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  As Thornalley recalled, Smith spent a lot of time trying to be as actively and creatively involved in the production of the album as possible. As harmless as that sounds, the studio system was then very much stuck in the old school, BBC mindset: the talent’s rightful place was on the other side of the glass, while the producer and engineer ruled the control room. Smith’s studio attitude bordered on heresy.

  “Robert was very interested in the studio and I think, in some respects, he thought it was cool that someone who was a bit younger than him had learned how to use the studio,” said Thornalley. “He was always looking over my shoulder; in fact, on that album, he had his hands on the desk. In those days the engineer or the producer would growl at the artist if they got too close. They tried to make it as mystical as possible.”

  More than most bands, The Cure has a fantastic legacy of myth making. Of all The Cure long-players, Pornography remains the one album frequently singled out by converts and critics to be the most tortured and arduous for them to capture on tape. Smith himself added to the aura surrounding Pornography by insisting that he spent most of its three weeks’ recording completely wasted. “We slept very little during the recording,” he said in 2003. “There was a lot of drugs involved.” In another interview, Smith insisted that he couldn’t even remember making much of the album. “We probably drank and took more drugs than we should have – an interesting process, but one that would kill me now.”

  If the band’s documented history is to be read as the Gospel according to Saint Bob, Lovecat Robert Smith used up several of his nine lives just trying to get the record made. But this theory is based on selective memory and the incredibly bleak and pessimistic gloomscapes captured by Thornalley and the band. A healthy dose of spin, at least on Smith’s part, also comes into play. Yet to their first-time producer, making Pornography was almost the perfect studio experience: Thornalley spent three weeks (from their one day of demos to the final mix) working with a band who came into the studio fully rehearsed and prepared to make a seriously heavy album. There were no overdoses, no hissy fits, no breakdowns. There was, however, a hefty £1,600 in the recording budget to cover the band’s cocaine intake, according to at least one studio staffer whom I spoke to. With Thornally and Nocito uninvolved, most nights would begin with several heart-starting lines of blow; sometimes four or five hours would pass before any work was attempted. And Smith wouldn’t even consider attempting vocals – which were usually recorded in the very early hours of the morning – unless he was “pretty hammered”, as co-engineer (and teetotaller) Nocito would tell me. Yet this was hardly uncharacteristic behaviour for a young rock band in the studio.

  “I don’t remember [the sessions as] being dark and doomy,” Thornalley said. “The music was obviously dark, but as for the process, I don’t recall there not being any laughter. I think there was. Maybe Robert was the tortured artist and the others maybe weren’t so emotionally involved.” Engineer Nocito agreed that it wasn’t all gloom and doom during the making of the album, although he did admit that the weather (it was a cruel English winter) and the late hours didn’t make for the most ideal working environment. “It’s hard to be lively at four in the morning,” he told me.

  Smith, typically, offered up a much darker version of the album’s recording – he likened it to the creepy comic film Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s tortured newsman character is forced to relive the same day time and time again. “You knew what you were going to be doing, what drugs you were going to take,” Smith insisted. “You knew how you were going to feel the following morning. It just became a sort of bizarre routine.

  “At the time,” Smith added, “I lost every friend I had, everyone, without exception, because I was incredibly obnoxious, appalling, self-centred. The tension in the studio was palpable, really. In a strange way it was sort of fun to do because it was so bad.” Maybe Smith and Thornalley were recalling different albums: who can really tell?

  From my research, the only time Smith and Thornalley truly clashed was very early in the recording. When a session wound down at 9am, the very nocturnal Smith told RAK studio staff to expect him back at 3pm, which gave Thornalley and Nocito the chance to catch only five or six hours of much-needed sleep, at best. Smith did this for several sessions, but rarely rolled into the studio before 8pm. Thornalley, understandably, was fed up and questioned Smith’s professionalism. A brief flare-up ensued but, from then on in, Smith was a little more realistic when it came to nominating a starting time. The mood swiftly improved, to the stage where band and RAK staff were allocated nicknames: Thornalley was from then onwards known as “Da Vinci”, engineer Nocito was “Mitch” and Smith was “Sandy”, named after a Crossroads character. (Nocito’s nickname has stuck to this day.)

