Never Enough Page 3
While Robert Smith and his schoolmates were coming to grips with the delicate nuances of wailing “we are gentlemen from Japan” in a Crawley assembly hall, a different kind of musical revolution was happening elsewhere in England. In 1968, the first Isle of Wight Festival was held. This was a bare-bones type of festival: the stage was perched precariously on the back of two lorries, the stars were San Franciscans The Jefferson Airplane, and the crowd numbered around 10,000. In 1969, however, the festival grew substantially when Bob Dylan, emerging from self-imposed seclusion, agreed to close the show. Decked out in preacher-man white and helped along by his mid-Sixties backing combo, The Band (themselves reluctant stars), the so-called “British Woodstock” pulled an estimated 150,000 punters. The following year, Robert Smith’s brother, Richard, then 24, insisted that his 11-year-old sibling accompany him to the next Isle of Wight Festival, which ran between August 26 and 30.
While the opening few days showcased local acts, soloists and second-division hopefuls, including Procol Harum, Supertramp and Tony Joe White, the festival’s final two days (and nights) blazed brightly, thanks to stellar performances from pyro-progs, Emerson, Lake & Palmer (making their debut, the supergroup very nearly succeeded in burning down the stage – 30-odd years later, Keith Emerson is a Santa Monican neighbour of Lol Tolhurst), along with Woodstock survivors John Sebastian, Ten Years After, The Who and Sly & The Family Stone. Electric gypsy Jimi Hendrix, the man whom the 11-year-old Robert Smith and much of the bumper crowd had come to see, shared the Sunday bill with an eclectic bunch: cosmic folkie Donovan, raggedy-voiced poet Leonard Cohen, Richie Havens, space ritualists Hawkwind, The Moody Blues, Brit folkies Pentangle, Ralph McTell, protest queen Joan Baez and soon to be prog superstars Jethro Tull.
As the organisers had discovered the previous year, art and commerce were uncomfortable bedfellows at the 1970 festival. A small community of ticketless hippies took over a nearby hill and the inevitable occurrence of fucking and various other bodily functions, frequently in full and shocking view, scared the hell out of the conservative locals. One of the event’s organisers, Ron “Turner” Smith, had to call the Health Department to have the hillside area – ‘Desolation Row’ – disinfected because of the stench of human waste. A resident, meanwhile, reported that “a stark naked man jumped out and danced” in front of her car, while there were numerous reports of nude bathing at nearby Compton Beach.
Robert Smith’s number one guitar hero, Jimi Hendrix, eventually took the stage on the Sunday night, August 30, working his way through a set that included Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’, The Beatles’ ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, his own ‘Machine Gun’ and, as a tip of his Fender to the British crowd – and a twist on his standard psychedelic reworking of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ – he tore through ‘God Save The Queen’. But as the final soaring strains of ‘In From The Storm’ rained over the crowd, young Robert Smith was nowhere to be seen. When Richard Smith had gotten lucky with a female festival-goer, he zipped Robert into their shared tent, thereby denying him the chance to check out what was to be Hendrix’s final UK performance. Eighteen days later Hendrix was found dead in a London flat, having choked on his vomit in his sleep.
“My brother took me,” Smith said in 2004, “but I wouldn’t say that I was aware that I was at a concert. I was 11 at the time. Jimi Hendrix played and I stayed in the tent. I just remember two days of orange tent and dope smoke.” Smith would be a tad more forthright in an interview with a Spanish newspaper, when he spoke of his Isle of Wight experience. “My brother left me locked in the tent while he left to fuck or get stoned. I have not forgiven him since.” (As compensation, his brother took Robert to see Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Smith was hooked, seeing the film 11 times in a fortnight. “That gave me a bit of brain damage as well.”)
Robert Smith still has a faded photo of himself at the Isle of Wight Festival, standing outside his orange tent, “with a glazed expression on my face”.
Smith’s youthful interest in Hendrix was more than just a passing fascination: Hendrix’s image and music represented a completely different way of life for the kid from comfortable, predictable Crawley. To Smith, Hendrix was an alien. “They’d not live like us, speak like us, eat like us. Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free, and when you’re nine or 10 your life is entirely dominated by adults,” Smith admitted. Understandably, Hendrix made Smith believe that there may be more to life than a stint as centre forward for QPR. “Hendrix was the first person who made me think it might be good to be a singer and a guitarist – before that I wanted to be a footballer.”
