Never Enough Page 26

“I’d gone up there to hang out for an hour, whatever,” he told me. “They said, ‘Simon’s gone, do you know any bass players?’” Thornalley certainly did: himself. Although best known as an engineer and producer (and later a songwriter), Thornalley had been playing the bass in bands since his teens. And since working with the band on Pornography, his stock had risen considerably: his subsequent production credits included XTC’s Mummer, Duran Duran’s Seven And The Ragged Tiger and Julian Cope’s Sunshine Playroom. He was seduced by the possibility of joining a band that was starting to have its own chart success: he’d achieved plenty, but hadn’t actually played in a successful outfit. Thornalley, of course, also had an escape plan – he realised that he was merely a fill-in and could jump ship and return to the studio if it all got too much.

  “It had a temporary feel to it,” Thornalley said. “There was a festival in summer, a few dates in America.” Of course, there was also a certain amount of ego involved in his decision, as Thornalley freely admitted. “It was lust for glory; the thought of being given a chance to be in a band that was playing theatres as opposed to toilets. It was a chance to see the world and whatever.”

  While Thornalley briefly returned to RAK, ‘The Walk’ became a hit. Smith knew something was up when his mother Rita told him that she liked the track. “She normally hates any Cure stuff I play her,” he chuckled, as the song climbed to number 12 in the charts. The single’s reviews, typically, sniffed at this second step in the band’s new pop direction. “Robert Smith actually sounds in a fairly good mood here,” reported NME, “but I’m sure it’s just a silly phase he’s going through.” And then, another far more damning take on ‘The Walk’. “I’d feel pretty sick if I spent all my royalty cheque earnings in an expensive recording studio only to come out with a load of fly-blown rubbish such as this.”

  Robert Smith, typically, did his best to side with his critics and play down his latest pop confection, when he said: “It occurs to me that a lot of idiots must be buying ‘The Walk’.”

  The BBC had been very hesitant to play the Pope-directed video for ‘The Walk’ because – shock, horror – Tolhurst and Smith were wearing make-up. The simple solution was to compile another makeshift Cure line-up and undergo the torture of Top Of The Pops not once, but twice. Their first appearance was on July 7, with Anderson drumming, Tolhurst on keys and a shades-wearing Porl Thompson miming the basslines. They returned soon after, this time with the newly recruited Thornalley on bass. Looking on, regular Cure critics Melody Maker reluctantly accepted that something was happening here. “The Cure on TOTP was an event almost as absurd as Jimmy Savile’s inanity,” they reported. “They looked and acted bored, but all across the nation Cure fans, Cure converts and folk who can’t tell The Cure from Culture Club and couldn’t care less interpreted Smith’s stifled yawns as enigmatic arrogance. Such is the power of reputation, such is the impact of dressing in black.”

  Much of what they said was true, but it wasn’t a case of the mainstream bending to accommodate The Cure – it was more a case of The Cure lightening up on the misery and exploring their own heart of popness. The charts certainly hadn’t undergone any type of radical change; when ‘The Walk’ began its march towards the Top 10, The Cure’s chartmates were Paul Young (dripping all over ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat [That’s My Home]’), Eurythmics, Shalamar and Nick Heyward. It became even clearer that The Cure was on the rise when New Order, who’d risen from the ashes of Joy Division, accused the band of plagiarism: the Mancunian’s ‘Blue Monday’, which appeared around the same time, bore some striking similarities to ‘The Walk’ – or was it the other way around?

  “Plenty of people have ripped us off,” barked New Order’s Peter Hook, “but The Cure really take the piss sometimes.” Some years later Smith would defend himself when he revealed that if ‘The Walk’ was stealing from anyone, it was Japan, not New Order. And if there was any similarity between ‘The Walk’ and ‘Blue Monday’, he accredited that to the fact that both bands fancied six-string basses.

  Of course New Order would have the last laugh, because ‘Blue Monday’ became the highest-selling 12-inch single of all time, breaking the band in the States and finally helping to put the legacy of Ian Curtis to rest. But Hook’s comment said something about The Cure – they’d become serious players in the pop world, a band that couldn’t be ignored.

  With two hit singles on the trot, The Cure was now ready for a return to “serious” live work, rather than the pantomime of Top Of The Pops or their Riverside one-off (a two-off, actually, because Smith had returned there in July, this time with Severin, performing The Glove’s ‘Punish Me With Kisses’). The Cure agreed to headline the event known as Elephant Fayre, which was held in St Germans in Cornwall on July 30. They warmed up with two club shows in Bournemouth and Bath.