  Phil Thornalley believes that Lol Tolhurst has been harshly treated in the documented history of both Pornography and the band itself. According to Robert Smith, Tolhurst the drummer was about as useful as trying to clap with one hand tied behind your back. Smith insisted that Tolhurst needed the help of his bandmates just to get through the Pornography sessions.

  “I don’t want to be slanderous,” Smith said at a 2003 press conference, before doing just that, “but Lol had, at times, a very limited range.”

  Smith has also stated that during the Pornography sessions he and Gallup chose to stand on either side of Tolhurst, sticks in their hands, drumming with him “because he was physically too weak to do it – and we wanted a big, booming sound”. And Smith has repeatedly said that Tolhurst’s key role in The Cure was that of band mascot-cum-whipping boy, the willing and frequent target of his and Gallup’s scorn. It would seem that his musical role was minimal, almost non-existent. (Smith’s views of his fellow Cure founder, admittedly, have been clouded by the court case Tolhurst would later bring against him and the band. It’s hard to give a balanced opinion of an obviously pissed-off former confidant when he’s dragged you through the courts.)

  Thornalley disagrees with Smith’s low estimation of Tolhurst’s creative worth. Thornalley felt that Tolhurst was a rock-steady drummer, whose solid time-keeping formed the core of Pornography’s grim wall of sound (what NME’s David Quantick would refer to as “Phil Spector in hell”). “I think Lol was a good drummer; he wasn’t a great drummer but he was really, really steady,” Thornalley said. And the producer was a reliable witness; he’d been amazed by the sheer number of diabolical drummers in punk and post-punk bands with major record deals who’d recorded at RAK. Most of these so-called timekeepers had trouble staying awake, let alone staying in time. “It was so hard getting good drum sounds because they couldn’t play. But Lol could play; he could stay in time and that’s the basis of that record, the mantra of the drums. They start off on one pattern and stay there. He was solid; he kept up that two-bar riff.”

  “Lol was limited but that doesn’t mean someone’s not good,” continued Thornalley. “It’s a shame. His work on those earlier albums is unique and that’s kind of what you want to be when you’re a musician.”

  Engineer Nocito agreed with this take on Tolhurst. “Everybody knew Lol wasn’t a great drummer, but he was great for The Cure. If Boris [Williams, future Cure drummer] had played on Pornography, the record wouldn’t have been anything.” (Post Pornography, when Nocito saw the band on tour – he even recorded a Glasgow show on the RAK mobile recording unit – he would continue to be in awe of Tolhurst’s fists-of-iron. “I remember being so impressed by Lol, because you kept wondering if the thing was going to fall apart, yet somehow he kept it all together.”)

  Tolhurst told me that his so-called “mantra of the drums” was, in part, the result of buying new gear. He’d bought a huge snare drum, somewhere between 10 and 12 inches deep, from The Specials’ drummer John Bradbury. He also acknowledged that the room they used in RAK was perfect for the cavernous rumble of the drums that can be heard all over the album. “We just wanted something that was very powerful,” he said. “This room we used in RAK had this huge ceil
ing; it made them much louder and reverberant. It fitted the tone of the material.

  “The songs were pretty sharp and angst-filled; the big booming sound seemed right. It was one of my favourite memories playing drums. It was angry but restrained as well; we wanted to make the ultimate, intense album. I can’t remember exactly why, but we did.”

  During their several weeks of recording Pornography, The Cure adopted a siege mentality. They decided to bunker down in the Fiction offices, which weren’t too far from the RAK Studios. Smith made himself a tent-like construction in one room of the Fiction camp, situated on the floor behind a settee. He’d fastened a blanket to the wall with a drawing pin, which created a sort of rough and ready lean-to. And he was very much the master of his domain.

  “We took over Fiction and wouldn’t let anyone in the door,” Smith recalled in Ten Imaginary Years. “I had all these little bits, things I’d found in the street and taken back to my nest. It really got out of hand.”

