Never Enough Page 30
From then on in it was a musical tug of war between the band’s MTV-ready, college-radio-friendly side, and their sullen nature, well represented by such urgent, insistent soundscapes as ‘Torture’ and ‘Fight’. Darkest of all was the epic ‘If Only Tonight We Could Sleep’, which was based around a faux-Eastern riff – shades of Led Zeppelin – and a forlorn Smith vocal that may well have been recorded from somewhere deep inside a wind tunnel.*
The flipside of these unholy guitar-and-keyboards powered odes to nothingness were such sweet confections as the manic ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’ and ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’ It was here that The Cure came on like a funk revivalist act: the Sussex Soul Train, with Smith quoting directly from Charles Aznavour’s ‘She’ at the opening of ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’ Powered by some drunken funk guitar, Smith likened this raver to a “Louis Armstrong record”. This pair of tracks was as freewheeling, raucous and irresistible as anything the band had previously unleashed on their slightly bemused, but no less loving public. More than anything on Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, these follies typified the band’s anything-goes approach.
“We were trying to be lots of different bands that we liked at the time,” Tolhurst explained.
‘Just Like Heaven’, of course, was another pristine few moments of Robert Smith the tunesmith; it was right up there with ‘Inbetween Days’ and ‘The Lovecats’ as a near-perfect pop song. The melody for ‘Heaven’ came to Smith at Maida Vale during another heavy boozing phase in his life. Smith admitted that in 1987 he needed to set himself a regimen of writing every other day, 15 days a month. “Otherwise I’d have just got up in mid-afternoon and watched TV until the pubs opened, then gone out drinking.” As soon as Smith finished ‘Just Like Heaven’, he realised it was a good pop song, possibly a great one – even if the structure was not unlike that of The Only Ones’ minor 1979 hit, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’. This similarity wasn’t lost on Smith.
“I can still vividly recall hearing [‘Another Girl’] on the radio late at night in the mid-Seventies. I introduced some different chord changes, which give it that slightly melancholic feeling.”
But Smith had no lyrics for the song, whose original tempo was much slower than the finished version. While still word-less, Smith gave the tune to French TV show Les Enfants du Rock, who used it as their theme tune. There was, of course, a method in Smith’s munificence.
“I already felt it was the most obvious single,” he realised, “and it meant that the music would be familiar to millions of Europeans even before it was released.”
Not only a hit in Europe, the song even reached the fringes of the US Top 40 and has been recorded by various players in Spanish, German and French – there’s even a version performed by LA’s Section String Quartet. And ‘Heaven’, most famously, was given a hard, grungy makeover by Dinosaur Jr in 1989. Of all the many takes on Cure songs, this has become one of Smith’s favourites, almost as soon as Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis sent him a cassette. “I’ve never had such a visceral reaction to a cover version before or since,” Smith said in 2003.
Smith was also smart enough to realise that placement was everything with an album as lengthy as Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. He wisely positioned such lightweight romps as ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’ directly after the bummed-out sprawl that was ‘If Only Tonight We Could Sleep’. Smith kept that balance pretty much constant throughout the 18 tracks. Given that there were two distinctly different Cure-lovers – the pop kids mad for Smith the Lovecat, and the doomed children of the night hoping for Seventeen Seconds Revisited – he was refusing to alienate anyone. The album was another savvy each-way bet on the part of Smith and the band – and it connected at the cash register with even more ker-ching than The Head On The Door. Kiss Me would go gold in the USA in August 1987, three months after its release, and platinum three years later. It wouldn’t leave the US album chart for a year.
Lyrically speaking, Robert Smith was drawing from the usual sources. There were the obligatory drug songs, including ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’ and ‘Icing Sugar’ (which featured some swinging sax from Andrew Brennen, whom Smith spotted blowing in a Compass Point cabaret band). There were songs about death (‘If Only Tonight We Could Sleep’), and escape (‘Why Can’t I Be You?’), songs about Tolhurst’s slide (‘Shiver And Shake’), fight songs (‘Fight’, of course), party songs (‘Hey You!!!’, a not-so-subtle steal of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. theme), sex songs (‘All I Want’), even love songs (‘The Perfect Girl’). The obligatory literary allusion came with the album’s most pedestrian track, ‘How Beautiful You Are’, which Smith adapted from a Baudelaire short story.
