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  Andy Anderson wasn’t the only Cure reject from this period. Phil Thornalley knew his time was almost up once the band returned to the UK at the end of November. Within a few weeks of the tour he’d realised that he just wasn’t built for touring; the safety zone of the studio was much more his style. “It’s not for the faint-hearted, touring, but it was worthwhile just to find out how flawed my character really is,” Thornalley told me. “You’re flying everywhere, you’re not looking after yourself; it can take a toll very quickly. When anybody else would ask me to come back out on the road [after The Cure], I’d have to be particularly hungry.”

  Thornalley’s exit was hustled along considerably when roadie Gary Biddles negotiated a reunion between Gallup and Smith. Gallup had been deeply scarred by his Brussels set-to with Smith; he admitted to feeling a deep sense of resentment whenever he saw The Cure on Top Of The Pops. Gallup also believed that Thornalley didn’t belong in the band – he should be The Cure’s bassist, not this studio cat. After all, Gallup figured, he and Smith were old mates, they should be playing together. Chris Parry realised this, too, and initiated a clever plan to squeeze Thornalley out of the band when the word came through that Gallup and Smith had got drunk and made up. Almost 20 years later, Thornalley was still impressed by Parry’s machinations.

  “It was very artful, the way it was done,” he said to me. “Robert wasn’t involved with it at all, it was Chris Parry, who’s very politically expedient. He was clever. He said, ‘With the next record, we want you to be the engineer. We don’t want you to co-produce, we don’t want you to play bass.’ Of course if you’ve just come off being the bass player and producer, it makes you ask, ‘What’s going on?’ I got into a flap. Looking back on it, it was very clever because it made me self-combust.”

  Once the dust had settled early in 1985, Simon Gallup was back in The Cure, as was Porl Thompson, the former greatest guitarist in Crawley. The Cure was about to enter their golden age.

  * Tin Drum was another Hansa release, incidentally: to Smith it must have felt like 1977 all over again.

  * Smith would recall entering his surgery and seeing his doctor’s face drop. “He said, ‘Whatever it is you’re doing, you have to stop.’”

  * Tolhurst still maintains a relationship with Anderson. “Andy is a great musician and friend when he is well.” Anderson and Tolhurst once undertook a short US tour, but the next time he was scheduled to return, Anderson simply didn’t show. “It’s not Syd Barrett, but he’s unpredictable. I like him a lot but he can be something of a liability.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Everything I’d ever dreamed of doing was coming to fruition. I suddenly realised that there was an infinite amount of things I could do with the band.”

  – Robert Smith

  SIMON GALLUP had kept himself busy enough during his 18 months as a Cure outsider. As part of Fools Dance, alongside erstwhile Cure keyboardist Matthieu Hartley, he’d released a mini-album called Priesthole and played some minor club dates in Europe. But it seemed as though every time Gallup headed up to the bar at his local at Horley, there’d be a Cure song playing or someone reminding him of his past. Gallup had two options: he could completely erase his days with The Cure from his memory, or he could reconcile with Smith and work out whether they could make new music together. Fortunately for Gallup, Biddles made that decision easier for him when he called Smith from the King’s Head one night and got the pair back together.* As Biddles would recall in Ten Imaginary Years, “They both met round my house and said hello very quietly and it moved on from there. After a few pints, they were talking again.” It was clear that Biddles’ area of Cure responsibility extended beyond the usual driving, humping amps and throwing the occasional punch.

  “The actual decision for me to go and meet Simon and ask him to rejoin the group was the most positive thing I’d done for ages with regards to The Cure,” Smith said. “Once he’d agreed [to rejoin], I knew I could pick up where I left off with Pornography.” But Smith’s revised master plan for The Cure involved music that was far more positive in mood than what had gone before. “I could then use what was in the group to uplift people,” Smith continued, “rather than just moaning about things.”

  Come February 1985, and the new Cure – Smith, Tolhurst, Gallup, Boris Williams and Porl Thompson – convened at F2 Studios in Tottenham Court Road, where Smith premiered a tape of demos that would form the nucleus of their next album, The Head On The Door. Gallup, who clearly wasn’t the most nimble-fingered bass player known to man, wasn’t so sure that he could help hold down the rhythm section alongside a player as skilled as Williams. However, just like his reconciliation with Smith, Gallup found that a few beers helped ease his nervousness. (Which was ironic, really, given Gallup’s later problems with drink and drugs.)

