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  The Cure’s fifth album, The Top, and, finally, the Banshees’ Hyaena, dropped a month apart: the former in May 1984 and Hyaena in June. It was the final move in a spectacularly productive (yet turbulent) time in Smith’s life. Over the previous 18 months, he had delivered four hit singles for The Cure (‘Let’s Go To Bed’, ‘The Walk’, ‘The Lovecats’ and ‘The Caterpillar’, all with the requisite Tim Pope videos); he’d also finished three albums – The Top, Hyaena and Blue Sunshine – for three different outfits, toured with both The Cure and the Banshees, and taken enough acid and magic-mushroom tea to lose several of his nine lives. Somehow he’d also managed to maintain his relationship with Mary; they were soon to move to Maida Vale, where they would set up base for several years. But by June 1984, with both The Top and ‘Caterpillar’ charting highly, he finally handed Siouxsie his GP-approved resignation. Robert Smith was a Banshee no longer.

  In an interview at the time, Smith figured he was going through a mid-life crisis at the ripe old age of 25, hinting that, “The point where I stop working in contemporary music, I think, becomes increasingly close.” When asked about his life as a Banshee, Smith was frank. “The stuff we did live was absolutely brilliant,” he said, “but the recorded stuff didn’t really have the same definition and maybe it was a mistake to make that record [Hyaena]. A lot of it is good, but it’s not cohesive enough to be great.” And his current mindset? “Happy but very muddled,” Smith replied.

  Steve Severin, Smith’s accomplice in The Glove and prime reason for his lengthy stay in the Banshees, wasn’t so enthused, especially given that Smith had just served his notice to the band. Their seemingly unbreachable alliance was over. Many years later, when asked whether he’d maintained any kind of relationship with Smith after the split, Severin virtually wrote him off. “Robert has a tendency to edit people out of his life when he has tired of draining them,” Severin snapped. “I have the impression that he lives in a rock star hermetic cocoon surrounded by sycophants. If so, he’s welcome to it. I doubt we would have much in common any more.”

  Robert Smith wasn’t a quick learner. He may have had a full physical collapse, his head and his body screaming for a rest, but he continued to tour with The Cure. After a trio of shows at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Cure 1984 (Smith, Tolhurst, Thornalley and Anderson) did the obligatory European run, concentrating on France, Holland and Germany, countries that didn’t take great exception to their recent pop makeover. After a final date on May 31 at Utrecht, Smith turned his attention to talking up The Top, an album that sounded remarkably coherent, given its bizarre, fractured creation. Smith, however, wasn’t so sure, damning it as “a really self-indulgent album – a reaction against ‘The Lovecats’ in a way. I had to get it out of my system, but there are songs on there that were really pointing the way to what I wanted to do.”

  Smith may have given credits to Anderson, Thompson and Tolhurst in The Top’s liner notes, but The Cure’s latest was effectively as close as Smith would ever come to his much talked about solo album. Those credits give away some obvious clues as to Tolhurst’s diminished role within The Cure, too: he was listed as simply playing “other instruments”. Tolhurst was purely a physical presence in the studio, weighed down by Smith’s obsessiveness and his own toxic problems.

  “To be honest,” Tolhurst admitted in 2005, “I played few keyboard parts on that album. The songwriting credits I have on The Top are for lyrics, really. I think this was the beginning of the downward spiral for me. The vision of The Cure was starting to evaporate for me; although I was physically in the studio every day pretty much for the whole album, my soul was elsewhere, looking down into that horrible dark abyss which nowadays I am thankfully free of.”

  Tolhurst wasn’t the only one on a downward spiral. Tim Pope would let it slip that Dave Allen, The Top’s co-producer, told him that Smith’s manic self-obsession had made for some “terrifying” sessions. When Melody Maker likened Smith to Pink Floyd’s doomed Syd Barrett in their uncharacteristically positive review of The Top, they were closer to the truth than they might have imagined.

