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  But before Carnage Visor’s public debut, the first single from Faith was released. ‘Primary’ was backed with ‘Descent’, a Faith out-take that, just like its A-side, featured a trade-off between the duelling basses of Smith and Gallup. ‘Descent’ remained an instrumental because, as Smith admitted, “I didn’t want to write any more words. I’d written all I needed for the Faith album and really had nothing more to say.” The single appeared in late March, sitting very comfortably amidst the chart fodder of the day, which included such lightweight fluff as Shakin’ Stevens’ ‘This Ole House’, Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids In America’ (more of her later) and the watered-down Joy Division of Ultravox, whose ‘Vienna’ had been embraced as the soundtrack for the puffy-sleeve-loving New Romantic generation. The rumbling, discontented Gothic groove of ‘Primary’ was a hard sell. However, it was a significant achievement on the band’s part – and tangible proof of their improving profile – that the single charted as high as number 43.

  A second Top Of The Pops appearance on April 16, however, didn’t contribute much to the single’s chart value. It began badly when the presenter, Radio One jock Peter Powell, couldn’t remember The Cure’s name or whether they were making their Top Of The Pops debut (they weren’t). Things then went downhill real fast, as the band obscured their instruments with clothing, just to remind the few million looking on that “live TV” was an oxymoron. Backstage, the very serious young gloomsters of The Cure did their level best to steer clear of the other names on the bill, missing out on the chance to form lifelong bonds with such like-minded peers as Bucks Fizz, the Nolans and Girlschool. A bad time was had all round.

  The reviews for ‘Primary’ were as ambivalent as The Cure’s petulant approach towards the fame game. Melody Maker’s Adam Sweeting, every inch The Cure banner-waver, called it a “triumphant return” after the heavy going and “limpid wanderings” of Seventeen Seconds. He wrote that ‘Primary’ was “unbearably urgent, matching a new-found sense of space with a brilliantly focused precision … [it] is a far better pretext for a national holiday than the forthcoming Royal Wedding.” The review by Sound’s David Hepworth, however, typified the response to an even darker, even bleaker Cure than had been heard on ‘A Forest’. “I do wonder,” he wrote, “how long The Cure can continue to prop their songs against the same chord progression, with its clambering bass and deadpan drums. At the moment their fast song (this one) sounds just like their slow one speeded up.”

  NME, meanwhile, sat somewhere between the two. “Smith’s dry, lost vocal,” noted Chris Bohn, “tells of an unsettled individual listening out for a strange guiding voice, while the band play an attractively doomy tune.” Record Mirror’s Simon Tebbutt neatly summed up the single’s musical mood when he observed how the band “sounds incredibly bored”. Back in Crawley, Robert Smith pondered this: if the critics noticed how bored the band was sounding on record, what chance did The Cure have when they would be forced to relive the album night after night for the next six months?

  Faith finally made its miserable presence felt in stores on April 11, reaching a UK chart peak of number 14. Though as uninformative and enigmatic as previous sleeves, the cover image was the Parched Art (Porl Thompson and his colleague Undy Vella) take on Bolton Abbey, a small village near Skipton in what is now North Yorkshire. It was a site that Smith knew extremely well: when he was a nipper, during family holidays in the Yorkshire Dales, he’d play in the grounds of the ruined abbey beside the River Wharfe. It is here, at a local landmark known as the Strid, that the river narrows and the current surges. According to Dales folklore, you can jump the river at this point, but if you fall short the seething current will drag you under and you’ll almost certainly drown. “It’s one of my oldest memories,” he’d admit.

  This was Thompson’s first Cure LP cover, although he had designed the sleeve for the ‘Primary’ single. It was yet another case of The Cure keeping things very close to home, Thompson, of course, being an ex (and future) member of the band, and husband-to-be of Smith’s sister Janet.

  Unimpressed by The Cure’s two prior album sleeves, Thompson, who was studying design in West Sussex, approached Smith and told him that his Parched Art could do a far better job. In a textbook case of method designing, he threw himself into the gig, ditching college and hanging out with the band in the various studios where the album was recorded. Despite all that, and his insistence that Parched Art were the right men for the job, the Faith cover image is no great progression from what came before. Smith, however, didn’t seem to mind, because Thompson and Vella would also design the covers for The Head On The Door and The Top. Thompson would also help out with the sleeve for Pornography.

