Never Enough Read online

  And Smith was still being eaten up by the realisation that, unlike Ian Curtis, he wasn’t prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for his music. He had what he would later describe as a “genuine passion for being alive. Life never got that painful for me,” Smith said. “Even when the void opened up before me, I always thought, ‘The sun will rise whether I’m here or not, so I may as well be here for as long as I can and try to find some enjoyment.’” But Smith did feel the heavy weight that came with The Cure not being regarded as “serious” as Joy Division because they chose life over death – as stupid and puerile as that seems. He was learning that rock’n’roll was a fickle business, even in matters as weighty as life and death.

  Whatever the cause of their tension, this once-tight combo were now solitary men. After most shows, Gallup preferred to hitch a ride with The Cure crew rather than travel with his bandmates, while Smith was spending more and more time alone, holding up the bar in numerous hotels before retiring to drain his mini bar, occasionally sleeping it off in the bath.

  During the Picture Tour they’d sometimes fought with audiences, but now The Cure was fighting with everyone – with each other, surly staff in European clubs, even the occasional biker gang. Smith, in particular, had crawled away from some of these clashes very much bruised and battered. Even members of their crew were throwing the odd punch at each other in anger. By the time the bloodied and disgruntled Cure bandwagon rolled into Strasbourg on May 27, for a show at Hall Tivoli, almost everyone involved was eagerly anticipating the end of the tour, which was just two weeks away in Brussels.

  After yet another brutal show, played to a bewildered audience, Gallup and Smith were drinking on separate floors of a Strasbourg club. Gallup, along with his new buddies in the road crew, was finishing up for the night when he was told by a member of the bar staff that he hadn’t paid for his drinks. Gallup, apparently, had been mistaken for Smith – the usual conflicting evidence, however, doesn’t clearly indicate exactly who was in the wrong. Whatever the case, Gallup decided he’d had enough of Smith, so he walked over to his Cure bandmate and thumped him.

  As Gallup saw it, Smith had seemed oblivious to his dilemma. “I was knackered but the [barman] took me up to the bar and Robert appeared to see what was going on. I hit him, he responded and we had a fight.”

  “He didn’t want to pay for his drinks because he thought I wasn’t paying for mine,” Smith explained. “I told him to shut up and he punched me. It was the first time he really laid into me; we had an enormous ruck.”

  Lol Tolhurst, meanwhile, was holding up the bar with members of Zerra 1. “I was talking with Paul and Grimmo of the opening band,” Tolhurst said to me. “Someone came over and said, ‘I think there’s been a fight and Simon and Robert have left the club.’ I thought I’d carry on because I was having a nice time. When I got up the next morning, the tour manager told me that they’d both gone; they’d got separate flights home.

  “I thought about putting a wig on [Zerra l’s] Paul Bell, playing a tape of the previous night and keeping the lights low, [that way] we could keep going. I thought better of it and a couple of days later they came back and finished the tour. But the writing was on the wall for Simon.”

  Smith’s father also had a hand in keeping the show on its rocky road. When Smith unexpectedly arrived on his doorstep, he lectured his son on his responsibilities as an entertainer. “People have bought tickets,” Smith senior admonished his son. “Get right back out on tour.”

  But the damage was very clearly done. The Cure was headed for a serious fall and it was impossible for anyone to stop it from happening. The inevitable crash happened on June 11 at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels at the last show of the Fourteen Explicit Moments Tour. Backstage, a clearly fed up Smith announced that he was going to be the drummer for the evening’s show. Gallup figured that if Smith were going to be contrary, he’d do likewise: therefore he was going to play guitar. Tolhurst walked over and strapped on Gallup’s bass. Though no one would say it out loud, there was an air of finality: the three could sense that this was the end of The Cure, possibly forever. So rather than go out with a whimper, they chose to say goodbye with a racket. “I thought, ‘I’m not going through this pantomime,’” Smith revealed. “I knew it was the last chance we had to make this memorable in the worst possible way. I’d never played the drums in public; I don’t think Lol knew which way a bass went.”