“It’s about how you think you’re really close to somebody,” Smith explained, “that you think the same way and enjoy the same things, but suddenly an incident will happen which makes you realise that the person thinks a completely different way about things, yet you can still get on with them really well.” Smith was clearly considering both his faltering relationship with Lol Tolhurst, and the immeasurable worth of his loyal allies, Mary Poole and Simon Gallup.
Then there were the clearly autobiographical moments, such as ‘Just Like Heaven’, which in its own subtle way revealed the details of a night that Smith, Poole and some friends spent at renowned lover’s leap Beachy Head, the same site where The Cure tumbled to their watery demise at the end of Pope’s video for ‘Close To Me’. It was also the spot where Smith and Poole would move when they’d had enough of London.
“We’d been drinking and someone thought it would be cool to go for a walk,” Smith reminisced when asked about the night on the tiles that inspired ‘Just Like Heaven’. “But suddenly the fog came in and I lost sight of my friends and couldn’t see my hand before my eyes. I thought I might fall down the cliff if I moved another foot so I had to sit down until dawn. Later I heard my friends didn’t even look for me.” Smith and band revisited the site for the Tim Pope video; look closely and you’ll spot Mary Poole, spinning and dancing like a fallen angel, looking exactly as you’d expect Robert Smith’s partner to look.
The Cure’s transition from band to brand was made complete with the release of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me in May 1987. Not so much because of its worldwide success – in the wake of the hefty sales of Standing On A Beach, that was almost a given – but by the image lathered all over the album’s cover. Those are Robert Smith’s lipstick-smeared lips in microscopic detail; a close-up of his eye featured elsewhere on the inside sleeve. Many rock stars had been synonymous with their body parts before – Iggy Pop was fond of unsheathing his “biggy”, likewise Jim “The Lizard King” Morrison – but not since the rubbery-lipped Mick Jagger at his Glimmer Twins’ prime had an artist been so directly linked to a body part. Smith admitted to an obsession with mouths and lips; it’s no accident that references to them appear frequently in his lyrics. “I suppose it’s because they’re a public orifice,” Smith said. “And they have so many purposes – eating, speaking, sex. Something must have happened to me when I was very young. A giant mouth must have tried to sit on my face when I was in my pram.”
It was clear that The Cure was about to hit their commercial peak, because Elektra had big plans for the album. They strongly suggested to the band that they hire hit-machine Bob Clearmountain to mix the album; he’d added his signature sonic boom to records from The Rolling Stones (Tattoo You), David Bowie (Let’s Dance) and Bruce Springsteen (Bom In The USA). Smith smiled, continued spending Elektra’s money, and went back to work with Allen.
“We’ve always heard that kind of thing from our American record companies,” Smith said, “and we’ve never paid any attention to it. Everything we’ve ever done has been very selfishly motivated.”
With Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me wrapped, Smith and Poole decided to take a driving holiday in France, staying in small, out-of-the-way places and trying their best to be a normal couple. All the trip achieved, however, was a reminder of just how big The Cure had become, especially in France. “In the morning there’d always be like 30
people outside the hotel because they’d found out I was staying there,” Smith revealed. “It was a fucking nightmare. I realised very quickly that I didn’t like that level of success.”
Robert Smith was now entering a new phase of his life, where he was struggling to find ways to deal with his rapidly rising star. One tactic was to drop big hints about The Cure’s demise. Like the Goth who cried wolf, Kiss Me would be the latest of many Cure albums where Smith would suggest, strongly, that this was the band’s swan-song. He even let that slip during a quick US promo trip in March 1987, two months prior to the LP’s release. “When we made this record,” said Smith, “I really thought, ‘This has to be the best Cure record, because it’s gonna be the last.’” Typically, Smith would then turn around and say that this kind of statement was purely designed as a Cure motivational tool: what better way to get the band fired up than to suggest they were finished?
But if Smith was serious, then he’d obviously decided to go out in the biggest way possible. The band had their first South American tour booked for March 1987, preceded by several weeks of rehearsals in Eire, where they squeezed in another madcap shoot with Pope, this time for ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’ Pope flew out and joined the band at a studio in Bray, owned by no less a legend than small-screen star Mary Tyler Moore.