  The Head On The Door’s songs started to come together by spring, with the sessions moving between Angel, Townhouse and Genetic studios. Dave Allen, whose first major credit was that of co-engineer on The Human League’s 1981 breakthrough album Dare, co-produced with Smith. The sessions progressed smoothly enough, although large cracks were starting to appear in the relationship between Tolhurst and the rest of the band. According to Smith, Tolhurst couldn’t get through a single session without drinking himself to a shit-faced standstill. “I don’t think Lol remembers much about it,” Smith said afterwards. “He was off the planet every night and had to be sent home in a cab.” Tolhurst knew he had a major drinking problem, but didn’t quite know how to deal with it.

  “I wasn’t aware enough to decide what the problem was,” he said in 2004. “I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll carry on drinking.’ I’d sit in the studio getting very upset at myself for not being able to play something or think of a good idea, which I’d always been able to do before.” Tolhurst’s only solution was to keep drinking. To his credit, however, he did receive a more substantial musical credit for The Head On The Door than he did with The Top (“keyboards” as opposed to “other instruments”). But this time, unlike their previous five albums, there was no musical or lyrical input from Tolhurst; each song was a Smith original. The new Cure ground rules were in place: Robert Smith was bandleader, dictator and its creative force.

  More so than any Cure album that came before, The Head On The Door is the sound of The Cure feeling more comfortable with its place in the world, denying neither their melodic nous nor Robert Smith’s pessimistic world view. It opened with the runaway hit ‘Inbetween Days’, where Smith achieved the near impossible, somehow managing to make the dire pronouncement about his feeling so aged he could die sound like a celebration. It was one of the key musical achievements of his career, the perfect balance of melody and melancholy. Powered by skittish guitars and a wheezing, tubercolic organ, ‘Inbetween Days’ made it very clear what listeners were in for – a pop album with a dark core, a candy-coated treat with a poisonous centre. Even on a track as miserable as ‘Kyoto Song’, a song that had come to The Cure singer after another night on Severin’s floor during his Blue Sunshine bender, Smith managed to fuse his sullen lyric to a playful, inventive melody, with a vocal that’s both daring and experimental. (Smith’s confidence was growing as much vocally as it was in front of Tim Pope’s camera.) This was pop, but unlike much of anything else calling itself pop music in 1985.

  ‘The Blood’, with its faux-Flamenco guitars and stop-start rhythms, was actually a drinking song. It was written (or scrawled, more likely) after Smith had polished off a bottle of Portuguese plonk known to wary locals as ‘The Tears of Christ’. When Smith moaned how he was paralysed by the blood of Christ, he wasn’t tapping into some long-submerged spirituality. He was singing about getting tragically, completely pissed on this potent local brew, whose label featured an unholy image of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus under one arm and a bottle cradled in the other. Steve Severin kept a stash of this and other equally potent liqueurs in his house.

  A rolling, tumbling piano figure opens ‘Six Different Ways’, a song a
bout multiple personalities and one of The Head On The Door’s many highs. It was another classic study of Smith’s fast-developing popcraft and oft-neglected sense of humour – in a world dominated by the austere, no-fun sounds of Simple Minds, Echo & The Bunnymen and U2, The Cure sounded like aliens beamed in from some parallel pop universe. ‘Push’, however, seemed a backward step, its chiming rhythm guitars and cavernous drums moving way too close to the turgid “modern rock” of Big Country and their peers. If there was one song on The Cure’s sixth album that was a compromise, a concession to the musical world around it, this was it. But it was a rare misstep on a record that offered up such small-scale masterpieces as the infectious minimalism of ‘Close To Me’.

