Never Enough Page 25

  Yet Tolhurst was convinced that the bond that had developed between him and Smith over the past five years of The Cure was too strong “to ever let it fade away”. “I was always sure that Robert wanted to head up his own thing with The Cure,” Tolhurst said to me, “so I never worried about him leaving for good. I always viewed what he did with the Banshees and Steve as a musical vacation. I knew he would be back.” Many others, however, must have questioned The Cure’s future, especially when Smith would make such public declarations as, “I don’t despair about losing touch with The Cure. It’s more despairing to realise I’ll never reach the heights of a Bach or a Prokofiev.” That was hardly the vote of confidence that Cure-aholics needed.

  Tolhurst remains unsure – even as late as 2005 – why his own attempts to keep The Cure on the rails at that time have been constantly underplayed by Smith. “I know what I did, what I contributed to The Cure; I’m still aware of that,” Tolhurst told me. “It still seems strange now; to give myself reasonable credit doesn’t seem to want to take away from what The Cure did; it doesn’t hurt it.

  “I’m not sure what it is – maybe Robert is scared that it will seem more to do with me than just him. For my own sanity, I have to ignore most of that. I know the truth about most of those things. [But] I’m sure Robert has his own version as well.”

  The Banshees’ demands on their newly recruited guitarist were as physically and mentally draining as any of The Cure’s previous stints of globetrotting, but with one key difference: Smith wasn’t required to make the key decisions. They toured the UK until the end of 1982, then spent January and February of 1983 pushing the product in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Initially, Smith was well pleased with the life of a hired guitarist. There were no songwriting expectations, no videos or records to make – all he had to do was turn up each night and play. “I’m just there,” he told one journalist, when he was asked to define his role in the Banshees. “I’m just the guitarist with the Banshees. There’s nothing formal, which is probably why it’s working.” When stretched, Smith admitted that the Banshees got a “bit fed up with me doing other things”, but in early 1983 Smith had little else to do but play guitar. He even admitted to getting along well with the notoriously prickly Siouxsie Sioux. “I think it’s because I don’t take her too seriously,” Smith figured. “It’s novel for her to have someone to tell her to shut up because most people are too scared.”

  But trouble was brewing: ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ had become a small-scale radio hit in the USA, especially on the West Coast. The Cure’s limited audience there was rapidly building, all on the strength of one sweetly twisted pop pastiche and a quirky Tim Pope video. The Cure needed to capitalise on this.

  And it didn’t take long for Smith to become irritated with his role as hired-gun for the Banshees: he wanted to return to songwriting. “Eventually,” Smith said, “I became frustrated because I couldn’t have the same control over what they were doing [as he did with The Cure].”

  “Siouxsie [is] quite [a] strong character,” Tolhurst added. “He was never going to be more than the hired hand in that band and he knew it.” But Smith’s bond with Severin was tighter than ever. In fact, as Smith once stated, that alliance was eventually the only thing that kept him in the Banshees. “I don’t think I was the right guitarist for them. My involvement was based mainly on my friendship with Steve Severin.”

  Chris Parry was becoming increasingly frustrated. He was convinced that the Banshees were simply cashing in on Smith’s name, while Smith remained with them purely because he had some peculiar dreams of being in a “supergroup”. Parry was also convinced that Smith had only agreed to the English leg of the tour, which would have taken him through to the end of 1982 – suddenly he was on the other side of the planet, with no plans to return until February 1983. Parry’s first response was a little extreme: he tried to sue his recalcitrant star if he didn’t return to The Cure. Smith, allegedly, called back and threatened to break Parry’s legs. Parry’s next move was surprisingly humble, especially for a man described to me as “brash” and “very good at business”. He approached Smith and apologised for his legal threat. Backing down was not one of Parry’s fortes – he’d held fast on everything from the cover art of Three Imaginary Boys to releasing ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ under the name of The Cure. It didn’t seem that apologising came naturally to Parry, but he’d do pretty much whatever was required to lure his star back.

  “He was worried that people would think that The Cure no longer existed,” Smith snapped, “but I didn’t give a fuck – we could always re-form. I hated being looked upon as a source of money; being with the Banshees was a reaction against that.”