  “Trying to get to the bottom of The Top,” the ubiquitous Steve Sutherland observed, “is a bit like trying to decide whether a happy lunatic would be better off sane. It’s silly and sinister, perfectly amoral and completely incompatible with anything else happening now.”

  Hindsight being the great leveller it is, it’s now much easier to unravel The Top. Along with its even more successful follow-up, The Head On The Door, which was released in August 1985, The Top was both an experiment and an each-way bet from Smith. He was trying to find a way to keep both sets of Cure lovers happy, providing enough upbeat pop tunes to satisfy those seduced by ‘The Lovecats’, without denying the overcoat and mascara brigade who’d understood Pornography to be the word according to Goth. This duality was reflected in Cure setlists from the time, too, where they attempted to present both sides of the band, including the epic downers (‘Play For Today’, ‘One Hundred Years’, ‘The Wailing Wall’) and the hits (‘Primary’, ‘The Lovecats’, ‘The Caterpillar’). It was a fine balance that Smith would eventually perfect, much to his commercial, if not his critical, benefit.

  The Top opened with ‘Shake Dog Shake’, where Smith unleashes possibly the creepiest shriek he would ever commit to tape – and that’s saying something, because it’s not as if his recorded history has been short of unsettling cries and feline-like screeches. But here he sounds truly possessed. Sonically, it does hark back to the swirling, claustrophobic soundscapes of Pornography, but ‘Shake Dog Shake’ isn’t necessarily a warning of things to come. It was just a reminder that The Cure hadn’t completely lost touch with their petulant past. The more restrained ‘Birdmad Girl’ follows, an early example of Smith’s efforts with vocal experimentation. The song may be a morbid study of what Smith described as “insensible savagery”, but there was a noticeable playfulness to Smith’s voice, as he wrapped himself around a slithery guitar riff and a stark piano. (‘Birdmad Girl’ is one of only two Tolhurst co-writes on the album; The Top truly was Smith’s album.)

  The musical mood of the album, though not necessarily its lyrical tone, is pretty well established at this early stage, two tracks in – each bleak soundscape would be countered with something lighter and breezier. It was as if the juggling act he was trying to maintain with the Banshees and The Cure was also captured in his songwriting. For every ‘Wailing Wall’ – a Middle East-flavoured dirge that came to Smith when he was touring Israel with the Banshees – there’s a baroque pop ditty such as ‘The Caterpillar’, with its rusty violin scratchings and toy piano interlude. Then there was the strangely seductive ‘Dressing Up’, a particular favourite of Smith’s, a track that opened with what sounded for all the world like pan flutes, as if Smith had sampled wild sounds from some esoteric South American soundtrack. And ‘The Empty World’ featured a scaled-down military band, tin whistles and all. Added to that was the gently twisted title track, where Smith and co-producer Allen were so intent on capturing the sound of a spinning top that they devoted the bulk of one night’s recording to doing just that. He’d come a long way from the three-nights-and-you’re-outta-here rush that was the recording of Three Imaginary Boys.

  Smith may have inched closer to the perfect musical balance on The Top, but his lyrical mindset was still set to pitch black. The screeching, insistent ‘Give Me It’ comes on like a warning, as Smith implores his protagonist to leave him alone so that he might be free to find affection as if he was documenting the last agonised cries of a dying man. Then there’s ‘Piggy In The Mirror’, another song touched by the Nicholas Roeg film Bad Timing, a song that Smith described as “me hating myself again”. When Smith invites us to follow him in his search for where the real pleasure might lie during ‘Shake Dog Shake’, it’s not quite an invitation; it felt more like a dare. Clearly, it proved that Smith was feeling the strain of simply taking on too much, as he bounced between bands and schedules like some human bas
ketball. And no Cure album would be complete without a literary loan: for The Top it was J.D. Salinger’s turn. His short story, ‘A Perfect Day For Bananafish’ provided the title, if not the message, of ‘Bananafishbones’. When asked about the song’s meaning, however, Smith admitted that it was far more personal and much more in tune with the rest of The Top. “Again, me hating myself,” he replied.