  When Tolhurst, Gallup and roadie Gary Biddles weren’t holed up in their own room at Fiction HQ, or hoovering their way through their £1,600 of coke (the budget was topped up after a week, apparently), they were building a mountain of beer cans in the corner of RAK Studios, or distracting Smith with their sloshed off-mic capers. At the time, the rest of the band was thrown by Smith’s seriousness, although Gallup would eventually understand his attitude. “He had to concentrate 20 hours of the day and we only had to do it for 12.” (Thornalley: “Robert resented that because he was trying to make a statement.”)

  At the end of each night’s recording, Thornalley was under strict directions to stop the cleaners from touching the sky-high pile of beer cans. He was, however, allowed to usher into the studio some Cure fans who worked at a nearby off-licence; they had the plum job of delivering the band’s nightly supply of beer. To The Cure, this aluminium edifice marked the progress of the album just as vividly as the tapes of each song. “It was very difficult to explain to the cleaner every day – ‘don’t touch the cans’,” Thornalley said. “The stench must have been appalling.” Engineer Nocito learned a tough lesson when he attempted to clean up this rapidly expanding mess: Parry gave him a serious dressing-down. “I think he might have let me empty them, though,” Nocito laughed.

  “We built this mountain of empties in the corner,” Smith said, “a gigantic pile of debris. It just grew and grew.” Smith still has a photo of their beer can Himalaya, as does Tolhurst.

  Despite Smith’s assertions that his fragile state of mind had reached breaking point during the making of Pornography, Thornalley recalled that there was only one break during the three weeks. And that was because Smith underestimated the potency of some industrial-strength acid that he’d swallowed when the coke ran out – it wasn’t due to any type of mental collapse or tortured artist syndrome. “Yes, some very strong acid was dropped,” Thornalley confirmed with a laugh. “There was a complete lack of focus [for one day] but then everything came back to normal.” As normal as life could be in the midst of all-night binges and a five-foot-high pile of beer cans, of course.

  “I remember getting to the studio,” Tolhurst said, “and I’m sitting in a chair. Robert’s at my feet and he suddenly started laughing uncontrollably. I turned to Phil and said, ‘Oh dear, I don’t think we’ll be recording today.’ Robert spent the next two days hidden behind the couch under a pile of sheets.”

  In spite of The Cure’s football-team-worthy consumption of ale and Colombia’s finest both during and after each recording session, Thornalley only witnessed one night of genuine Caligula-like behaviour. And even then it was when the sessions were over and The Cure hooked up with the Banshees and fellow Fiction labelmates The Associates for a monumental post-sessions piss-up. Producer Mike Hedges also joined the party, as did Ric Gallup, who organised a special screening of Carnage Visors for the night (he’d just done likewise during the album’s mixing, screening the film on the RAK studio wall). “That was pretty debauched,” Thornalley said quietly.

  As for inner-band politics, if there was any serious tension within The Cure it completely bypassed Thornalley. The Cure didn’t seem to bear any grudges, either, because former members Matthieu Hartley and Michael Dempsey visited the band during the making of the record. However, Thornalley did have a pretty thick skin, which rendered him immune to any in-fighting, if it did exist. “I’d been in situations with The Psychedelic Furs where there were fist-fights in the studio,” he told me. “I was kind of numb to the band politics that were going on.” As for engineer Nocito, he was impressed by Smith’s quick wit and stunned by his deeply sarcastic nature. Tolhurst, in particular, would be the frequent victim of Smith’s vocal sparring. Interestingly though, Nocito felt that the bond between Tolhurst and Smith was tighter than that between Smith and Gallup. “Lol and Robert were very close,” Nocito told me. “Simon, if anything, was the easiest to talk to of the band.”

  In fact, Lol Tolhurst could sense that the sheer intensity of the music they were making, and the band’s strong focus on making the album, had started to drive a wedge between Smith and Gallup. By the end of the subsequent tour, they’d resort to speaking with their fists. “By Pornography it was still very much democratic but the very nature of what we were doing made it difficult, especially between Robert and Simon,” said Tolhurst. “Simon liked to come to the studio, play whatever he had to play and then relax, but the very nature of Pornography meant we had to be on all the time. That was the seed right there of Simon’s departure. It was a very intense time.”