  The year in rock 1981 would be a banner time for all things Goth, with the release of such albums as Joy Division’s swansong Still; Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Juju and Bauhaus’ Mask. Though every bit as grim, Faith wasn’t destined to be so highly regarded. It was ‘Primary’ all over again; critics were uncertain exactly what to make of all this useless misery – was the Thatcher regime to blame or was it simply the weather that made Robert Smith so bloody grim?

  Adam Sweeting was among the few champions of the album, noting that it should definitely be filed in the “uneasy listening” corner of the record store. He felt that there was something about Faith that could get under your skin. “Mostly,” he commented, “Faith is a sophisticated exercise in atmosphere and production, gloomy but frequently majestic. You may not love it, but you’ll become addicted to it.” NME grumbled that The Cure were now leaders of “the new songwriting category known to experts as Grammar School Angst”, although they did admit that there was an upside to the new album. “It’s very well played, beautifully recorded – and says absolutely nothing meaningful in a fairly depressing way.”

  Mike Nicholls, from Record Mirror, was a tad less generous with his praise, comparing the band unfavourably with PiL, John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols experiment in noise. “The Cure remain stuck in the hackneyed doom mongering that should have died with Joy Division,” he figured, not unreasonably. “[They] are lost in the maze of their spineless meanderings … hollow, shallow, pretentious, meaningless, self-important and bereft of any real heart and soul.” In short, Nicholls figured, Faith stank.

  When he revisited the album and the ensuing Picture Tour more than 20 years later, Robert Smith wasn’t that thrilled by Faith, either. He was convinced that the death of his grandmother and Tolhurst’s mother’s illness (there had also been a death in the Gallup family) had cast a dark pall over the record, a murky, morbid gloom that was almost tangible in its songs. “The initial demos that we did in my mum and dad’s dining room are really quite upbeat,” Smith said. “Then, within about two weeks, the whole mood of the band had completely changed. I wrote ‘The Funeral Party’ and ‘All Cats Are Grey’ in one night, and that really set the tone for the album.

  “A lot of people around the band began reacting badly to the fact that we were becoming successful, on a very limited scale. There was a lot of jealousy and sour grapes and people saying, ‘You’ve changed!’ We had changed because we weren’t going to the same pubs all the time, because we were touring Europe. So we lost a lot of friends, and we became much more insular. We would just drink ourselves into oblivion, and play these songs.”

  Accordingly, the Picture Tour was a grim affair, tinged with more than a little sadness, although the band’s use of Pink Floyd’s PA gave their live set an earthquaking sonic boom. (Smith had namechecked the Floyd’s Ummagumma in early discussions of Faith, when he owned up to admiring records that were “built around repetition”. He also included Benedictine chants and Indian mantras on his list.) Smith was suitably impressed by the Floyd PA after the band gave it a test run at Shepperton prior to the opening date at Friars in Aylesbury. It was roughly 10 times the size of their previous PA and was hardly likely to break down with the frequency of their old gear. “At the moment,” Smith said with some insistence, “it’s reliability we want.”


  Within a few dates of the Picture Tour – so named because of the screening of Ric Gallup’s Carnage Visors – The Cure had settled on a setlist to which they’d remain faithful for their next eight months. The opening trio of songs would typically combine Faith’s ‘The Holy Hour’ and ‘Other Voices’ with Seventeen Seconds’ ‘In Your House’, setting a resolutely bleak mood for the night. Their sets were now running to around 20 songs, but with the exception of a smattering of pre-Seventeen Seconds tracks (‘Killing An Arab’, ‘10.15 Saturday Night’), Tolhurst, Smith and Gallup stuck very rigidly to the downbeat, downcast mood that permeated their two most recent LPs. The Cure’s legend as the ultimate overcoat band, Gothic gloomsters obsessed with death, was firmly established during 1981.

