Never Enough Read online

  “Eventually I thought I’d better get them back to the hotel to sleep it off,” Tolhurst continued. “The only way I could persuade them to come with me was by starting a fight with Simon so he would get up and run after me straight into the back seat of a taxi to take us to the hotel. Once there it took me about an hour to persuade Simon that he didn’t need to brush his teeth first, he should just go to bed.

  “We didn’t have a lot of money back then so we were all sharing a suite of rooms. I finally pushed them both in the direction of the bedroom. Then I heard Simon back up again trying to brush his teeth. At this point I abandoned the effort and went to bed myself. The next day was funny.”

  The tone was set for the rest of their North American tour and the upcoming August shows in Australia and New Zealand: Smith was so freaked out by the usual well-wishers after their Hollywood show at the Whisky A Go Go on July 27 that he took refuge in his hotel room, in tears. A few nights later, while in Auckland, New Zealand, Smith tracked down Severin, who was in Scotland with his fellow Banshees. The Cure frontman felt that he needed to give his new pal a sneak preview of ‘Charlotte Sometimes’, which he promptly played down the phone to Severin before falling asleep. However, a dangerously drowsy Smith hadn’t hung up the phone. The next morning, The Cure was down $480.

  A review of The Cure’s 15-song set at Christchurch, on August 6, aptly showed the uncertain response the band was copping from both press and fans throughout the Picture Tour. “The Cure concert was tiring, sometimes difficult, an accessible barrier, no fun, but deserved respect,” David Swift wrote in local newspaper The Press. “The band was not close to the audience, but earned accolades all the way.” Bizarrely, Swift likened bassman Simon Gallup to Thin Lizzy’s rock’n’ roll gypsy, Phil Lynott, a comparison that would have provided one-time Lizzy lover Robert Smith with a rare chuckle. Swift’s response to the night’s opener, Carnage Visors, was to shrug and wait for the main attraction. “I do not think anyone will remember the film,” he surmised. As for the band’s dour frontman, Swift felt that the only hint of personality that Smith demonstrated all night was his T-shirt, which was emblazoned with the image of tragic Hollywood bombshell, Marilyn Monroe. Death was all around.

  The band then crossed the Tasman to Australia, where they found a way to deal with the seemingly non-stop requests for their more accessible, pre-Seventeen Seconds tunes: physical confrontation. “They were expecting a lighter, poppier show,” Smith figured, reasonably enough, “and … we started with ‘The Holy Hour’ and ‘All Cats Are Grey’, seven minutes of atmosphere.”

  The mood darkened when the band returned to Canada for a series of shows, followed by a month-long tour of France, which ended with a rough night at Toulon’s Theatre D’Hiver on October 23. By this stage of their increasingly violent and seemingly never-ending tour, Smith and Gallup had developed an unspoken understanding: when Smith started to unstrap his guitar, Gallup knew that it was time to leap into the crowd “to settle accounts”.

  Smith would recall in Ten Imaginary Years that much of the tour was, to him, a blur of angry crowds and his own fragile state of mind. (He and Gallup were obviously still recovering from their Quaaludes encounter in New York.) “I don’t really remember many of those shows,” Smith said. “I was getting to the manic stage that was going to lead to Pornography. I was due for a break – too much of everything, no respite.”

  If only it could have been that easy. The band had a final lap of the UK scheduled before they could take the time to check their heads and determine if this pain (both physical and existential) was really worthwhile. The support act for the last British leg of the Picture tour was punk poetess Lydia Lunch, who had teamed up with the Banshees’ Steve Severin, the man who had been appalled by Smith’s green check suit when they first met a couple of years earlier. This new collaboration called itself 13.13. Not only would the bond between Severin and Smith tighten during these dates, but Lunch and Robert Smith would also form their own unholy alliance.