  But if there was one song from The Top that summed up Smith’s jumbled emotions (and senses), as he struggled to understand whether he was fronting a pop band-in-the-making or something far darker and heavier, it was the title track. While it was clear that Smith didn’t have any immediate answers for his dilemma, at least he had finally worked up the courage to ask the question out loud, as he sang of being unable to care yet being equally unable to admit it without feeling an apprehensive sense of remorse. Smith knew that this was an important song for him, as simple as it seems when deconstructed. He referred to it as a classic case of “finally coming to my senses; [it’s] something of a milestone lyric.” Robert Smith wasn’t totally free of his band’s bleak past, but he was finding the courage to consider their poptastic future. The Top was proof of that.

  Lol Tolhurst’s role on the album (and in The Cure) might have been reduced to a couple of co-writes and “other instruments”, but he seemed fully aware that The Cure was a band in transition. “With The Top, it was like 50-50, you know,” Tolhurst said. “There were some days when we did things that felt sad and sort of claustrophobic and then some days it was like happy and up. So that accounts for the variation. [It was done] purely for that reason, just to sort of experiment and try and see if people would believe it was us. I suppose we like to confuse people, really. We’re a bit mischievous.” As for Smith, he revealed that he’d gone back to his old method of compiling a master tape of favourite songs while making the album, and playing it over and over for inspiration. The tape’s contents – Billie Holiday’s ‘Getting Some Fun Out Of Life’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ – seemed to explain The Top’s sonic schizophrenia, or possibly the reason why, five years later, Smith would come clean and admit that the entire album was recorded in the wrong tempo. Wrong tempo or not, The Top spun its way into the UK Top 10.

  August 1984 was the rarest of months for Robert Smith: he had no commitments other than to return to Wales with Mary, with the album still climbing the charts, and sift through hour after hour of Cure tapes – about 160 in all – for their live set, Concert. On its release in October, it appeared that Smith had the balance just about right, aligning the stark, bleak roar of ‘One Hundred Years’ and ‘The Hanging Garden’ with their almost-hits ‘Primary’ and ‘A Forest’. Smith dug even deeper into the back catalogue for ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ and ‘Killing An Arab’. Of course Smith wasn’t satisfied, but you’d hardly expect anything less. “Half of it is really good,” he said, “and half of it is … interesting if you like The Cure, but if you don’t you’ll be bored by it. Very bored.”

  By the time Concert did appear, The Cure was back performing some concerts of their own. The next leg of their world tour kicked off in Wellington, New Zealand, on September 30. They wouldn’t return home until the end of November.

  It wouldn’t have been a Cure tour without at least one meltdown and a departure: this time it was the turn of drummer Andy Anderson. But unlike most Cure road trips, where the unease takes some time to bubble to the surface, there was tension pretty much from the get-go. Temporary Cure-ist Phil Thornalley told me that when they reached Australia, there was clearly more brewing with Anderson than magic-mushroom tea. “The tension on that tour was rife,” Thornalley said. “By the time we got to Australia there was already tension with Andy. It was strange and very sad.”

  The cracks had actually started to appear back in May, when Anderson flipped out in Nice when he was sprayed with mace after having been mistaken for an intruder. (Dressing Rambo-style, in combat fatigues, while marching down the corridor of a five-star hotel, blaring boombox on your shoulder, can cause that kind of confusion.)

  “The first time in Nice was kind of interesting because I had to go with Parry to get him out of jail,” Tolhurst said. “He came back in the morning in combat gear, boombox on his shoulder, shaved head, walking through the foyer of this fancy hotel. The security guy grabbed him and maced him, which wasn’t the right thing to do, because he went into this fury. He chased the guy and started banging on a door of the room into which he thought he’d disappeared, but in fact it was the room of the daughter of the mayor of Nice. So he got carted off to jail.

  “When Chris and I got him out, I spent three hours on the beach at Nice with him talking him out of going back to the hotel and finding the guy. Then the mayor said very kindly, ‘If Mr Anderson leaves town today, there’ll be no charges.’”