  Somehow the set proceeded, the newly configured band reeling off such 1982 standards as ‘Siamese Twins’, ‘Primary’ and ‘One Hundred Years’ in rapid succession. But by the time the quarrelsome Cure could begin their last song, ‘Pornography’, roadie Gary Biddles – who was very much from the Gallup camp – grabbed the mic. He had a simple message for the crowd: “Robert Smith is a cunt.” (Smith insisted he also shouted: “Tolhurst’s a wanker.”) Smith, still in a violent frame of mind, threw his drumsticks at Biddles, striking him in the head; then Gallup jumped into the fray. Tolhurst, meanwhile, brushed his curls out of his eyes and continued grappling with his bass. “That was pretty morose that night,” Tolhurst recalled. “I think Gary Biddles was jumping around the stage saying various things about Robert and I. He was part of the Gallup alliance.” When the melee had finally been halted, the three knew that the dream was well and truly over. As far as Robert Smith was concerned, The Cure was dead.

  “By the end of the tour, we weren’t in the best of health mentally,” Smith wildly understated when asked in 2003 about the brawl that ended the first stage of The Cure’s career. “Night after night playing those songs – most nights after the shows were pretty demented as a response to what we were doing musically. I was in a really depressed frame of mind; I was taking an awful lot of drugs – anything and everything [bar heroin, Smith has stated more than once]. Inevitably, it sent your mental equilibrium awry.”

  Tolhurst admitted that their drug consumption wasn’t helping the band’s problems, but felt their troubles ran deeper than whatever they were putting up their noses. “I don’t think it [coke] makes people reasonable; it exacerbates things. But I also think the problems were there and would have come out sooner or later.” He also felt part of the band’s problems related to the timing of the tour – Pornography hadn’t been released in many of their ports of call, which meant they were playing unfamiliar songs to unprepared crowds.

  “The main thing that’s true is that it was the first tour we’d been on without releasing the album [to coincide],” Tolhurst said. “We were touring and playing the songs for an album that nobody had heard. They’d booked us into some huge halls in Europe and there we were playing songs that nobody knew in places that were half full. And we were perhaps not in the best frame of mind; maybe we should have taken a break before going out on tour.”

  As for Smith, he was dissatisfied with the music his band was playing – he felt they were seriously underachieving. “I was really disappointed with what we were doing,” he said. “I thought we should be going somewhere else, not in success terms, but I thought we should be making music that was on a par with Mahler symphonies, not pop music. I just felt that I was not doing what I wanted to do. [It was] your classic early twenties crisis.”

  But the truth was this: Robert Smith had succeeded brilliantly. His master plan for Pornography was to cut the ultimate fuck-off album, a stark, raw, fearless farewell. Not only had he achieved that, thereby alienating many of The Cure faithful, but he’d also managed to drive a bloody stake right into the heart of The Cure themselves.

  As soon as the crew had cleared away the debris from their final show of the tour, Tolhurst, Smith and Gallup were on a flight home, Smith sleeping all the way. When they landed at Heathrow, a grumpy Smith turned to Gallup and mumbled a cursory “bye” to his bandmate and close pal. The two Cure allies wouldn’t exchange another word for 18 months.

  * That list also included Kraftwerk producer Conny Plank, who met with Smith and Tolhurst at this time, but, tragically, died shortly afterwar
ds.

  Chapter Eight

  “My reaction to all those people who thought that The Cure could only be pessimistic and predictable was to make a demented and calculated song like ‘Let’s Go To Bed’.”

  – Robert Smith

  HIS band may have been falling apart around him, but in one crucial aspect, Robert Smith was a lucky man. Over the past three years and three Cure albums he’d suffered a very public meltdown and done his best to alienate his audience, his friends and his bandmates. But the one constant in his life was Mary Poole, his long-time girlfriend. Even when he’d sunk lower than he thought possible, with The Cure having crashed and burned at the end of a period Smith described as “more like a rugby tour than a Cure tour”, Poole stood by her man. Smith was smart enough to recognise her remarkable, unswerving faith in him and acknowledge how much she helped him keep his head together.