  Born only five weeks after Smith, on June 2, 1959 in Rochester, New York, Lunch was already a veteran at 22 when she first met Smith during the tour. Lunch was seemingly born to punk. At the age of 16 she was a key player in New York’s ‘No Wave’ scene, shrieking and chanting at the front of Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, who contributed four cuts to Brian Eno’s highly regarded No New York compilation, a snapshot of the short-lived scene that also spawned such acts as James White & The Blacks, and Defunkt. Lunch had also starred in three 8mm movies by filmmaker Vivienne Dick, before recording the pivotal Queen Of Siam album with a band that included ex-Voidoid (and future Lou Reed) guitarist Robert Quine and a bassist calling himself Jack Ruby (real name George Scott), who’d played alongside John Cale. By the time Lunch was heading the very fluid line-up of 13.13, she’d shifted base to California. Steve Severin was at her side by the time Lunch arrived for their first show at the Lyceum in Sheffield on November 25. She’d been personally invited by Smith to join the tour. And Also The Trees, who would soon be working in the studio with Lol Tolhurst, were also on the bill.

  When I spoke with Lunch in late 2004, she retained strong, very deeply felt memories of the tour, which she expressed in her typically potent mix of prose and poetry. “At the time,” she said, “I was experimenting with the spontaneous explosion of The Agony Is The Ecstasy [a work which would eventually be released in 1982 as an EP cut with The Birthday Party]. Never has there been a more appropriate title.”

  Clearly the shows were as tumultuous for Lunch as they were for The Cure, as she would go on to explain. “Take musicians who have never played together before, throw them on stage with the vague theme of ‘follow the lyrics’ – [playing] sad songs about death, decay and murder – and encourage them to illustrate. Pray for the best, expect the worst.”

  Whereas The Cure’s method for dealing with audience apathy and agitation during this tour was to resort to physical violence, Lunch and 13.13 just powered on, while the crowds stared, unsure what to make of the wild scene they were witnessing. If there was one thing that both 13.13 and The Cure took away from the Picture Tour, it was this: they’d been through a heavy learning experience. “The tour taught me,” Lunch said, “especially in front of thousands of black-clad sad romantics, that my instinct has always been to improv wildly, madly, with force of insight, even if said experiment creates an atrocious, hideous din to which no one – sometimes even the self – is not in tune with. This is far better than repeating, night after night, a set song list whose tedium is far more aggravating than the frightening sounds, like that of a naked wound, seething in agony, amplified to an unbearable fevered pitch of near hysteria.”

  As for the tour itself, Lunch doesn’t remember it as being an overly sociable time – it was hardly a laugh riot backstage. Instead she remembered it being “one of the darkest periods for everyone I know”. Lunch told me there were three common denominators on the Picture Tour: “drug abuse, depression, alcohol”. In fact, Lunch’s own set was so physically and mentally draining – screaming blue murder at the top of your lungs to a stony-faced crowd can do that – that most nights she didn’t have the energy to hang around until the show was over. Instead she’d simply collapse in a heap.

  As arduous and draining as those dates turned out to be, Lunch and Smith maintained what she described as a “long-distance relationship” well after the tour ended on December 3. Smith must have felt strongly about their time together: he even had a “mystery” inscription dedicated to Lunch carved into the run-out groove of the vinyl of one of their early albums (most likely Pornography).

  “I always found him terribly sweet, sensitive and shy,” Lunch told me, offering quite a different take on a man who was sometimes known to jump into his audiences and physically sort out all non-believers. In an effort to continue their relationship/friendship, Smith and Lunch created a small montaged book of poetry and photographs which would bounce between them over the ensuing years. “I still have it,” she told
me. “[It contains] pieces of hair, photos of ghost-white dolls with no eyes, criminal tales of love gone sour. A beautiful little funeral book.”

  It would be a serious challenge to find a symbol more apt for the Picture Tour than Smith and Lunch’s “beautiful little funeral book”. The Cure – and Smith in particular – had pushed themselves dangerously close to the edge over the past eight months. They’d alienated audiences, tested their own toxic capacities and found themselves continually questioning the very reason they were making music in the first place. When asked about the Faith period in 2004, Smith could see it was clearly a Cure low point.

  “When we toured on the back of this album, the mood was so sombre,” he recalled. “It wasn’t a particularly healthy thing to do because we were reliving a really bad time, night after night, and it got incredibly depressing. And so I kind of have mixed feelings about Faith.”