  Robert Smith wasn’t necessarily in a healthier state of mind for The Head On The Door – this was an album, after all, that stuck with such familiar subject matter as drugs, either as a theme (‘Screw’), or as a source of inspiration (Smith would admit that ‘New Day’ was a “drug-induced improvisation”). Smith also let loose his frustration towards the unstoppable march of time (see ‘Sinking’). And just as Smith had done way back with ‘A Forest’, he was also documenting his bleakest nightmares in such tracks as ‘The Baby Screams’ and ‘Close To Me’. Robert Smith had tapped into this negativity many times before – in fact, he’d made a handsome living doing just that. But this time around, overriding these downbeat lyrics and themes was the type of musical free-thinking that would soon cement The Cure’s position as accidental stars. They were one seriously fucked-up pop band who’d somehow managed to find a way to combine their leader’s dark nights of the soul with such flights of musical fancy as ‘Inbetween Days’ and ‘Close To Me’.

  These were pure pop songs that operated on two levels. On the surface, they were very easy to sing along with, but they could also be scrutinised more closely for signs of Smith’s ever-changing moods. As Smith explained, his goals with the album were very clear. “I wanted to write moody songs and pop songs and put them on the same record. I knew that there were people ready to accept the two things at the same time.” Smith also fancied The Head On The Door as a rebirth of The Cure. That was a fair enough comment, too, given that it was recorded with yet another revised line-up. “There was a real sense of being in a band for the first time since Seventeen Seconds,” Smith said. “It felt like being in The Beatles – and I wanted to make substantial, ‘Strawberry Fields’ style pop music. I wanted everything to be really catchy.”

  In reality, many Cure fans would be alienated by The Head On The Door, especially those who swore allegiance to the turbulent trilogy of Faith, Seventeen Seconds and Pornography. But for every browned-off member of the overcoat brigade, The Cure enticed a handful of cashed-up pop fans over to the dark side. It was an artful piece of manipulation on the part of Smith and The Cure, which was to prove particularly effective in North America, where their following had been increasing in both size and levels of fanaticism. And as Smith and Parry both knew, America was where they could make real money.

  Smith had never made any secret of his ambition to create the best possible music with The Cure; now he wanted to sell that music to as many people as possible. “I was looking for a bigger audience,” he admitted. “It wasn’t to do with being well known; I wanted more people to hear us. I thought we were in danger of disappearing a bit.”

  To achieve that goal, another call was made to Tim Pope, who truly excelled himself with two benchmark Cure videos for ‘Inbetween Days’ and ‘Close To Me’. The former marks the arrival of The Cure’s full-blown, large-haired, baggy-clothed, lipstick-smeared phase. It’s a performance video, of sorts, albeit one with a wildly surreal touch: the band seems to spend the entire clip being pursued by a battalion of flying fluorescent socks. Pope insisted that he was merely giving life to Smith’s creative vision (all for the princely sum of £8,000). “Robert’s brief was to make it look fresh and vivacious. They were supposed to be a kind of blurry colour effect, but when we got the video back, they looked exactly like socks. Robert was really pissed off.” MTV didn’t mind, however, because the clip quickly went into maximum rotation.

  ‘Close To Me’ was another performance video, but with a twist – the band was wedged into a cupboard that was slowly filling with water, which was teetering on the edge of Beachy Head.* The video worked on any number of levels – it was perversely entertaining, the images seemed to match the bare-boned electro-pop song beautifully, and, crucially, it stuck in the head of MTV viewers. Not only did it make global stars out of The Cure, but it also became a signature video for Tim Pope. “Wherever I go,” he said in 2003, “someone mentions it.” Pope’s memories of the shoot aren’t exactly nostalgic: they revolved around a tiny wardrobe, a massive studio and Lol Tolhurst’s digestion. “Lol’s bowels were a problem in a very confined space,” Pope admitted.

  “We were stuck in this horrid, tepid water for several hours at a time,” Tolhurst recalled. “It was kind of bizarre. I like the little trick it played on people; it was fun. The only thing I would say is that Tim always picked me to do the most dangerous thing to do in videos. I’d always come back a few days later with bruises and mild concussion from things he made me do. But I trusted him.”

  Again, Pope had taken a very literal approach to a Smith concept. They’d met a week before the shoot, when Smith mentioned that he had an image in mind for the sleeve of the single: the band jammed in a wardrobe about to take a tumble off Beachy Head. “I thought it’d look quite surreal,” Smith said. Pope thought the image would be wasted on a record sleeve and stole the idea for the video. According to Smith, “Tim translated that as, ‘How can I make it even more uncomfortable?’ He stuck us in a wardrobe and dropped us in a tank of dirty water.”