  Smith could have used Elephant Fayre as an opportunity to road-test the brighter, bolder, more outgoing Cure as captured on ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ and ‘The Walk’. Instead he decided to use the event as a eulogy for The Cure that came before, the band that dared not smile. Their 18-song set was littered with their pre-Pope moodscapes: opening with ‘The Figurehead’, they droned their way through ‘The Drowning Man’, ‘Cold’, ‘Siamese Twins’, ‘Pornography’ and more, not even bothering to include their two most recent singles. But Smith knew what he was doing. “It was something of an obligation to play all the old songs,” he said afterwards, “but that was the whole reason for doing it. I just wanted to play those songs just once more. [It was] like the end of an era for us, I suppose.”

  Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland could see the value of the new Cure, even if they were wheeling out the grim old songs just one more time. In his review of the set, he noted that The Cure’s resurrection was the most unlikely second coming of the summer of ’83. “A few months back,” he stated, “if anyone had been laying odds on a summer artistic renaissance, The Cure wouldn’t have even figured in the reckoning. [They] were, to all intents and purposes, widely considered a lost cause. But from something old sprang something new … it was a show of strength with the power of trance … The Cure[’s] future will be well worth the wait.”

  Elephant Fayre clearly had the right effect on Smith: within five days The Cure was in the middle of a two-night-stand at New York’s The Ritz, followed by shows in Toronto and San Francisco. ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ had done the trick Stateside: whereas their last round of shows drew the usual long-faced types in overcoats, there were now more than a few Smith clones in the crowds. It wasn’t quite Curemania, but their star was very clearly rising. Tolhurst spotted the evolution, stating that the band’s American fanbase now included its fair share of screaming 14-year-olds. “I remember doing some personal appearance in a club and I couldn’t believe it: there were a thousand people there singing along to the song. It was something that happened outside of us playing a show, it was completely new to us. I thought, ‘OK, this is the Eighties, this is how it’s going to work, let’s go along with it.’” When a bra came sailing onto the stage, The Cure realised that their entire world had changed.

  On the way home, Smith, Tolhurst, Thornalley and Anderson stopped over in Paris, where they hired the Polydor-owned Studio Des Dames for five days to record three tracks: ‘The Lovecats’, ‘Mr Pink Eyes’ and ‘Speak My Language’.

  If ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ and ‘The Walk’ were the work of a band in the midst of a transition, ‘The Lovecats’ was the sound of The Cure as a full-blown pop group. And an excellent one, at that. Smith wasn’t digging too deep for meaning – the song was inspired by Walt Disney’s The Aristocats. “I knew all the words [to the film] by heart,” Smith admitted. “I was completely obsessed.” But of pretty much any pop song Robert Smith would ever write and record, ‘The Lovecats’ was a perennial, a song that would forever be associated with the bird’s-nest-haired, smudged lipstick era of The Cure. As late as 2005, the song was still being heard everywhere: it was even used as a programme ID for a drive-time radio show on
Australia’s ABC, in between political updates from Canberra and weather reports. Ubiquity, thy name was ‘The Lovecats’. Even the polka-dot shirt that Smith wore in the clip briefly became a fashion item de rigueur.

  For Cure fill-in Phil Thornalley, the French sessions that resulted in ‘The Lovecats’ was by far his most enjoyable time with the band. Along with Smith and Parry, Thornalley co-produced the three tracks, which were subsequently mixed at RAK. “That was the best time with The Cure,” Thornalley told me. “I was doing what I did best: I was producing, I was playing the bass. It was a great session. The studio was crammed with all these orchestral instruments and we did three tracks in five days. In many respects, given my background as a pop person, ‘Lovecats’ was my moment when I felt that I really shone with The Cure; it was the best record I ever made with them, mainly because everybody enjoyed it.” Thornalley could barely comprehend that this was the same band – minus Gallup, of course – who’d made the terminal comedown that was Pornography.

  “It’s a great pop song,” he continued. “Everybody did a great job, particularly Robert. It was nice to be making a record with him where he was being more poppy. And he is – he’s written all these great pop songs, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, ‘Friday I’m In Love’, ‘Inbetween Days’. I’d never seen that side of him.”