  When the tour finally ground to a halt at the Hammersmith Palais on December 3, rather than retire to their respective Crawley recovery centres – Smith was still bunking with his parents; it wasn’t until 1985 that he bought a London flat, in Maida Vale, which he shared with long-time, long-suffering partner Mary Poole – The Cure jumped straight into their next project, their fourth album, Pornography. It would turn out to be the longest, darkest night of a career that, to this stage, could have desperately used an injection of something just a little upbeat and life-affirming. Robert Smith simply couldn’t resist the temptation to dissect his own black soul and then put it on public display.

  * Smith also referred to Peake’s trilogy of novels in the song ‘The Drowning Man’, referring specifically to the third book in the series, Titus Groan.

  Chapter Seven

  “We wanted to make the ultimate, intense album. I can’t remember exactly why, but we did.”

  – Lol Tolhurst

  THE Picture Tour had almost been a career-ending slog, a maze of dispirited crowds, wasted nights and non-stop travel. But rather than pause and regroup, the trio of Smith, Tolhurst and Gallup barely took the time out to reintroduce themselves to friends and family before they began sessions for their fourth album. This time around, Smith in particular felt that he wanted to work with someone other than producer Mike Hedges – ideally someone younger and a little more flexible in their working methods. Parry and Smith, jokingly, had made a wager with Hedges that if the single ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ flopped, then they’d look elsewhere for a new producer. Maybe they weren’t kidding after all. Hedges’ contribution to The Cure had been vital, especially in the making of Seventeen Seconds and Faith, albums that helped to define the darker side of Robert Smith’s muse. But the band and Parry knew it was time to experiment. Hedges made their decision easier when he opted to produce Siouxsie & The Banshees’ A Kiss In The Dreamhouse album instead of making another Cure LP.

  Producer-in-the-making Phil Thornalley had been recommended to the band by studio veteran Steve Lillywhite. Thornalley had been Lillywhite’s studio engineer and general sidekick during the making of The Psychedelic Furs’ 1981 breakthrough long-player, Talk Talk Talk. (A rough and tumble studio encounter, as it turned out, with frequent punch-ups interrupted by the occasional recording of songs.) Thornalley had worked with virtual hit machine Lillywhite during various other RAK studio sessions. Thornalley was no Cure insider, but he wasn’t a complete stranger to Parry. Their paths had crossed when Thornalley was the tape operator on the All Mod Cons album in 1978, a hit for Chris Parry’s other suburban three-piece, The Jam. Thornalley, however, played down any strong connection to The Cure when we spoke in late 2004. He insists he was simply “a name on a list” when he was eventually hired by the band over the Christmas/New Year break.*

  If Robert Smith was serious about being on the lookout for someone with a different approach, background and age to Mike Hedges, he couldn’t have made a more astute choice than Thornalley, who was Smith’s junior by about eight months. Born in Warlington, Suffolk, on January 5, 1960, Thornalley was one of two boys, his brother Jonathan being a couple of years older. Thornalley didn’t come from an especially musical family, although, as he told me, his childhood neighbours were musically inclined, which is where he first developed a taste for rock’n’roll. By the time he left Culford School at Bury St Edmunds, in 1978, Phil Thornalley had already played in several fledgling outfits. “But that didn’t look like the route for me. I was interested in being a producer and songwriter and the studio seemed the right place for me.”

  Very much the right teenager in the right place, Thornalley scored a plum job: a sound engineer apprenticeship at London’s legendary RAK Studios where he started work in 1978. There were few better places to learn studiocraft, especially for someone like Thornalley, who had a real flair for thinking-person’s pop. Established in 1976, RAK Studios (and the RAK record label) was the baby of Mickie Most, who’d produced The Animals’ seminal ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ (in 15 minutes!), amongst other benchmark hits from the Sixties. Most was very much a man with an ear for the charts, subsequently signing such multi-million-sellers as Suzi Quatro, Smokie, Kim Wilde and Hot Chocolate to the RAK label. Pop-lover Thornalley couldn’t have hoped for a better boss or mentor. (Later, as part of pop outfit Johnny Hates Jazz, Thornalley would record with Most’s son Calvin Hayes, who was the band’s keyboardist, and Mike Nocito, the co-engineer of Pornography.)

