Never Enough Page 29
As The Cure took a breather over the early months of 1986, Smith had the chance to review the 18 months that had slipped by since he had left the Banshees. If facts and figures counted for anything, Smith had made a shrewd move: over the course of two albums and a handful of hit singles – ‘Close To Me’, ‘Inbetween days’, ‘The Caterpillar’ – his band had become bona fide pop stars on the continent and were edging ever closer to mainstream success in the US. It hardly mattered that the UK press was still writing off The Cure.* Smith, however, was having the last laugh, as MTV continued to spin Pope’s videos and The Head On The Door clung to the charts like a fluoro-coloured barnacle.
Smith’s next move was typically unexpected. The band’s record deal was up for renewal and Polydor had plans for the obligatory best of. Smith was wary of career backtracks; they were usually a clear sign that an act was past its sell-by date. Aware that he couldn’t stop Polydor from issuing a compilation, he decided to become actively involved in the process. “If we were not to re-sign,” Smith realised, “they would immediately put out what they would call a greatest hits album and package it very badly. So that made me think we should do it now rather than wait for them to do it.”
Smith not only helped with the selection of tracks, but also re-remixed and re-recorded the vocal for ‘Boys Don’t Cry’. Alongside Tim Pope, Smith also helped compile a set of Cure videos. As no clip had been made for ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, the pair opted to shoot a performance video with a twist. Smith and Tolhurst hand-picked three pre-teens from a local drama school, who could convincingly lip-synch the song, while the original Three Imaginary Boys – Smith, Tolhurst and Michael Dempsey – strummed along from behind a screen. Sure, Smith was treading water by revisiting the band’s back catalogue, but at least he was finding a way to put a new spin on an old favourite.
Tolhurst recalled the reunion as “kind of strange”. The three had met beforehand for lunch in a London club; then just prior to the shoot they shared a very gentlemanly game of three-man racquetball. Times had definitely changed.
Dempsey had been a Cure outsider since his departure in 1979. Not surprisingly, he was taken aback when Smith called and informed him of the planned video. But he was unsure if it was an act of generosity on Smith’s part “or whether it just fitted in with the general scheme”. Regardless, he turned up and plugged in one more time. The clip worked brilliantly, even if Smith’s new vocal seemed strangely hysterical in parts.
The band’s worth on the continent was building to the stage where ‘Close To Me’ was actually heading for the top spot on the French chart. With that very much in mind, in April 1986, The Cure returned from their brief exile for an appearance on a TV show, Champs Elysee (“Wogan and Top Of The Pops rolled into one,” according to Tolhurst). With Thompson and Williams still on vacation, Tolhurst made a brief return to the drums while Martin Judd, a flatmate of his, mimed keyboards. Record Mirror looked on and couldn’t help but notice just how big the band had become, even without their full line-up available. They reported that “The Cure are the biggest thing to happen in France since Joan of Arc’s heart refused to burn at Rouen.”
Just like Pink Floyd before them, and Jeff Buckley afterwards, The Cure had tapped into the part of the French psyche that was drawn to moody, melancholic music. “The rock press loved the band, they toured France, their music is very emotional and ‘romantic’ – and the French love that,” explained Claude Duvivier, a Paris-based music industry professional. The French press, meanwhile, were convinced that Judd was the latest addition to The Cure. Lol Tolhurst has fond memories of Chris Parry “frantically running around trying to tell everybody he wasn’t the new band member, much to my and Robert’s amusement.”*
The band celebrated in very Cure style on May 22, when they rode the Orient Express to Venice for a proposed Old Grey Whistle Test live shoot. (Their show at Verona was scuppered by the local fire chiefs, so the Whistle Test filmed their on-board antics instead.) Freed of any immediate commitments, the band and their partners ran up a record Orient Express bar tab. Depending on which report you take as gospel, it ran to somewhere between £1,500 and £2,000. They’d come a long way from pushing Smith’s green Maxi van from show to show and singing for petrol money.
