosened up over a bottle of vino, the real Robert Smith began to appear. “Smith is soft where I imagined he would be hard,” Morley wrote. “He’s not a big softie. He’s always on a fine line between agitation and boredom and such a balance turns out faintly, deviously charming.” When Morley asked Smith if he took himself seriously, Smith replied: “I do take myself seriously but there’s a point beyond which you become a comic figure.”

  Smith was also uncertain about the live incarnation of the band: were they on stage to entertain or enlighten? Or was their job purely self-satisfaction – the audience be damned? “It’s very selfish when we go on stage,” Smith said. “It matters what the audience thinks, but I write songs for myself. I’d prefer it if we really impressed a lot of people who’ll like us for a long time rather than give someone a good night out who’ll forgot it next week.”

  In the same interview, Smith would own up to a dangerous temper, but he wasn’t the physical type. As Tolhurst had already mentioned, there was a certain Englishness at work here – emotions were best kept to oneself. “I don’t throw tantrums or anything like that,” he said, “so rather than smash the room up I write things down. It’s a release.”

  As their seemingly endless 1980 tour continued, Smith and Gallup, especially, found new outlets for their bad vibrations. The pair was in the process of developing a more than lively interest in Bolivian marching powder, and had virtually given up on sleeping. They spent much of their downtime in a near catatonic state, Walkmans glued to their ears. Smith was still dealing with his mixed feelings regarding Ian Curtis’ suicide: did it really mean that in order to have his band taken seriously, he had to follow suit? It was not exactly the ideal environment for new recruit, Matthieu Hartley. Tolhurst, as always, remained the band’s target: without him as class clown it was likely they would have ended up killing each other. Even Hartley got in on the action, as he revealed in Ten Imaginary Years.

  “Dear old Lol, he’s the master,” the keyboardist said. “We beat him up, wind him up, frame him up, but he understands. He knows we have to release our tensions in some way and he’s the target.” (Snapshots from the time usually show Tolhurst buried up to his neck in sand on a beach somewhere.) What Tolhurst didn’t know – couldn’t have known, really – was that he was setting himself up for the biggest of all possible falls a few years further down the road.

  The band’s relentless touring schedule – they played over 80 shows between March and November 1980 – also meant that their entourage was increasing. The Cure crew now included a roadie named Elvis, a former Teddy Boy who, according to Smith, dismissed the band as “a right scruffy bunch of cunts”. Their tour manager was Welshman Lawrie Mazzeo, a bloke with a passion for fine dining and a habit of short-changing hotels. Then there was Mac, their lighting man, who was with the band during the 6.30am romp in Rotterdam that ended with a public indecency incident.

  By the time The Cure reached New Zealand on July 24 for their first antipodean tour, the roadlag was starting to set in. Posters promised Kiwi fans the chance to ‘Get a Dose of the Cure’ – the recently released Seventeen Seconds had charted well there, as it did in Holland and France – but as the band shuffled between Auckland, Wellington, Christ-church and Dunedin, playing nine shows in all, the heaviness of the songs they were playing was starting to wear them down. “We’d played too much and were becoming very jaded,” Smith recalled. It was also during this tour that Smith dropped his first tab of acid; he spent most of the mind-stretching experience taking photos of his reflected image in a hotel room mirror. (In one picture “there are about 2,000 cocktail toothpicks stuck on me,” Smith revealed in 2003. “In that skin, in those things – I looked like a porcupine.”) And while in Auckland, the band let off steam with some hotel room redecorating, smashing a door and several fittings and fixtures. This time around Mazzeo settled the bill before they checked into another hotel.

  Smith downplayed the incident the next day. “We’re not the type of band to smash furniture,” he said. “We’re not The Who. It was just part of our working day. It was obvious they preferred us to leave so we went to another hotel.” As much as Smith tried to dismiss it as another day in the life of The Cure, it was hardly the type of publicity they needed on the eve of their first Australian tour. These boys mightn’t cry, but they sure knew how to drink (and drop LSD).