  “He was fantastic; no other producer has come along like him,” Thornalley said of Most. “His instincts were totally commercial but refreshingly so, because his sessions were over very quickly. He knew if something was a hit or not.” By the time Chris Parry and Smith chose to work with Thornalley, initially for one day in what Thornalley would describe to me as a “probationary trial”, he was the house engineer at RAK.

  The Cure’s approach to recording the album was hardly typical. As Nocito told me, a first day of recording is usually spent “just getting the drum sound right”. Yet The Cure came in and played their entire album, from bleak start to grim finish, in one hit. Both Thornalley and engineer Nocito were stunned. Then Smith, Tolhurst, Gallup and Parry retired to consider their verdict: was Thornalley the producer they needed? (“I think they were deciding if they liked my attitude,” said Thornalley.)

  As his bandmates and manager chewed it over, Smith spent a weekend in a windmill in Guildford (I kid you not) where he fine-tuned most of the album’s lyrics in a stream-of-consciousness outpouring. Still dazed and confused by the band’s ruthless Picture Tour, Smith had decided that his new lyrics should head into even heavier territory than Faith or Seventeen Seconds, if that was humanly possible. “I really thought that was it for the group,” he said in 2003, looking back at another of his darkest hours. “I had every intention of signing off. I wanted to make the ultimate fuck-off record, then The Cure would stop. Whatever I did next, I would have achieved one lasting thing with the band. So Pornography, from the moment we started it, we knew that was it.”

  “I had two choices at the time,” Smith said in another discussion of Pornography, “which were either completely giving in [thereby emulating Joy Division’s Ian Curtis] or making a record of it and getting it out of me. I’m glad I chose to make the record. It would have been very easy just to curl up and disappear.”

  His poison-pen lyrics now prepared, Smith and the band reconvened. Obviously they approved of Thornalley, because by Christmas 1981 they’d agreed to make the album with him. Yet in spite of the band’s slowly rising star, Thornalley was, if anything, underwhelmed by the moody trio. To him, they were just the next act on the RAK schedule, slotted in between sessions with such hit machines as Hot Chocolate, Racey and popstress Kim Wilde, who worked in the next studio at RAK while The Cure unleashed their fourth album. The Cure sometimes passed Wilde in the corridor, having just finished another all-nighter – most sessions for Pornography running from around 8pm to breakfast time. By this time of the morning, The Cure would be “looking fairly deranged,” as Smith would relate. Ms Wilde was not amused.
“I think I scared the hell out of Kim Wilde,” Tolhurst told me. “I cornered her once and had a big long conversation about nothing. She was ready to go to work and I was ready to go to the pub. But she was game.”

  Thornalley would defend RAK’s musical egalitarianism. “[Everything else was] full-on pop,” Thornalley told me, “not particularly dark and meaningful ‘art’, although legitimate in their own right.” In fact, the only song of The Cure’s that Thornalley had heard was ‘Killing An Arab’, and even then it was via a random spotting on the radio. “Those early records had a sound, but not one I would try to get. I worked at the studio and The Cure was just the next group that came in,” Thornalley explained to me. “That was my job. There was no pontificating on my part; it was very unpretentious. One day it could be a middle-of-the-road singer, the next day an orchestra, then The Cure for three weeks. You just get on with it, you know.

  “I had no real knowledge of the history of the band. Perhaps that was positive, because I had my own feelings on good sounds. I’d learned a lot from Mickie Most and Steve Lillywhite, who tended to be more aggressive in their approach. They tried to get some excitement on the tape as opposed to coldness.”

  Thornalley quickly came to understand the hierarchy within The Cure: Smith was an interested and willing student in the craft of recording, while the less technically inclined Tolhurst and Gallup left Smith alone in the control room and concentrated on getting their parts right. “Simon and Lol weren’t as interested, but from a recording point of view, they were experienced; they were well-rehearsed,” Thornalley figured, reasonably enough. “They’d obviously done it many times before. That was very refreshing. They knew where things belonged; they knew what was going on.”