  “I was quite out of sync, a bit disturbed,” Smith said of his hard times in the early Eighties. “I knew then that Mary was the girl for me, because she stuck by me. But everyone I know reaches a point where they throw out their arms and go berserk for a while – otherwise you never know what your limits are. I was just trying to find mine.”*

  By mid-1982, Smith truly believed that he couldn’t sink any lower: he had some major healing to do. “I’d reached a spiritual low point around that time,” he’d confess. “Inevitably there followed a physical decline. I couldn’t be bothered any more. It took quite a few different things to bring me out again.” Poole, of course, was the one person who could get through to Smith and help him recover. “Mary was the biggest motivating force,” Smith agreed. “There’s a great advantage in knowing someone for so long, being the same age and from the same background. You know what the other person means and what they’re going through.” But Smith was a pessimist at heart and realised that it would take more than physical comfort and soothing words to help him out of his existential funk. “They can’t tell you that everything is going to be all right because you both know, deep down, that it probably won’t be all right. At the same time, it was good having someone I didn’t have to pretend to. I had no reason to be anything other than what I was.”

  Smith had returned from the Fourteen Explicit Moments Tour a physical wreck, a 23-year-old with worrying drug, booze and psychological problems. Unlike previous years, where he’d simply thrown himself back into the music, this time he paid attention to what his body and head were telling him: he needed a break, and badly. After briefly checking in with the Banshees – whose company Smith clearly preferred over his pissed-off Cure brothers – who were making their Kiss In The Dreamhouse album, he and Mary disappeared for a month’s camping-cum-detox in Wales. (Smith’s brother Richard had bought a farm there.) During this holiday, Smith abstained from all mind-alterers – although beer was permitted, of course. Tolhurst, meanwhile, drifted through Europe for several weeks, while a disgruntled Gallup returned to his Horley crew at the King’s Head pub, uncertain about his musical future.

  Chris Parry and Fiction had more immediate concerns: they needed their cash cow, The Cure, to keep generating product. Accordingly, ‘The Hanging Garden’ was finally released as a single in July, in a rich assortment of seven-inch (backed with a live take on ‘Killing An Arab’ from the Manchester Apollo gig on April 27) and bonus-track versions. It was even packaged as a four-song double pack, with a gatefold sleeve, which also included the live version of ‘Arab’ along with ‘A Forest’. (During 1983, ‘The Hanging Garden’ would be The Cure’s first Japanese release. In late 1982, as part of a four-track release called ‘The Singles’, it would be the band’s final Australian release on Stunn Records, the label run by Parry’s school pal Terry Condon.)

  The single did reasonable business for a band that was as good as dead, reaching number 34 on the UK singles chart. It wasn’t exactly causing nightmares for such chart-toppers as Irene Cara’s ‘Fame’ and Hot Chocolate’s ‘It Started With A Kiss’, but its middling success demonstrated that despite Smith’s best efforts, not all Cure fans were completely alienated by the band’s self-destructive rampage. NME journalist Adrian Thrills, however, was not among the converts. “The Cure have drifted disappointingly and indulgently from the idyllic pop invention of their younger days,” he wrote with some scorn, “a decline in standards reinforced by the inclusion of the original versions of ‘Killing An Arab’ and ‘A Forest’ on one portion of this double pack.” Thrills may have been wrong on some minor points – the recordings of ‘Arab’ and ‘A Forest’ were live takes – but his point was well made. It seemed that even Chris Parry lacked the confidence in The Cure’s new music; what other reason was there to include these old standards on the band’s latest release?

  Chris Parry was going through a marriage break-up during the second half of 1982, which may have been some motivation for him to try to keep The Cure together: what could be worse than losing both your wife and your flagship band? The cash would prove useful, too. So Parry made a key decision. If Smith wanted to kill off The Cure as their fans knew it, Parry reasoned, then why not try to reinvent the band? His master plan was for them to lighten up on the bleakness and delve deeper into the pure sense of melody that had carried such early tunes as ‘Boys Don’t Cry’. All Parry now had to do was get the band back together.