The first Hendrix song to which Smith was exposed was ‘Purple Haze’; his brother Richard had played it to him when Robert was eight, in 1967. His response was both swift and immediate – he simply wouldn’t stop playing the record until he’d worn a completely new groove in the vinyl. “I was just awestruck by it,” Smith said. “I must have played it 20 times a day; I drove everyone in the house mad.” Smith went as far as to memorise the song, but not with a plan of emulating Hendrix’s peerless guitar moves. Instead he learned the song inside out by singing it. “I learned to sing all the drum parts, the bass, the guitar solo – I was just obsessed by it.”
It was Smith’s brother Richard – a hippie who’d backpacked through Asia, returning from India with, as Smith would relate, “lots of pictures of women with eight arms to stick on my bedroom wall” – who’d have a big impact on his impressionable sibling, as well as his schoolyard buddy Lol Tolhurst. Smith’s rebellious brother would smoke pot in the family house, in full view of his parents. But his elder sister Margaret also introduced Smith to a key musical influence: The Beatles. When Smith was six, the melodic chime of The Beatles album Help! – a plea for help from John Lennon, as it turned out – would blare, repeatedly, from the other side of Margaret’s bedroom door. She was also a serious Stones fan. Smith was hooked. “I would sit on the stairs, listening through the door,” he recalled almost 40 years later. “It made me realise there was another world going on beyond my immediate environment. The melodies on these tunes are so fantastic and the imagination that goes into these songs is just unreal.” While the very young Smith was moved to tears by the music, it would continue to have the same effect on him as a 44-year-old. “It’s so perfect it makes me weep,” he said in 2003. “I listen to Help! and I’m filled with hope that the world could be a better place.”
In the mid-Sixties, there was no avoiding The Beatles or the Stones, so the youthful Smith chose to dive straight in. “My older sister and older brother had all their records and instead of listening to childish little things, I was listening to rock,” said Smith. By the time he was seven, Smith insisted that he knew the complete repertoire of Jagger & Richards and Lennon & McCartney.
It was also during the formative years of his life that Smith first heard the mysterious, ill-fated singer/songwriter Nick Drake, whose downbeat moodscapes would have a significant and quite tangible impact on Smith’s early work with The Cure. Smith was 10 when he first listened to Drake’s 1969 album Five Leaves Left, courtesy, again, of his brother Richard. Just like Hendrix and ‘Purple Haze’, Smith’s conversion was quick and absolute, although Smith realised that Drake was “on the other side of the coin to Jimi Hendrix – he was very quiet and withdrawn”. As his musical career advanced, Smith would aspire to emulate Drake’s understated songwriting and singing. But at the age of 10, it was more Drake’s heartfelt style that swayed Robert Smith. To Smith, Drake’s depth of feeling felt convincingly real. “[He] wasn’t worried about what people thought of him. He wasn’t worried about being famous. I think also that because he had an untimely death like Jimi Hendrix, he was never able to compromise his early work. It’s a morbid romanticism [something Smith and The Cure could definitely relate to] but there is something attractive about it.”
Smith’s parents, both of whom were musically inclined (his father sang, his mother pl
ayed the piano), had no objections to their son’s love of rock – in fact, they encouraged it, while at the same time gently steering young Robert in a more formal musical direction. While all the time encouraging their children to discuss their favourite records – Smith would remember “staggering talks about Slade and Gary Glitter” – Alex and Rita Smith also introduced them to classical music, in an attempt to, in Smith’s words, “enable me to have a larger vision of rock”.
Another of Smith’s early music heroes was David Bowie. He and his lifelong partner, Mary Poole, would share their first dance to the accompaniment of Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars’. Smith first laid eyes on the man who fell to earth on Top Of The Pops on July 6, 1972. Bowie was decked out in his jumpsuit of many colours and crooning ‘Starman’ while draped suggestively over his sidekick and guitar man Mick Ronson. Bowie’s grandstanding performance introduced what would soon become known as glam rock to the mainstream. It was a pivotal moment in pop history in the UK – and was as far removed from the previous week’s Top Of The Pops, when urchin piano man Gilbert O’Sullivan crooned ‘Ohh-Wakka-Doo-Wakka-Day’, as was humanly possible. A generational change had happened, all in the space of seven days.