  As for Smith, he was more comfortable talking up the non-single cuts than ‘The Lovecats’, which he laughed off as an “amateurish pop song”. ‘Speak My Language’ pretty much came out of nothing – or at least a bassline that he sang in the studio to Thornalley and Anderson, who jammed with him. “I made up the piano parts and the words as we went along,” Smith said in the liner notes for Join The Dots. “Very jazz.” ‘Mr Pink Eyes’ was a minor-scale slice of autobiography, flavoured by some blasts on the harmonica by Smith, that was written after the Lovecat caught sight of himself in a bathroom mirror after another bender. “Mr Pink Eyes was me,” he admitted.

  A Tim Pope shoot was organised as soon as the band touched down in London – Parry knew that ‘The Lovecats’ had hit written all over it. It was shot in a derelict terrace in England’s Lane in Primrose Hill, a house that Pope only managed to rent when he convinced the landlord that he had plans to buy the dump.

  Robert Smith was very clearly adapting to his newer, cuddlier small-screen persona, because he hogged the camera like some Hollywood hopeful throughout the clip, while Anderson and Thornalley quite readily accept their bit parts in the part-performance, part-pantomime clip. Thornalley was as pleased with the video as he was with his work on the track. “God knows what the neighbours thought,” he laughed. “We started shooting around seven in the evening. It was good fun.” Tolhurst, as usual, played Cure clown – this time he was decked out in a cat suit, which he continued to wear once the clip was wrapped, scaring the crap out of an early-rising Rasta who was wandering the nearby streets.

  With ‘The Lovecats’ on simmer – engineer David “Dirk” Allen had some final tinkering before it was ready – another single from The Glove’s Blue Sunshine was released. As curious as the track ‘Like An Animal’ was, it was merely a stepping stone along the way to ‘The Lovecats’, which appeared on October 25, quickly becoming The Cure’s finest pop moment, reaching number seven. Even Steve Sutherland heaped praise on the sure-fire hit, although it wasn’t held in quite the same regard as two singles which had preceded it, The Glove’s ‘Like An Animal’ and The Creatures’ ‘Right Now’. But once again, by this time Robert Smith had moved on – back to the Banshees. It was part of a musical tightrope that he tried his best to walk for the next six months.

  Maybe Smith just wasn’t sure if he was ready for pop stardom or maybe he just fancied the idea of spreading himself thinly. Whatever the reason, he rarely had a moment to stop and think from September 1983 onwards. First it was an Italian gig and video shoot with the Banshees for their less-than-awesome cover of The Beatles’ ‘Dear Prudence’, released a month before ‘The Lovecats’ to a far less excitable response. (“Siouxsie’s … group are getting fogged and indecisive,” noted NME, who felt that ‘Prudence’ was an “under-fed treatment of a dried-out chestnut.”) There was also a Banshees show in Israel, after which Smith wrecked the group’s car, followed by a two-night stand at London’s Royal Albert Hall on September 30 and October 1, shows which were documented on the Banshees’ double LP Nocturne. At the same time, Smith was already showing signs of the big fall that was to come, admitting, “If I went on like this for a few more months I’d be the next one to have a breakdown.” Hardly the words of a guy enjoying his dual musical life.

  On October 27, The Cure returned to Top Of The Pops for another run through ‘The Lovecats’, which continued its climb up the charts. It didn’t matter that Smith forgot the song’s lyrics: by this stage he was lucky to remember which band he was in.

  Japanese Whispers was released in December, a stop-gap eight-song collection of The Cure’s trilogy of pop singles – ‘Let’s Go To Bed’, ‘The Walk’ and ‘The Lovecats’ – plus five B-sides. The album came with a warning, as word started to leak that Smith was considering an about-face to murkier emotional waters for The Cure. “Beware!” advised Sounds’ Bill Black. “All the signs are that Smith intends to return to the plodding ground of past work for the next album, so get happy while you can.” The most schizophrenic phase of Smith’s musical life was summed up precisely on December 25, when he starred with both the Banshees and The Cure on the Christmas Day episode of Top Of The Pops, performing ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘The Lovecats’.

  It wasn’t as though he had much time to sit back and take it all in, because Smith was now doing the two album shuffle, bouncing between sessions for The Cure’s The Top at Genetic Studios in Reading and the Banshees’ Hyaena at Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie Studio in Twickenham. By this time, the Banshees’ record had been a stop-start project taking up almost a year. A typical Smith day ran like this, as he documented 20 years later, still stunned that he managed to survive with body and psyche relatively intact.