When Standing On A Beach, their 13-singles-strong compilation, was released in May, along with the video compilation Staring At The Sea, the band decided against the usual all-stops UK jaunt. Instead they played selected European festival dates, topped off with a celebratory headlining spot at Glastonbury on June 21, where a virtual greatest hits set ended in a blaze of lasers and retina-burning lights. The Cure mightn’t have been the most lively band on stage – Gallup’s low-slung bass playing being the only real rock move on display – but they now had the budget, and the audience, to turn on their very own rock’n’ roll spectacular. Smith was on such a high at Glastonbury that when he wished the masses a “happy tomorrow”, the persistent rain actually stopped falling. Only a star could do that.
Success in Europe was all well and good, but Smith and Parry still had their eyes turned Stateside. The Cure returned to America in early July for three weeks of shows to coincide with the release of Standing On A Beach. The standard question asked by the press was this: who’s the old codger on the album cover? It turned out to be one John Button, a fisherman living in quiet retirement in the harbour town of Rye. His wizened, leathery mug was perfect for the cover. Button was also the only person to appear in the newly shot clip for ‘Killing An Arab’. For a moment in time, Button became the sixth face of The Cure. (“If I can help these youngsters break through, after all, why not?” he said, when asked.)
The Cure was now onto its fourth US label, Elektra. (Sire had issued Japanese Whispers, but passed on The Top.) As always, there was more than a little backroom argy-bargy at work. In their very literal way, American radio programmers had begun to use ‘Killing An Arab’ as some sort of propaganda tool; its release came just after the US air and sea raids in the Gulf of Sirte in Libya on March 24, 1986. Quickly, the American Arab League petitioned Elektra to have the track withdrawn from Standing On A Beach. Smith responded by advising Elektra that they could delete the entire album, but the song stayed. They reached a compromise when Smith agreed to pen an explanation of the song, which appeared on a sticker affixed to the album’s cover. It read: “The song ‘Killing An Arab’ has absolutely no racist overtones whatsoever. It is a song which decries the existence of all prejudice and consequent violence. The Cure condemn its use in furthering anti-Arab feeling.” ‘Killing An Arab’ was quietly withdrawn from US radio airplay, but that didn’t stop the album from selling.
“I just despaired, really, that I had to step in and explain,” Smith said, “and I got very annoyed at Elektra’s initial suggestion that they delete the song but keep selling the album, which I refused to do. The song was written … when I was 16. It seemed ludicrous to me that it suddenly became an issue.”
Against Smith’s wishes, Elektra re-released ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ to help flog the best of, rather than Smith’s choice, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’. Smith felt that The Cure sold more singles than albums in the States, anyway, and was uncharacteristically mellow about the disagreement. “I’ve given up fighting with the record company in America,” he commented, as their US tour wound from the East to the West Coast, where the band would have their unfortunate meeting with suicidal self-mutilator Jonathan Moreland. “As long as they release the album and don’t mess about, I don’t really care.”
Smith was both right and wrong. Standing On A Beach was fast becoming their biggest seller in the US, but it was selling on the strength of the band’s singles, especially those with an accompanying Tim Pope video (as seen on MTV, of course), such as ‘Close To Me’ and ‘Inbetween Days’. Smith’s public image didn’t hurt their value either. The East Village Eye captured the zeitgeist perfectly when they described Smith as a “prophet of gloom [who] is the cuddliest thing since the Qantas koala bear; he is cute
in a Pillsbury doughboy sort of way”.
By February 1987, Standing On A Beach was The Cure’s first gold record in North America, shifting more than 600,000 copies. Their video collection, Staring At The Sea, would also go gold, in September 1987. (The Head On The Door had shifted around 250,000 copies after 38 weeks on the US album chart; everything that came before had averaged sales of 40–50,000.) “Standing On A Beach was a huge commercial success,” Smith stated. “Everything I’d ever dreamt of doing was coming to fruition. I suddenly realised that there was an infinite amount of things I could do with the band.”