Smith insisted that everyone his age remembered the event. “It’s like Kennedy being shot, [but] for another generation. You just remember that night watching David Bowie on TV. It was really a formative, seminal experience.” And Smith wasn’t alone – another onlooker was Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch. “As soon as I heard ‘Starman’ and saw him on Top Of The Pops I was hooked,” McCulloch would state. “In 1972, I’d get girls on the bus saying to me, ‘Eh la, have you got lippy on?’ or ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ Until he turned up it was a nightmare. All my other mates at school would say, ‘Did you see that bloke on Top Of The Pops? He’s a right faggot, him!’ And I remember thinking, ‘You pillocks,’ as they’d all be buying their Elton John albums, and Yessongs and all that crap. It made me feel cooler.”
Gary Kemp, future songwriter for Spandau Ballet, also looked and learned. “I watched it at a friend’s council flat,” he recalled. “My reality was so far removed from this guy’s place, that my journey from that moment on was to get there, and I think the same applies to most of my generation.”
Robert Smith’s love of all things glam was swift and absolute. He would boast of his affection for Sweet, Slade, Marc Bolan and T. Rex (“who I secretly loved because my brother considered that to be music for women”). Roxy Music was another Smith favourite; he’d first seen them perform ‘Pajamarama’ on TV at around the same time as witnessing Bowie camp up ‘Starman’. The attraction was as physical as it was musical: Smith was a big fan of Ferry’s quiff and his pink leopard jacket.
But Bowie was the deepest kick of all for Robert Smith. By this time Bowie had been through more makeovers than Joan Collins; pop crooner, earnest folkie, spaced oddity, Ziggy Stardust – he was exactly the kind of pop chameleon that appealed to the lateral-thinking Robert Smith. Within weeks of his star turn on Top Of The Pops, Bowie had made his second assault on the UK Top 20; along with fellow glamsters T. Rex and Mott The Hoople (riding high on their Bowie-penned ‘All The Young Dudes’, no less), he was sharing chart space with such peculiar bedfellows as Cliff Richard, David Cassidy and Donny Osmond. And Bowie’s thing for reinvention wasn’t lost on Robert Smith: over The Cure’s four decades, Smith wouldn’t just reinvent the band musically, but his public image was in a constant state of evolution, from the serious young insect of Faith and Pornography to the lipstick-smudged Lovecat and beyond.
Smith would ponder the fine art of reinvention during a 1989 interview, where he freely admitted that the idea of disappearing for a time and then returning in a new skin had its appeal. “In fact, it appeals to me so much, I do it every couple of years. I think I enjoy The Cure because I do come back as a different person every time.*
“I felt that his records had been made with me in mind,” recalled Smith. In fact, Smith was so inspired by Bowie’s Top Of The Pops performance that he counted his pocket money and bought Bowie’s epochal The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, which had been released a month earlier. It was Smith’s first – and most prized – LP purchase. “He was blatantly different,” said Smith.
Bowie’s androgynous appeal and uncertain sexual persuasion would lead to a division amongst the students at St Wilfrid’s Catholic Comprehensive School (as it would at thousands of other schools across the UK): Smith willingly stood on the side of the cross-dressing Starman. Smith recalled how the school was divided “between those who thought he was a queer and those who thought he was a genius.
“Immediately, I thought: this is it. This is the man I’ve been waiting for. He showed that you could do things on your own terms; that you could define your own genre and not worry about what anyone else is doing, which I think is the definition of a true artist.”