  “I used to do the Banshees album at Eel Pie … then travel out to Genetic … in a taxi. [The Cure] were all staying in a pub, so I’d meet up with the others, who were all a bit pissed by then. I’d have a few drinks then go into the studio. We’d start recording at 2am. Then I’d go back to Eel Pie. I used to sleep in the taxi.” For these manic six weeks, Smith was sustained by an especially potent brew of magic mushroom tea, courtesy of drummer Andy Anderson who, along with Tolhurst and Smith, formed the musical core of The Top. (Thornalley was AWOL working on Duran Duran’s latest opus.)

  Smith wasn’t the only one who started to unravel at this time. Lol Tolhurst’s alcoholism was exacerbated by The Cure’s decision to set up camp in a pub while making The Top. “That’s the beginning of where I was going to get worse addiction-wise,” he said. “[I was] stuck out in the middle of the English countryside in the winter at Martin Rushton’s studio. It was a recipe for disaster – and this is key – that we stayed at the local pub, the John Barleycorn, and they gave us the key, so we could come back at five or six in the morning and carry on. The landlord would cook us breakfast so we’d be up at eight in the morning drinking pints with breakfast, having been up all night.”

  The upside of their stint at the John Barleycorn was that it gave Tolhurst the chance to become closer to new Cure drummer, the black, one-eyed Andy Anderson. “He was still pretty sane at that time,” said Tolhurst. Also in the studio, strangely enough, was Nigel Revlor, a friend of Parry’s who managed Pete Shelley. He was going through a divorce at the time and was hiding out at the studio while The Top was being recorded. According to Tolhurst, “He would come to the studio every night to sleep and escape home. He was there for the whole album – he’d wake up about six in the morning, shower, and then go to work. He was there for the whole time but I don’t think he heard a thing.”

  Somewhere in the midst of his mushroom-fuelled balancing act, Smith also helped Tim Pope with his own record, the twisted n
ovelty song ‘I Want To Be A Tree’. It was a sentiment that Smith could fully comprehend, especially when the tension started to grow at Eel Pie. Smith would turn up for the Banshees’ sessions and learn that the others had clocked off for a curry, leaving him to work with producer Mike Hedges. It didn’t help that Severin, Budgie and Siouxsie felt, justifiably enough, that Smith wasn’t giving them 100 per cent. Inner-band relations were right on the edge – and someone with an ego as healthy as Siouxsie couldn’t have been comfortable when, during their Italian stopover a few months earlier, the tour poster read “Siouxsie & The Banshees With Robert Smith”. Whose band was this anyway? Again, it was only Smith’s friendship with Severin that kept him focused on Hyaena – or as focused as he could be given his schedule and his lifestyle.

  It was inevitable that Smith would come apart. It had happened before, on The Cure’s Picture and Fourteen Explicit Moments tours and in his relationships with erstwhile bassists Michael Dempsey and Simon Gallup and Fiction head Chris Parry. This time it was Smith’s health that packed it in. Blood poisoning was cited as the official cause for his collapse, but a complete physical meltdown was closer to the truth. “It was like the vengeance of God,” said Smith. “My skin started ripping apart, falling off. It was almost as though my body was saying, ‘Well, if you refuse to stop, I will stop you.’ I had everything you could imagine going wrong with me. I didn’t exactly have a breakdown but I was like a clockwork toy that ran down.” Smith knew that something had to be done when his body started to shake uncontrollably – and it had nothing to do with pre-show nerves or a bad chemical reaction.

  Smith’s crash led to one of the more bizarre resignations in rock’n’ roll history. Asked to tour America with the Banshees in May 1984, he cried off, offering Siouxsie a doctor’s certificate from the Smith’s family GP stating that he simply wasn’t up to the grind.* It was an interesting twist on the old standard “musical differences” – it’s not often that a band member has backed out of a tour after actually taking a doctor’s advice. But before his relationship with the Banshees reached that strangely formal nadir, Smith had plenty of business on both sides of the musical fence. There had been a Banshees single, ‘Swimming Horses’, followed by a tour in March, then a Cure UK tour in April on the back of yet another winningly eccentric single, ‘The Caterpillar’. The Cure’s obligatory Top Of The Pops spot, aired on April 12, gave some idea of how Smith felt: he and the band (which had now solidified into Smith, Tolhurst, Anderson and Thornalley) played their new single sitting cross-legged on stage. “We were knackered,” Smith insisted. It showed.