  While still chewing over his future in March 1983, Smith, for the first time in a long time, was a man without a band. Finally off the road, Banshees Budgie and Siouxsie Sioux were moonlighting as The Creatures, while Tolhurst was still working with And Also The Trees, which left Smith free for any offer that came his way. And that offer came from the most unexpected place.

  Nicholas Dixon had recently been appointed choreographer by the Royal Ballet. Young and hipper than most people associated with such a high-brow art form, he approached Smith with the idea of writing a musical score for a production of Les Enfants terribles, Jean Cocteau’s twisted tribute to love, death and incest. Smith was flattered by the offer but he was also pragmatic enough to realise that he was a little out of his depth. As a test, he proposed the choreographing of a Cure track; ‘Siamese Twins’, from Pornography. With Tolhurst briefly back on drums, a hat-wearing Severin playing bass and Marc Almond’s Venomettes providing strings, Smith strummed the song live while two dancers twirled around him. Smith and Dixon’s experiment aired on BBC2’s Riverside programme in February. Despite a favourable response, their planned adaptation was put on hold (and remains that way, 20-odd years later).

  Smith’s next non-Cure project was much closer to his comfort zone. He and Severin had long been promising to throw themselves into a serious collaboration, something much more fulfilling than cameos on the BBC or sharing a stage as part of the Banshees. Smith occasionally slept on the floor of Severin’s London flat, wearing layers of coats to prevent the English chill from turning him into a block of lipstick-covered ice. Clearly their connection was very strong. During March, Smith and Severin shifted base to London’s Britannia Row Studios, a site owned by Pink Floyd, ostensibly to record a collaboration they entitled The Glove. (Tolhurst also used Britannia to mix And Also The Trees’ Shantel album.)

  The name was a nod to Smith’s youthful love of The Beatles – the Glove was a character in the Fab Four’s trippy 1968 cartoon Yellow Submarine, a peculiar, deadpan slice of hippie-era psychedelia littered with in-jokes and Beatles references. In one standout scene, as ‘All You Need Is Love’ chimes in the background, John Lennon has it out with the so-called ‘Flying Dreadful Glove’, one of the Blue Meanies’ evil crew, in the ultimate battle between good and evil. (The Glove, of course, morphed into “Love” when it fell under the spell of The Beatles’ music.) The Smith/Severin alliance was now official; its name was the perfect mix of Smith’s love for The Beatles and their collective thing for twisted, trashy movies. The fact that the Glove possessed good and bad sides couldn’t have been lost on the pair, either.

  It would be a stretch to call The Glove a true musical collaboration: it was more like a non-stop party, fuelled by acid and video nasties, with the Banshees, The Associates and Marc Almond’s band playing bit parts. Smith would depict The Glove as “an experiment in disorientation”. During the making of their Blue Sunshine LP, he and Severin made a peculiar pact: “There was this unspoken idea that we should make the album with as many different drugs as we could get our hands on.” Acid was their mind-alterer of choice and the pair would gobble them down like aspirin. (Severin couldn’t actually recall dropping any tabs during the actual sessions, but LSD can have that effect on you.) The party-cum-album-recording would begin most nights at 6pm and th
en continue for the next 12 hours, when the pair would retire to Severin’s flat, where they’d come down while watching such shockers as Videodrome, The Brood, Evil Dead and Nicholas Roeg’s more upmarket Bad Timing, which they’d watch in slow motion.* When not taking in these B-grade shockers, they’d take a pair of scissors to dozens of magazines scattered about Severin’s flat, to create bizarre murals. The sessions and the party moved between Britannia Row, Morgan, Trident and the Garden studios, as the pair juggled their chemical indulgences and music-making.

  “Acid used to make me feel very connected to Severin,” Smith said. “We used to walk around London, living in this Yellow Submarine cartoon world. It was really upbeat and fun, because I’d got rid of all the bad stuff with Pornography. When you’re taking acid with someone you really like, then it’s really, really funny. It was a fantastic time, that Glove album.”