  The morbidity of the music they were playing also started to seep into the band’s psyches off-stage. In the past they’d managed to balance onstage austerity with off-stage boozing and high jinks, but the unrelenting bleakness of these shows was like some social experiment gone horribly wrong. “I didn’t realise what effect it would have on the group,” said Smith. “I thought we could just merge the [new] songs in live, and the other [older] songs would balance, but it affected everyone. Those songs had a downward spiral effect on us – the more we played them, the more despondent and desolate we became.”

  The Cure’s ever-increasing fanbase wasn’t quite prepared for these funereal dirges and the trio’s increasingly long faces. Even during the first week of the tour, at an Oxford show covered by Melody Maker, the rock’n’roll natives were becoming increasingly restless. While an agitated audience yelled out unrequested requests – ‘Forest’, ‘10.15 Saturday Night’, ‘Killing An Arab’ – the band ploughed through their recent material with a cold, steely-eyed intent. As Melody Maker noted, there wasn’t a lot of love felt between band and punters. “The Cure were about four numbers into their set. As they paused for breath between songs, yells [for older songs] went up around the hall. We’ve paid our money and we want hits, dammit. Singer and guitarist Robert Smith stepped to the microphone and said, ‘This one’s called “The Funeral Party”.’ I thought I saw the hint of a smile.”

  Rival rag NME witnessed a similar uneasy atmosphere at their Reading show three nights later, April 26, at the Hexagon, but they did admit that the show displayed a reverence and solemnity that bordered on the “religious”. “They allow a sense of doom and fatalism to hang over them with a sense of personal election,” they reported. “At times they seem more impressed by their own exclusive use of a doomy vocabulary than convinced of it, white ghouls taking glamour from their pallor.”

  It was an astute take on The Cure circa 1981. In much the same way that they’d one day be pigeonholed as cute, huggable, big-haired pop freaks, as captured in their string of hit singles and made-for-MTV Tim Pope videos, they were now stuck in a ghoulish rut, playing the part of the voice of doom. Smith would become so wrapped up in the role he was playing that he’d sometimes leave the stage in tears.

  There were, however, occasional flashes of good humour: a show at Dublin College on May 22 would be remembered mostly by the band because they barricaded themselves inside a beer tent. (The show itself was a half-baked set played to uninterested locals.) Two weeks later, at Freiburg in Germany, there were almost as many people on stage as there was in the crowd – The Cure clearly didn’t have quite the pull in Deutschland as they did in neighbouring France. Smith spent most of the night seated at the front of the stage singing, pretty much to himself, and then got pleasantly smashed with the few punters who’d braved the stifling 90-degree heat.

  But these were rare moments of drunken joy. The Picture Tour bottomed out, hitting a low point on June 24, when the band played at the Terrein Serviem at Sittard in Holland. Having just completed their set, and with the crowd expecting an encore, Tolhurst was given an urgent message to call England immediately. When he did so, the voice at the other end had a simple, shocking message: “Your mother’s dead.” The band went back on stage and started playing ‘Faith’, but after what was possibly the most unbearable minute of his life, Tolhurst stopped, his shoulders drooped. The show was over.

  The next day the band returned to England for Daphne Tolhurst’s funeral, playing the tape of the previous night’s show during the service, as well as a handful of Daphne’s favourite Cure songs on acoustic guitars. A few hours later, over many drinks, Tolhurst insisted that the show must go on. If it didn’t, he might just lose his mind.

  “When we were in Germany,” he told me, “I came back to see her; she was staying with my sister who was a registered nurse. I knew she had about a month. I told everyone on the crew that if I got a call about her before a show, tell me afterwards because there’s not much I can do.

  “We were in Holland when my brother called. I drove down to Amsterdam that night, flew back, saw everyone, made the funeral arrangements and then kept touring because I figured that’s what my mother would want. Those few following nights after were the weirdest shows I’d ever played.

  “There’s a little causeway at the top of Holland and I remember driving along that a day or two after she died, and I saw these swans on one side in the freshwater and also in the sea, which always struck me as very weird,” Tolhurst continued. “I think that was a pivotal time for me about the way I would then think about things and write about things. Up until then a lot of what we wrote about came out of books and not out of real life. But we were now able to talk about what was happening to us and how they happened; that came to a pinnacle in Pornography.”