  The Cure and the charts were now firm friends. ‘Inbetween Days’, backed with ‘The Exploding Boy’, a song that Smith felt perfectly expressed “the happiness I felt playing in the new line-up”, fairly galloped to number 15 on its release in July 1985. Even the press was warming to Smith’s weird pop ways, if somewhat reluctantly, as typified by Steve Sutherland’s take on The Head On The Door in Melody Maker.

  “Robert Smith has wormed himself into an enviable but precarious position over the past 18 months,” he wrote. “We don’t know what to expect any more. He’s slipped the straitjacket of brooding depression that shaped Faith, cleaved through the claustrophobia of Pornography … and now roams among us, a harmless eccentric.” Sutherland could spot The Head On The Door’s obvious appeal, noting that ‘Close To Me’ was a seductive pop song and admitting that the entire album was “perfection of sorts”, even if it was merely “a collection of pop songs”. Rolling Stone, however, weren’t quite so sold on the album. While acknowledging that this was the LP that would make them much more than contenders Stateside, they still felt that the album hung “on the engagingly sweet single ‘Inbetween Days’ and not much more”.

  It didn’t really matter. By the time the new Cure hit the road, playing their first show in Barcelona on June 20, their star status was confirmed. So much so, in fact, that after a show in Athens, where they shared the bill with Nina Hagen, Talk Talk and Boy George, Tolhurst was mistaken for the Boy himself. Many free champagnes later, he crooned ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me’ as if he really was the artist sometimes known as George O’Dowd. Mary Poole, who’d commandeered the hotel bar, laughed along. By September 12, they were filling the 11,000 capacity Wembley Arena, followed by full houses at the Manchester Apollo and the 12,500 capacity Birmingham NEC. When ‘Close To Me’ dropped in September, the band was readying itself for yet another US tour – 14 shows in a month, culminating with a sold-out show at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. The Cure was an unstoppable force, with a hit album and two high-rotation MTV videos.

  So why The Cure? Nothing radical had occurred in the charts; in August 1985, when The Head On The Door was released, Huey Lewis was celebrating ‘The Power Of Love’, Bryan Adams was daydreaming about the ‘Summer Of 69’, and Dire
Straits was cranking out ‘Money For Nothing’. It was mediocre business as usual. With the odd exception, such as Kate Bush’s Fairlight extravaganza ‘Running Up That Hill’, the Top 40 was still a very safe house, a place for respectable acts to preach to the converted and then count their cash. But with their winning blend of eccentric pop tunes and wonderfully weird videos – and a look that fell just on the acceptable side of dangerous – The Cure had found their place amongst the Tinas, Phils and Whitneys of the world. It was a major achievement: five wild-haired Brits, one an alcoholic and several drunks-under-development, had managed to become pop stars.

  Robert Smith’s year in the spotlight was made complete with a December appearance on the BBC TV Oracle service, mixing a cocktail of his creation. He’d become a celebrity, of sorts: teen magazine Just 17 wanted to know his star sign, Smash Hits made him a cover star. Smith’s premature mid-life crisis seemed to be in remission as he flirted with the press, even starting a rumour that he was contemplating an EP of Sinatra tunes. The press, who’d dubbed him variously Mad Bob, in light of his “chemical vacation” with Severin, and Fat Bob, due to his expanding waistline, lapped it up.

  In many ways, Smith was the perfect star. He didn’t bullshit when asked reasonable questions, yet at the same time he fully appreciated the power of spin – his ever-changing responses to the “secret” behind the title of The Head On The Door alone were enough to fill a chapter of this book. He even managed to convince a gullible writer that Mary Poole was at various times a nun and a stripper. And The Cure now had an instantly identifiable look, courtesy of Tim Pope, with a back catalogue large enough to satisfy both long-termers and recent converts who, prior to ‘Let’s Go To Bed’, didn’t know The Cure from The Cutting Crew. Their live sets, which now ran to 20 or more songs, could easily accommodate the many sides of The Cure, encompassing everything from ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ and ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ to ‘Inbetween Days’, ‘The Walk’ and ‘One Hundred Years’. The compromises were small, the rewards were large.