  Although their Oz tour was a success – Australia would embrace the band with the same fervour as North America in a few years’ time – it was a tough time in camp Cure. It didn’t help that the planned Australian itinerary had mushroomed to 24 shows. And like Michael Dempsey before him, Hartley had developed a serious case of road fever: the Auckland incident had escalated out of a minor run-in with Smith that went completely off the rails. “It just started to go all wrong with Matty,” Smith said. “He was getting very grumpy, very tired and moaning that he couldn’t get any vegetarian food – lots of things upset him.” To Smith’s recollection, Hartley used to take out his anger on Tolhurst, the band’s in-house punching bag. Nonetheless, the band managed to set a new house record at Sydney’s Bondi Lifesaver, packing 2,200 fans into a venue that was built for maybe half that many at a very tight squeeze.

  When the band stopped in Perth, on the west coast of Australia, en route to Europe, they knew that Hartley needed to face up to the fact that he just wasn’t built for the road, or the band. His snoring did nothing to help his relationship with his bandmates, either. And again just like Dempsey before him, Hartley wasn’t too enthused about the increasingly grim direction in which Smith planned to take The Cure. “[It was] not my style of music at all,” Hartley would state. “Also I was treated strangely, childishly. Robert stopped talking to me. So did Lol. I’d had enough. [Fans] used to ask me if I liked Joy Division and, I mean, they were exactly the kind of group I can’t stand. I realised that the group was heading towards suicidal, sombre music – the sort of thing that didn’t interest me at all.”

  The band played one final show, in Stockholm on August 30, before finally making it home to the UK. They’d been away for a particularly tough six weeks and hadn’t had a genuine break since March. When Parry collected his charges at Heathrow, the cracks showed in a very obvious way: while Smith, Gallup and Tolhurst squeezed into the front of the pick-up, Hartley was left in the back, sardined with the band’s gear. Once Hartley arrived home, he decided to save Smith a call: he rang the bandleader and told him he was quitting The Cure, having lasted only nine months.* Smith didn’t hold any grudges. “Matty was really good about it,” he revealed. “He phoned me up and that was it.”

  * A live take of ‘In Your House’, recorded at this show, made its way to 1984’s odds-and-sods collection, Curiosity.

  * Interestingly, he now lives near Smith in Bognor Regis, working in a photographic store and still playing music.

  Chapter Six

  “I was 21, but I felt really old. I felt life was pointless. I had no faith in anything. I just didn’t see there was much point continuing with life.”

  – Robert Smith

  NICK Kent had been understating the band’s case when he noted that they had covered so much territory in such a brief space of time. Most bands would have pleaded t
emporary insanity after such a ruthless slog of a tour, and gone underground until at least the new year. Not so The Cure. Almost immediately Smith, Gallup and Tolhurst chose to head back to Morgan Studios, at the end of September, to start work on their third album, once again with Mike Hedges producing.

  It turned out to be a major miscalculation, not least because they were all very jaded when they drifted into Morgan on September 27, barely a month having passed since Hartley’s last stand in Stockholm. Among the new tunes they attempted to capture on tape over the next three days were ‘All Cats Are Grey’ and ‘Primary’. While both would eventually make the cut for the album that became Faith, neither was recorded satisfactorily during this first session at Morgan. Smith had been hoping for something “funereal”, instead “they just sounded dull”. Unfortunately for the band, this aborted session would set the tone for Faith. Whereas both Seventeen Seconds and Three Imaginary Boys had been turned around in record time, the recording of their third album became an odyssey that saw the band bounce between almost as many studios as they would record songs.

  Tolhurst, for one, knew that the band wasn’t ready for another LP. “The Cure existence on the road wasn’t the kind where you could write songs,” he said to me. “We had to write so much of Faith in the studio.” But, as he explained, it simply didn’t enter their minds to withdraw from the musical front line. “We never thought about going home and not doing anything for six months,” he said. “Our contract said to make an album a year and we did that.”

  The Cure was always striving for financial self-sufficiency; by the time of Faith they’d pretty much achieved that. Their records were relatively cheap to produce and constant touring helped to pay the bills. Regardless, it was a true low point in Robert Smith’s life. “I was 21,” he said in 1985, “but I felt really old. I had absolutely no hope for the future. I felt life was pointless. I had no faith in anything. I just didn’t see there was much point continuing with life.”