  It wasn’t hard for Parry to talk Tolhurst around: there was none of the tension in their relationship (at least at this stage) that existed between Smith and the Fiction head. Tolhurst would frequently visit the Fiction offices and Parry would take the time to inform him as to exactly where it all went wrong for The Cure. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that much harder to convince Smith that reinventing The Cure as a pop band was a good idea. As Parry stated in Ten Imaginary Years, “It appealed to Robert because he wanted to destroy The Cure anyway; he was up for it.”

  But before The Cure could undergo their makeover, Smith had two more immediate tasks to undertake: one musical, one dictatorial. The magazine Flexi-Pop had approached Smith about recording a song for a promotional flexi-disc. Because The Cure didn’t actually exist at the time, Smith asked Severin to help him record a mournful tune called ‘Lament’, which he’d written while in Wales with Mary. They pieced it together during a one-off session at London’s Garden Studios; the flexi-disc was given away with Flexi-Pop issue 22, which featured ABC’s Martin Fry in a studied, studly pose on the cover.*

  Smith’s next step, as he gradually re-immersed himself in a musical world that as recently as July he’d “despaired about”, was to advise Tolhurst that his drumming days were over. His grand plan was to move Tolhurst to keyboards. Tolhurst began taking piano lessons, but his keyboard skills were, at best, limited: everyone that I asked about this would admit that his prowess didn’t stretch much beyond two-fingered noodling, although he has moved way beyond that with his post-Cure bands Presence and Levinhurst.

  Producer Phil Thornalley, soon to return briefly to the inner sanctum of The Cure, suspected that Tolhurst’s new role was part of a Robert Smith scheme. “He wasn’t a very good keyboard player. I don’t know what went on there. I guess Robert wanted to expand the rhythm pattern of the band.” Pornography co-engineer, Mike Nocito, also felt there was something slightly suspicious about Tolhurst’s change of instrument. Both Thornalley and Nocito knew that Tolhurst’s drumming was perfect for The Cure, so what other reason could there be behind Tolhurst’s sideways move?

  When I asked Tolhurst about his shift, he insisted that it was an effort on his part to embrace new technology and keep the band moving forward. “At that point it was just the two of us; The White Stripes hadn’t been thought of yet, and we thought, ‘How are we going to do this?’ Even during Seventeen Seconds there was some kind of electronic element to the drums that I’d been fascinated by. It seemed a natural evolution from playing the drums to the keyboards, which are rhythmic as well. Going into the electronic era more than anything else, that’s what we really wanted to do.”

  During September an
d October, Parry co-ordinated what would become known as the ‘Art Under The Hammer’ sessions, where the new two-man Cure demoed various ideas for their perfect throwaway pop song. At the same time, Simon Gallup had split with his wife Carol, with whom he had two children, Eden and Lily. This left Gallup as the latest resident of the Fiction office, which is where he accidentally learned about the movements of his two estranged bandmates. One morning he fielded a phone call from a fan, who asked a simple question: “Where are The Cure recording?” This was news to Gallup – neither Smith nor Parry had got around to advising him officially that he was out of the band. “I wanted to talk it over [with Smith],” Gallup said, “but after the fan’s call I knew it was too late. For the next six months I was bitter and sour and, even after that, when I saw them on Top Of The Pops, I kept thinking, ‘That should be me.’”

  Along with session man Steve Goulding, formerly Wreckless Eric’s drummer, Tolhurst and Smith settled down in Island Record’s in-house studio to record ‘Let’s Go To Bed’, a co-write that, at least on the surface, was another of Smith’s great “fuck-offs”. The core of the song was also written during Smith’s Welsh retreat with Mary. In its original, slowed-down form, the song could have fitted on Pornography. But Robert Smith wasn’t a fool; in fact, he was one very smart operator. He knew that if The Cure’s pop experiment sank like a lead balloon, he could defend himself by dismissing it as a lark. That way the band’s credibility would remain intact. But if the song was a hit, well, maybe it was time to reconsider The Cure’s future direction.