While Hendrix and Bowie seemed natural-born heroes for a musically curious kid such as Robert Smith, Alex Harvey was a much less obvious choice as a musical role model. Born in Scotland, Harvey was a rock’n’roll journeyman who’d worked his way through the UK skiffle boom of the Fifties, eventually forming The Alex Harvey Big Soul Band in 1959. Just like The Beatles, Harvey crossed the Channel to Hamburg, Germany, in the early Sixties; it was there that he cut his first album, 1963’s Alex Harvey And His Soul Band, which, perversely, didn’t actually feature his band. Unlike the Fab Four, however, Hamburg wasn’t the start of a supernova career for Harvey – quite the opposite. He dissolved the Big Soul Band in 1965, heading home for a period until he moved to London, where he fell under the spell of psychedelia, forming the short-lived Giant Moth. But neither a spell in the pit band of a production of Hair, or a solo album (1969’s Roman Wall Blues) did much for Harvey’s profile. It wasn’t until the early Seventies, when he recruited the Scottish band Tear Gas – guitarist Zal Cleminson (a particular favourite of Smith’s), Chris Glen, Hugh McKenna, and Ted McKenna – and renamed them The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, that Harvey finally worked his way out of the musical ghetto, if only briefly. The band’s third album, 1974’s Impossible Dream, became Harvey’s first UK chart record; it even briefly dented the US charts in March of the following year. Commercial success ensued with his spring 1975 release, Tomorrow Belongs To Me; both the album and his flamboyant take on Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’ reached the UK Top 10. On the back of this, Harvey’s 1973 album, Next, returned to the hit parade, while in September 1975, the obligatory live set also reached the UK Top 20 and the US Top 100.
By this time, 16-year-old Robert Smith, who’d first seen Harvey play two years earlier in 1973, was a true believer. Smith and girlfriend Mary Poole followed Harvey to virtually all of his shows in the south of England. “People talk about Iggy Pop as the original punk,” Smith said in 1993, “but certainly in Britain the forerunner of the punk movement was Alex Harvey. His whole stage show, with the graffiti-covered brick walls – it was like very aggressive Glaswegian street theatre.”
It was Harvey’s every-bloke appeal that had Smith spellbound. He was the anti-David Bowie; a far more tangible – and attainable – ideal than the enigmatic Ziggy. Smith explained that Harvey was “the physical manifestation of what I thought I could be. He never really got anywhere, even though he had something so magic when he performed – he had the persona of a victim and you just sided with him against all that was going wrong. I would have died to have had Alex Harvey as an uncle. Alex Harvey was the closest I ever came to idolising anyone.” Smith proudly wore a striped black-and-white shirt wherever he went – a Harvey signature – which he’d compare to a gang uniform. “People look a certain way so if they see someone else dressed that way they can talk to them.” The only thing about Harvey that Smith didn’t consider worth emulating was his looks: he found the guy “much too old and ugly”.
For two years, Smith was as committed an Alex Harvey fan as you were likely to find. Harvey offered a musical respite from some
of the seriously questionable outfits being played to death at the time. As Smith realised, “Without him I’d have been into Supertramp, those sort of horrible groups. If I thought we [The Cure] had the same impact on people as The Sensational Alex Harvey Band had on me, I’d be …” – here Smith found himself lost for words – “he was the only person who made me think, it must be fucking brilliant to be Alex Harvey. It was like believing in a creature, a myth that was presented to you on stage.”
Harvey’s time in the spotlight was relatively short: although 1976 was another banner year for him and his Sensational Band, as ‘Boston Tea Party’ made the singles chart and Penthouse Tapes became a Top 20 hit, the inevitable slide set in and the band dissolved. Rock Drill was their swansong. Harvey died on tour in Belgium in 1982, from a heart attack brought on by heavy boozing, just before reaching his 47th birthday, while Smith and The Cure were readying possibly the most disturbing – and disturbed – album of their lives, Pornography. Twenty years later, however, Smith and The Cure would perform a very public eulogy for Harvey, covering ‘The Faith Healer’ at a huge Hyde Park show.
While his idols outside of rock’n’roll – Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, footballer Rodney Marsh – were more typical, mainstream obsessions, Smith’s youthful heroes, such as Bowie, Hendrix and Alex Harvey, were all fringe-dwellers. Bowie was an alien beamed in from another planet; Hendrix was an African-American who brought the psychedelic blues to English audiences; Harvey was a regular bloke shouting to be heard above the lipstick and bell-bottoms of glam rock. And they all helped to contribute to the outsider status that Smith would embrace so willingly during his teens in Crawley and in the nascent stages of The Cure’s career. Nevertheless, Smith did have other, more mainstream enthusiasms, such as twin-guitar fanciers Thin Lizzy – “They were fabulous, I saw them probably 10 times in two years; the actual sound of them live was just so overpowering, it was better than drinking” – and Irish axeslinger Rory Gallagher – “I thought his guitar playing was fabulous.”