Smith was as good as his word. After the LA tragedy, their greatest hits tour ended at a Roman amphitheatre in Provence on August 9, where the band had several thousand Cure-crazy French fans and Tim Pope’s cameras for company. Pope had snagged a reasonable £150,000 to shoot what would be known as The Cure In Orange, which had a low-key theatrical release in October 1987. When asked why the band was so big in France, Smith was stumped. “They like us because we’re odd,” was all he could offer.
Live film in the can, The Cure was now ready to begin piecing together an album that would reflect the band at their most prolific. They might as well have named their seventh album The Many Sides Of The Cure – it was truly all over the shop.
The recording of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was also an indication of The Cure’s new, gold-plated status. The various London studios in which they’d recorded – RAK and Townhouse, amongst others – might have featured all the production mod cons a band on an upward spiral (with a budget to match) could desire, with production staff who could make sense of the music ringing in Robert Smith’s ears. But Miraval, where the band set up camp for 10 weeks, had that extra special something. For one thing, the studio was the perfect escape: it was deep in the south of France, situated roughly halfway between Marseille and Nice and about a 40-minute drive from Cannes and St Tropez. Miraval also had enough beds to house the band and their many guests (most Cure partners moved in halfway through the sessions). The studio also had a certain history; since opening in 1977, its occupants had included Pink Floyd, who brought their almost career-ending monster, The Wall, to Miraval. David Sylvian would also record here, as would Stevie Winwood, Yes, Sade and Belinda Carlisle. And Miraval, which was set in the grounds of an imposing 17th century Provençal chateau, offered all the usual indulgences, such as a swimming pool and games room, plus a grand dining room that was just right for the type of bacchanalia to which The Cure had become accustomed.
“Miraval was great,” said Tolhurst, “because by that time we had enough money to record anywhere we wanted to. We realised the best place for us was somewhere far away from all the distractions.” There was also some local history to the site, as Tolhurst explained. “[The owner] Jacques Loussier,* I think, had vied with the local Mafia for the house. They wanted it for a safe house.”
Crucially for The Cure, Miraval was surrounded by 300 acres of rolling hills, pine woods – and lush Provence vineyards. The Cure weren’t averse to the occasional tipple, so Miraval must have felt just like home, even if it wasn’t exactly the perfect location for Lol Tolhurst and his worsening alcoholism. By this time, according to Smith, “Lol became a pitiful figure.”
“I wasn’t well for some of the time,” Tolhurst recalled. “Some of it was very good, some very sad.”
The band’s boozing during the sessions was so pronounced, in fact, that Tolhurst felt that the studio’s owners missed a great opportunity. The usual deal was that by hiring the site, the residents were supplied with all the Chateau de Miraval they could drink. “[But] I think with us they would have preferred it the other way around. With all drinking stories there’s an element of myth-making,” Tolhurst added, “but without a shadow of a doubt, Robert, Simon and myself were the hardcore crew. By that time it had become de rigueur; we just had to do it.”
“It was a very unreal situation,” Smith commented. “Ten weeks of being completely cut off from the world. It was a very incestuous, very secretive kind of thing – because we were having so much fun we didn’t want anyone to come and break the spell.”
Miraval was also very nearly the end of the band – or at least most of its members. After yet another boozy night, Smith, Tolhurst and Boris Williams decided to try to pay a visit in Smith’s jeep to racing car driver Alain de Cadenet, who lived nearby. The plan was to challenge him to a race. They didn’t get very far, as Tolhurst reported. “We were racing around, with no lights on, of course. There were all these ledges coming down the side of the hill of the vineyard, with a drop of about 15 feet on either side. We got stuck and Robert burned out the clutch trying to get it off this incline. All we could see was darkness all around us. We managed to get out and walk back, but the next morning we saw how precariously it was balanced. The car was written off. And we never got to see Alain de Cadenet.”
Despite all the band’s wild nocturnal wanderings, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was the most sprawling, musically adventurous outing of The Cure’s career. The mixing took Smith and co-producer Dave Allen even further off-shore, to Compass Point in Nassau, plus New York and Brussels. It was one strange trip, especially in light of the album’s more humble beginnings: the early demos had been recorded in Beethoven Studios in chilly London during downtime in summer 1986.