  The third member of The Glove was Jeanette Landrey, a former dancer and choreographer, and then girlfriend of Banshee drummer Budgie, who provided vocals for much of the album.† Although she didn’t realise it at the time, Landrey’s role was little more than session singer – and silent witness to the increasingly weird relationship that was brewing between Smith and Severin. “I don’t know what I actually expected,” she said when the album appeared in August 1983, “but if I was offered something similar again I’d have a much clearer idea of the problems involved. I still feel like a faceless voice to some extent. It’s very much Steve’s and Robert’s baby – but that was always clear so I can’t complain.”

  Blue Sunshine took its title from one of the Z-grade horror flicks that were on repeat play in Severin’s flat – “blue sunshine” being the name of an especially potent strain of acid.* And while it may have been recorded during some particularly high times, Blue Sunshine was treated with much reverence on its release, which was more a nod to Severin’s involvement than Smith’s. ‘Like An Animal’ was the lead single; Allan Jones’ review in the August 13 Melody Maker was heavy with praise, declaring that this exercise in psychedelia packed the same kind of “spacious rush as The Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’”. Big raps. “Are The Glove the new West Coast experimental art ensemble?” Jones asked. “Whatever: like all good pop records, ‘Like An Animal’ sounds like it’s always been there. The Glove may yet prove to be a real handful.”

  When they hunkered down with Steve Sutherland in early September, both Smith and Severin were guarded, insisting that this was a one-off experiment and they weren’t quite ready to kill off their day bands. Smith seemed more interested in spelling out the process of making the record, rather than dissecting such tracks as ‘Mr Alphabet Says’ and ‘Blues In Drag’.

  “It was a real attack on the senses when we were doing it,” Smith boasted. “We were coming out of the studio at six in the morning, watching all these really mental films and then going to sleep and having really demented dreams. Then, as soon as we woke up, we’d go virtually straight back into the studio, so it was a bit like a mental assault course towards the end.” In another post-mortem on The Glove, Smith confessed just how draining the indulgence had been. “After that period with Steve, I was physically incapable of cleaning my teeth. The whole thing was unreal – a dream – and not something I’m likely to repeat in a hurry.”

  Despite his dental health issues, Smith’s next move was even bolder (or, in hindsight, possibly more stupid). While Simon Gallup went back to work with Cry (quickly renamed Fools Dance), an outfit he formed with another member of the ex-Cure club, keyboardist Matthieu Hartley, Smith decided that he could juggle recording duties with both the Banshees and The Cure. This, more than anything he’d lived through before, was very nearly Robert Smith’s undoing.

  * Smith would repay Poole’s loyalty many times over as The Cure’s commercial worth increased, sometimes in very material ways. Allegedly he once renegotiated the band’s record label deal with a proviso: that a jet-black Porsche be delivered to Poole before he put pen to paper.

  * Parry obviously had little involvement in the project because there was no editorial in the mag on The Cure. The typical trade-off for a free song is a free feature. As for ‘Lament’, a more polished take would appear on 1983’s Japanese Whispers collection.

  * The genuinely unnerving Roeg film had a direct influence on the Blue Sunshine track ‘Sex Eye Make-Up’, as did a letter Smith had that was written by a madman and addressed to the Queen.

  † Chris Parry had advised Smith not to sing on the sessions because of a potential problem with royalties. So Smith and Severin used a John Peel Show appearance to announce that they were seeking vocalists. Smith, however, did end up singing on two tracks.

  * The director of this 1978 gem, Jeff Lieberman, went on to call the shots on such Oscar contenders as Satan’s Little Helper.

  Chapter Nine

  “We always used to pretend we understood what each other was saying, but I don’t think either of us had a fucking clue.”

  – Tim Pope on Robert Smith

  IN theory, Robert Smith’s master plan for the rest of 1983 and early 1984 seemed like the perfect juggling act. By recording and touring with the Banshees he was cast as a respectable musician, playing with a highly regarded band. As frontman and tunesmith for The Cure he had a ready-made creative outlet. And when Siouxsie proved too much for him to bear, or Parry started to put the squeeze on The Cure, he had the perfect retreat. In the back of his mind, though, he knew that a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He even said it out loud when talking with Flexi-Pop magazine about the Blue Sunshine album. “I need a holiday,” Smith said. “I keep making plans to go every week but every week I’m in another group.”