  For the immediate future, however, Tolhurst was on the verge of unravelling: his downward slide into chronic alcoholism had begun. “Since my mother died, for at least six months, every single restraint I had went straight out the window. I was sad, really, a lot of that was grief.”

  The Picture Tour took another bleak turn two weeks later, during a festival show on July 5 at Werchter in Belgium which featured the unlikely pairing of The Cure on stage before blue-eyed soul mannequin Robert Palmer. Palmer’s road crew had threatened to pull the plug if The Cure didn’t stop playing, but their tour manager shouted to them that they could play only one more song. As they lurched into ‘A Forest’, Smith had an announcement for the crowd: “This is the final song because we’re not allowed to carry on any more,” he stated. “Everybody wants to see Robert Palmer, I think.” Smith, Tolhurst and Gallup transformed the song into a nine-minute-long plod. When they finally neared the song’s end, with Palmer’s seething road crew looking on, Simon Gallup started up a chant of “fuck Robert Palmer, fuck rock’n’roll”. Minutes later, Palmer’s crew took their revenge, tossing The Cure’s equipment off the back of the stage, and trading blows with the band. The Cure wore their “us against the world” attitude like a badge of honour, and the tour dragged on.

  In between these European festival dates and the band’s next North American tour, The Cure paused to record a new single, again with Mike Hedges producing. The band had finally outgrown Morgan studios; this time they recorded at Hedges’ Playground Studio (which had been named by Smith, as it turned out). The track ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ was recorded over two days, July 16 and 17. Not only inspired by, but also named after the Penelope Farmer book – subtlety not being one of Smith’s strongest points – ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ wasn’t a major Cure single, but it marked a subtle transition from their grim past to their poppier future.

  Cut during the same recording pit-stop, ‘Splintered In Her Head’, the B-side of ‘Charlotte Sometimes’, was equally noteworthy because it was a very clear sonic signpost to their next album, Pornography. (The title was also taken from a line in the Penelope Farmer book.) The song emerged from a random drumbeat with which Smith had been tinkering. “The intention was that the song should complement ‘Charlotte’,” Smith admitted in the liner notes to Join The Dots, “that it should have the same kind of vibe. And despite my slightly deranged harmonica playing, I think it does. There are also definite s
igns of the Pornography stuff to come.”

  But the video for ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ was a major mistake, ranking among the worst of the band’s small-screen career. On the advice of Chris Parry, it was directed by Mike Mansfield, who’d made numerous videos for current band du jour Adam & The Ants. The clip was shot in the grounds of Netherne Hospital, where erstwhile Cure bassist Michael Dempsey had worked. Smith had hoped for something “really mysterious”, but the video’s cold, sterile mood didn’t do anyone any favours. When ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ was released in October, the album art featured a typically oblique, cryptic cover image, which was actually a shot of Mary Poole, which had been snapped by Smith at a Scottish castle in 1980. The song crawled to number 44 in the UK singles chart.

  Within a week of the single’s recording, The Cure was in New York for a double-header at The Ritz. But the band barely made it through the first night intact. Smith and Gallup had cheerfully gulped down two Quaaludes apiece, which had been offered to them backstage. They must have been super strength, because Tolhurst, in the uncommon role of straight man – he’d been to the dentist that afternoon and was advised against drinking for the day – genuinely feared for the barely conscious pair’s lives, as he escorted them to various New York clubs.

  “I had to carry both of them into the clubs, which I’m sure they don’t remember as they spent the rest of the night sitting on some couches pretty much unconscious,” Tolhurst said. “I attempted to get Simon to the bathroom at one point to splash some water in his face as he looked like he could depart at any time. Unfortunately I couldn’t hold him up over the sink so he nosedived straight into the porcelain, which must have hurt later.

  “Then a club patron came over to me, as it was obvious that I was having some difficulty holding Simon up, and offered to help. But before I could say or do anything he started blowing some unspecified powder up Simon’s nose. Simon regained consciousness just long enough to think the man was attacking him so he started stamping on the poor guy’s feet. Then he fell back into his stupor once more.