It may have taken two or three videos for the band to warm fully to Pope’s wicked ways, but now they fully embraced his mad methodology. For ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’, it was all about dressing up. Smith chose to sport a bear suit. Gallup played the role of a crow, in black cape, huge yellow beak and dangerously tight tights; then he was a Morris dancer. Williams wore basic schoolgirl, while Thompson played both a Scotsman and a woman (Smith also doubled as a cross-dresser). As for Tolhurst, his role as Cure jester was made very clear: he wore blackface – “Prince’s ugly brother,” laughed one band member – then doubled as a bumblebee, flapping about helplessly on wires attached by Pope’s crew.*
Smith, of course, laughed it all off. “This is it,” he shouted as the madness of the shoot happened around him, “the grand finale, the climax. ‘Drunken Schoolgirl in Gay Sex Orgy’.” Then he returned to perform some of the most poorly choreographed dancing ever seen on MTV. As for Tim Pope, he couldn’t be happier. “This is … the video I’ve always wanted to make,” he whooped. “The Cure dancing! I can’t believe I’m seeing this. They’re finished.” That may have just about been true for Tolhurst, but The Cure was only getting bigger.
If Smith needed evidence of just how big The Cure had become, how far they’d outgrown their life as a post-punk trio from suburban Crawley, it was on full display during the first South American jaunt. The signs were there from the moment their Aerolineas jumbo hit the tarmac at Buenos Aires on March 15. Rather than the usual drag of clearing customs, waiting for their luggage and piling into a van to the hotel, the band and Parry were given the full Beatles treatment, being led out through a side door into a waiting car, followed all the way into the city by what Smith would describe as “a bizarre motorcade of horn-blowing-screaming-waving cars”. There were already 500, maybe more, diehards camped on the pavement outside the Sheraton Towers when they arrived, including members of the “Bananafishbones Club”, which was as close to an official fan club as these reluctant stars had.
The bedlam intensified with their first show on the Tuesday night. There was, as Smith euphemistically reported, some “confusion” regarding ticket sales: 19,000 had been sold for a 17,000 capacity venue. A full-scale riot ensued: police cars were trashed, several security dogs killed – even the local hot-dog vendor suffered a heart attack and died – and all before the band even made it to the stage. “For almost two hours we play[ed] amidst deafening bedlam, before rushing off, screaming, into the car and away,” Smith reported. The next night, when the band began their set, the temperature was hitting the 100 degree mark. In spite of beefed-up security and higher barricades at stage front, another riot broke out. (Smith swore blind that he spotted “several uniformed men on fire”.) The crowd let it all out by pelting the stage area with anything they could lay their hands on: coins, bottles, whatever. Thompson was first to be hit, but Smith lost it completely when he was hit full in the face with a Coke bottle during ‘10.15 Saturday Night’. The rest of their set was a punky thrash, played as quickly as humanly possible. “Outside the ground,” Smith reported, as they raced away from the mayhem, “is not unlike downtown Beirut.”
Then it was Brazil, for a pair of shows at Porto Alegro’s 12,000 capacity Gigantinho Stadium, a venue described by Smith as “a strange hybrid of Brixton Academy and Wembley Arena”, but with dodgier wiring (throughout their set, the band received frequent shocks). By their second night at Gigantinho, the band was so drained by the heat and the noise that they required hits of oxygen before attempting an encore. The crowd was less volatile than Buenos Aires, even helping Smith out when he forgot the words to ‘The Blood’.
Three days later the band was in Belo Horizonte for a show in front of 20,000 Cure-aholics at the Mineirinho Olymnasium. The heat and the crowd were every bit as intense as the previous South American shows, Smith recounting that “bodies are carried out by the hundred, but the survivors are still chanting madly as we run away”.
More so than any of the madness that had gone before, by the third week of their tour, The Cure knew they were in a strange new pop universe. They turned up for a football game between local sides Voscow and Bangu, at the Maracanzinho Stadium. Once settled in their seats inside the Director’s Box, the band almost fell over when the massive electronic scoreboard beamed out a simple message: BRAZIL WELCOMES THE CURE. It was official – The Cure were superstars.