  As Lol Tolhurst added, “We said to him, ‘OK, you get another chance.’” The next time around, though, Anderson truly bottomed out. He and Smith had argued after a show in Sydney on October 12; by the time they made it to Tokyo five days later, Anderson exploded.

  Earlier in the night they’d played the second of two shows at the Nakano Sun Plaza Hall, and the band had ended up in a club until somewhere around four in the morning. Smith, who admitted to being “a bit sake-ed up”, staggered off to bed. When he awoke, he found that Anderson had left a wave of destruction behind him, systematically attacking band and crew members and anyone else who approached him. Maybe the mixture of his magic-mushroom tea and the physically and mentally taxing life on the road sent him over the edge. There were even suggestions that Anderson had lost it after one too many jibes about his skin colour. “There was definitely some issues with racism,” said Smith. “When we went to places like Japan, you’d notice things, people’s attitudes, how difficult it was for him to get served in clubs. I think it really got to him.”

  Phil Thornalley was very reluctant to go into the specifics of Anderson’s Tokyo rampage. He would say, however, that by the time The Cure reached Japan the Anderson situation was way out of control. “He wasn’t a happy camper. As ever, touring with The Cure there was lots of drinking, drugs – it had just taken its toll.”

  “We had a German tour manager, Jade Kniep,” Lol Tolhurst said to me, “who had spent some time in the military, which was fortunate as he was able to restrain Andy so he couldn’t hurt himself or others. We had a meeting the next day and said to Andy, ‘OK, we’ll send you home to London and see what happens on our return.’”

  As Tolhurst was to learn, Anderson had a history of erratic behaviour. “People said to us, ‘Oh, you should get Andy, he’s a really good drummer.’ But no one told us that if you went on the road with him for too long, he went crazy.”*

  It was a classic Cure scenario: they were five days away from their first show of a US tour, at the Paramount in Seattle, and they were now one member short. Even though his own time with The Cure was fast running out, Thornalley proved to be the band’s saviour, as he searched for a drummer who could fill in at a phone call’s notice. His first call was to Mike Nocito, his RAK sidekick during the Pornography sessions, who had been playing the drums for as long as Thornalley had been a bassman. As tempted as he was to join a band that was about to play a selection of middling-sized venues in the USA (including the Beacon Theater in New York and the Hollywood Palladium), Nocito passed, mainly because his studio reputation had blossomed since Pornography. “Tempted?” Nocito laughed when I asked him about his near thing. “It would have been magnificent.” Thornalley’s next call was to Vince Ely, whom he’d met while working on The Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk. “Count me in,” Ely replied.

  But Ely, who was working on the West Coast at the time, was purely a fill-in, someone to keep the beat for the band’s first six US shows. Boris Williams, another contact of Thornalley’s, via his work with The Thompson Twins and Kim Wilde, shifted into the drummer’s stool for their November 7 show in Minneapolis. Williams would stay in the chair for the best part of
the next 10 years, even though he admitted to not being the band’s biggest fan. “I like some of the stuff The Cure have done, but I’ve never bought their albums,” he said not long after joining. What did endear The Cure to Williams was their fondness for booze; The Thompson Twins had been an alcohol-free zone. “The idea of a party with The Thompson Twins,” Williams said, “was a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich.”

  Though there were only 16 dates in their North American tour, there were already further signs of what would eventually become known as Curemania. An in-store at a Vancouver record shop provided hints of the hysteria that would burst out during subsequent tours. The band was scheduled for a 4pm signing session at Odyssey Records; when they finally arrived, almost two hours late, the store was packed. “What was an orderly line has now become an impatient mass halfway into the store,” reported local journalist, Dean Pelkey. When Smith and band arrived, they were swamped. “They [were] instantly mobbed,” he reported, “besieged for autographs, presented with banners, stuffed toys and smothered with kisses. It makes me wonder if the boys in Duran Duran had not better start worrying a bit.” A little less than a year later, when The Cure returned to North America, Pelkey would learn how accurate his off-the-cuff prediction truly was.