  In April 1983, The Cure made another fleeting return, this time performing on BBC’s The Oxford Road Show. Smith was asked to perform ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ and ‘Just One Kiss’, the UK flipside of ‘Bed’. The ever-contrary Smith thought not – instead he said he’d prefer to play a pair of gloomy Pornography tracks, ‘One Hundred Years’ and ‘The Figurehead’. Of course, there was a slight hitch: The Cure didn’t actually exist, apart from Smith and Tolhurst. Parry had no plans to miss out on this plum gig, so he recruited Andy Anderson, who’d drummed with space rockers Hawkwind and, more recently, the band Brilliant. Anderson knew Smith; he’d helped out during the non-stop party that produced the Blue Sunshine LP. Bassist Derek Thompson of SPK signed up as temporary bassist. Unlike Smith’s dreaded Top Of The Pops, their performance was live, and it had the desired effect on Smith: he loved the experience. Within a few weeks of the Road Show’s screening, Smith wanted to record another Cure single.

  This time around, it would be just Smith and Tolhurst together in the studio. For the five-day sessions that would generate the tracks ‘The Upstairs Room’, which was written while bunking on Severin’s floor, ‘The Dream’, a re-recording of ‘Lament’ – Smith’s favourite track of the four, which he felt showed off his “romantic side” – and their next single, ‘The Walk’, the duo chose to work with chain-smoking producer Steve Nye. Just like Thornalley, Nye had learned from the masters, having started out as an assistant engineer to Beatles producer George Martin, at AIR Studios in 1971. Amongst many subsequent productions, he had worked with XTC and Roxy Music and had co-produced Bryan Ferry’s solo outing In Your Mind. But Nye was best known to Smith for his work on Japan’s Tin Drum album from 1981, widely regarded as the finest hour of these dedicated followers of synth-pop fashion.*

  While Smith was searching for something just as infectious as ‘Let’s Go To Bed’, he was also ready for some direction in the studio. “I thought it would be good to do something structured,” he said, “to go in and have someone say to me, ‘That vocal isn’t any good, you’ll have to keep doing it.’” In short, he didn’t want another Blue Sunshine. And Jam Studios, where they chose to record the four tracks, had all the Smith essentials – a good pool table, a full fridge and a space where he could write.

  Both the single and Tim Pope-directed video of �
�The Walk’ seemed like a very natural progression from the band’s new beginning of ‘Let’s Go To Bed’. Beneath the song’s electro-pop surface there was just a hint of the new romanticism that The Cure had previously dabbled with, but there was an insistency and melodicism at work that made it an ideal pop song for anyone who’d outgrown Culture Club. And while the on-screen Smith hadn’t quite perfected the Lovecat persona that would soon make him a star, he seemed more at home in Pope’s second Cure clip.

  Shot against a stark black background, Tolhurst once again plays the fool, performing a herky-jerky dance in a child’s paddling pool while wearing a dress (on his insistence, as it turned out). Smith, meanwhile, eyes the camera with a growing sense of assurance – hell, he even danced with the baby doll that was thrown around during the clip like a football. It didn’t make that much literal sense – and who was the mysterious old biddy “signing” and mouthing Smith’s lyrics? – but that was hardly the point. Tim Pope wasn’t so sure himself. He would eventually come clean on the mysterious “understanding” he and Smith shared. “We always used to pretend we understood what each other was saying, but I don’t think either of us had a fucking clue.”

  ‘The Walk’ clip was shot at a studio only 400 metres from RAK Studios, where The Cure had hoovered up their budget while making Pornography. Phil Thornalley, who’d produced the album, decided to check out the shoot and check in on Tolhurst and Smith. It turned out to be a fortuitous meeting for Thornalley, as he would tell me. While he was watching the cross-dressing Tolhurst and Smith splash about in the kiddies’ paddling pool, he was indirectly made an offer that he couldn’t refuse.