By this high water mark in their commercial standing, The Cure had locked into the well-established route of recording/press/touring; much of the rest of 1987 was consumed by lengthy jaunts through North America (July 9 to August 11), and Europe, which kicked off with an Oslo show on October 22 and concluded with no less than three nights at Wembley Arena from December 7 to 9.
With success, naturally, comes turmoil. The Cure had been subject to inner-band strife even when they were the most cultish of cult bands; now it seemed as though their troubles intensified in proportion to their success. By late 1987, Lol Tolhurst was falling to pieces. During a more candid moment on their wild ride through South America, Smith mentioned that, upon rising relatively early one day, “seeing Lol over coffee cheers us all up”. The message was clear: Tolhurst was a man in serious trouble. Former Psychedelic Fur and Thompson Twins keyboardist, Roger O’Donnell, a close friend of new drummer Williams, had been drafted into the band for the European tour and onwards. He was startled by Tolhurst’s limited musical contribution.
“I couldn’t see why he was in the band. He could have afforded to hire a tutor and have daily lessons, but he wasn’t interested in practising. He just liked being in the group.” Gallup, however, explained Tolhurst’s role to the new recruit: “It is fun to have him around,” he said, “even though he doesn’t contribute much to the music. He is part of The Cure.”* The simple fact that O’Donnell was hired said a lot about Tolhurst’s ever-diminishing input.
“He was like a safety valve for all our frustrations,” O’Donnell admitted. “Which was really sick. By the end [of the tour] it was horrible.” Tolhurst simply drank his way through the 1987 world tour, to such a level, according to Robert Smith, “that he didn’t bother retaliating [to the band’s provocation]. It was like watching some kind of handicapped child being constantly poked with a stick.”
But as Tolhurst told me, Smith was a practical man: Tolhurst clearly had something to offer The Cure or he would have been benched long before. “People would ask Robert, ‘Why are you keeping Lol around when he’s not doing anything?’ But I did keep doing things. Robert’s very pragmatic: he wouldn’t keep someone in the band who wasn’t doing anything. [And] because we were friends, Robert held on to me for a long, long time.”
As the frontman and centra
l figure of a band in the midst of a supernova rise, Smith was also having to deal with his own demons throughout 1987. Against his better instincts, he was being sucked into the pop-star vacuum – as he learned, when you’re surrounded by yes-people and sycophants, whose main role is to remind you of your brilliance, it’s hard to resist the temptation to agree with them. This self-obsession, brought into sharp focus every night when many, many thousand people scream your name and your songs, wasn’t helped by the cocoon-like life on the road. When cities become a blur, and you’re rushed from press conference to hotel to gig by a fleet of limos and private jets, it’s pretty easy to forget about the rest of the world. His fan’s obsessiveness added to his alienation; while in Europe, Smith tried various disguises (flat hair, hats, etc.), none of which seemed to work-incredibly, his signature high-top trainers usually gave him away. After that, he could only travel as part of a hefty entourage.
To his credit, Smith was able to eventually detect the tell-tale signs of complete self-immersion, although by the end of the 1987 tour he was in deep. “It was like dropping coloured ink in water,” he admitted. “I became public property and I wasn’t prepared for the level that we’d reached. It was fanatical. Suddenly I was recognised everywhere I went in America, and when I got back to London, there would be 30 or 40 people camped outside my flat.
“By the end of that tour, my personality had changed a lot. I’d become really conceited, not just pretending to be a pop star, but living it. I realised that I couldn’t go on like that.”
As 1987 turned into 1988, Robert Smith began a self-enforced hibernation. The Cure wouldn’t play live again for another 18 months.
Robert Smith didn’t just feel that he was losing his grip on reality, but once again he felt that The Cure was being misunderstood. ‘Just Like Heaven’ and ‘Catch’ might have been sweet pop tunes, but they didn’t pack anywhere near the same emotional potency as the songs on Pornography or Faith, or something more recent such as ‘If Only Tonight We Could Sleep’. And Smith wasn’t so sure that it was the pop spotlight he was craving when he, Tolhurst and Dempsey formed the band more than a dozen years ago.