As the album would show, this truly was a team effort. It was also the first time that Smith would introduce a “scoring” system for each song offered by band members for inclusion. This relatively democratic system ran along simple lines: each Cure-ist would adjourn to their home studios, record demos on a cassette and then hand them to Smith, who would play each and make various notes in exercise books. As Boris Williams would relate, Smith then graded the songs. “He draws a little face, a frown, smile or blank face beside each song and out of all those we pick out the right sort of songs.” Smith’s more inclusive attitude might explain why there’s plenty of flab on the bones of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. It would also explain how Porl Thompson and Boris Williams came to score their first Cure songwriting credits.
To Smith, it was further evidence that this truly was the best Cure line-up he’d ever worked with – everyone was willing to chip in. Lol Tolhurst agreed. “That was the accomplished version [of The Cure],” he said to me. “Porl was a wonderful musician, Boris was a great drummer. It was a band that had real empathy with each other. Put us all together and it was like the best gang in town. That’s what kept it going – we had this loyalty to each other and whatever we were doing, it worked.”
This was very unlike the previous pair of albums, where Smith had strongly exercised what he called his “negative dictatorship”. (This was redefined by drummer Williams as a “democratic dictatorship … when it comes down to final decisions, it’s Robert’s decision what songs are going to work on the album.”)
“Among the five of us there is a genuine excitement about doing things,” Smith said. “With this album, I insisted that the others gave me a cassette of music and I got six or seven songs from each one. It just showed that everyone really wanted to be involved in it.” Smith would even liken the process to the Eurovision Song Contest.
Before hiding themselves away at Miraval, the band spent a fortnight demoing two cassettes’ worth of band-approved tracks in Provence. Smith remembered these sessions almost as fondly as the band’s leisurely months at Miraval. “It was really good fun,” he stated. “They had a football pitch and we played the locals every day.” As for the finished record, in spite of Tolhurst’s battles with the bottle, Smith felt “it was a delight to record, a joy”.
Looking back on that time, Tolhurst now realises how his chronic drinking problems were killing his creativity and poisoning his mind – he wanted to contribute to The Cure, but he found that the more he drank, the less he wrote. “I was there because I wanted to be there and contribute something,” he said. “But having this broken psyche meant that I was living inside my head for a lot of the time; my mind wouldn’t allo
w me to do it. It just wouldn’t come out by that time.”
If The Top was Robert Smith solo in all but name, and The Head On The Door was Smith backed by his favourite Cure line-up of all time, then Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me truly was The Cure as an egalitarian enterprise, even if it could have used an iron-willed editor. It was a fine single album posing as an 18-track sprawl. Every track carried the Smith/Gallup/Thompson/Williams/Tolhurst credit line, which said as much about The Cure’s one-in-all-in spirit as the diverse songs contained within. Rolling Stone got it exactly right when they stated that, “Under Smith’s guiding presence, The Cure ploughs through wah-wah encrusted garage band rave-ups, suicidally bummed-out set pieces and thumping rock-disco grooves with equal assurance.” In short, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me offered something for everyone – possibly even too much. To Smith, it was both a document of the band’s patchy musical history and a blueprint for the next stage of their career. “Half of it’s looking forward,” he said, “and half of it’s trying to sum up what the group’s done in the past.”
Kiss Me was not an album going anywhere in a hurry: it took almost four minutes of guitar squall during the opener, ‘The Kiss’, before Smith’s voice emerged from the gloom with a signature wail. And then it was only to mutter some of the most gruesome lines of his lyrical life which invoked the f-word in a now typical abusive put-down aimed at his long-suffering tormentor. But then came a reminder that The Cure was a pop band deep down inside: ‘Catch’ was up next, a gentle valentine flavoured by a plucked acoustic guitar and keyboards posing as strings. It was a low-key charmer that, along with ‘Just Like Heaven’ and ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’, was one of the trio of singles to emerge from this hugely successful long-player.