  Chris Parry, meanwhile, once more kept his distance during the making of the album. Maybe being the number two target of Smith’s sarcasm – “‘Bill’ would get it almost more than anybody,” Nocito said – made him wary. He only intervened when it dawned on him that there obviously wasn’t another ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ or ‘A Forest’ amongst the album’s nine dense tracks. The chance of extracting a single from Pornography was about as likely as clearing away The Cure’s beer-can mountain. Parry admitted that he was bored by the album, with the possible exception of the track ‘A Strange Day’. He’d wander into the sessions at 10 o’clock most nights, but could only endure a few hours before heading for the door. At the same time Parry understood the simple necessity of a song for radio, and thought he could salvage something from ‘The Hanging Garden’. He instructed both his star and Thornalley to polish the song. Thornalley and Smith tried, but the producer feels that it was time (and money) wasted.

  “Under pressure from Chris Parry we [worked on] ‘Hanging Garden’” – which was finally released as a single in July 1982, clawing its way to number 32 on the UK chart – “to add something more catchy. I think we spent more time on that [than any other track on the album] trying to make it more palatable to radio programmers.” These were the same radio programmers, of course, who were currently spinning such hits as Bananarama’s ‘Shy Boy’ and Hot Chocolate’s ‘It Started With A Kiss’. A ditty about the “purity of animals fucking”, set to some primal jungle drums, was always going to be a tough sell.

  But Smith was on a different wavelength to Parry. Although he wasn’t averse to a hit record, he simply wasn’t as obsessed by the charts. His dream was to create an album that would be seen as a statement of serious artistic intent from a songwriter hoping to say something more profound than “boys don’t cry”. And if it didn’t work, then fuck it, The Cure was over and he’d move on.

  Though Thornalley admits that he didn’t really connect with Smith’s message – “I didn’t know what he was on about, frankly; I was 21 and wasn’t on the same emotional level with him in any sense, emotionally or artistically” – they did bond when it came to sonic exploration. He and Smith would experiment with what were then known as “found sounds”, a concept that was introduced to the mainstream by the recent release My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. This landmark album was a collaboration between a pair of like-minded rock’n’roll eggheads, Talking Heads’ David Byrne and studio pioneer
(and erstwhile Roxy Music keyboardist) Brian Eno.

  Inspired by this ground-breaking LP, Smith and Thornalley would flick between TV stations, searching for random grabs of noise to record and incorporate into Pornography’s murky soundscape. During one night of exploring, they not only found the perfect sound bite, but also chanced upon the album’s title, when they discovered a televised debate between two unlikely opponents: feminist Germaine Greer and Monty Python comic Graham Chapman. Their discussion topic was, of course, pornography. A few seconds of their “deconstructed” version of the debate can be heard at the opening of Pornography’s title track.

  “It was one of those very weird coincidences,” said Thornalley. “Around that time it was considered quite cool to put a microphone next to the television and record whatever as a kind of effects track. It just so happened that the discussion we recorded was a debate about pornography. A very strange coincidence.”

  Polydor, who were responsible for distributing and marketing the band’s releases through Parry’s Fiction label, weren’t that impressed by the title Pornography. When NME revealed the album’s proposed name in early March, a humourless Polydor spokesman made this comment: “Whether or not it actually goes out under that title remains to be seen.”

  The title of the new Cure album, however, was a minor concern for both Polydor and Parry when they were given a preview of the album at Mike Hedges’ new Camden studio, The Playground. If Seventeen Seconds and Faith had suggested that you were listening to a band dealing with some genuine pain, Pornography was the sound of death, pure and simple. Parry summed it up when he stated: “The first album was done in naivety, the second with clear cut-vision, the third under difficulty and Pornography was all those three rolled into one. It was a mess.” (Parry may have taken some consolation from the fact that Pornography, unlike Faith, came in on budget, even if there was plenty of red ink in the column marked “cocaine”.)