Never Enough Page 31

  As he and Poole started to consider a new life outside of Maida Vale, Smith became seriously withdrawn. Unlike the lead-up to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, where input was requested from everyone in The Cure, Smith now recorded alone. And for the first time since the Blue Sunshine sessions with Severin, he started taking acid again on a regular basis. But he wasn’t in the mood for another non-stop party or a “chemical vacation”; this time he was using the drug to get inside his troubled thoughts. And Smith was about to reach a life milestone, because the big 3-0 was little more than a year away. Robert Smith was sinking deeper and deeper into a funk that would either have him finally, truly kill off The Cure – or lead him to Disintegration.

  * Tolhurst told me that he tended to avoid the King’s Head, even though it was also his local, because “Simon … was still quite angry about leaving the band and if he saw me it was a little like a red rag to a bull – especially if he’d had a few beers, which he usually had.”

  * A million Cure fans sighed their disappointment when they learned that the majority of the clip was filmed in a studio.

  * After their September show at the Brighton Centre, NME got very personal. “I wouldn’t like to be washed up on a desert island with this boring old sod,” it declared.

  * French Cure collectors can still buy a postcard of the band featuring Judd.

  * A classically trained pianist, Loussier was famous for performing Bach’s music with a jazz trio. His version of ‘Air On A G String’ became the soundtrack for the celebrated Hamlet cigar TV advert.

  * Years later it was given a wildly effective reawakening by dedicated Cure lovers, nu-metal moodists The Deftones, on an MTV Icons episode dedicated to Smith’s not-so-merry band of men.

  * Off camera, during the subsequent ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’ shoot, Smith actually spat on Tolhurst. His downward spiral was just about complete.

  * Gallup was clearly being polite. Smith insisted that if Tolhurst stayed in the band much longer, “Simon would have thrown him off a balcony.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “I was fighting against being a pop star, being expected to be larger than life all the time, and it really did my head in. I got really depressed, and I started doing drugs again – hallucinogenic drugs.”

  – Robert Smith

  ROBERT SMITH’s annus horribilis, 1988, didn’t necessarily start out that way. Rumours of The Cure’s demise after finishing Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me were greatly exaggerated, because he had decided to make at least one more album. And with no deadline hanging over his head, and with money in the bank – he’d even made the pages of Debrett’s Peerage – Smith wasn’t a man in a hurry. There were no live dates scheduled for the year. Kiss Me gradually faded from the charts, its final offering being a radically reworked ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’, remixed by Francois Kervorkian, which crept into the UK Top 50 in February. The airwaves returned to normal: the first few months of 1988 offered up some quality pop, such as INXS’ ‘Need You Tonight’ or ‘Fairytale Of New York’, wherein Pogues’ dipsomaniac Shane MacGowan swapped insults with Kirsty MacColl, alongside the usual fluff, such as Morris Minor & The Majors’ Anglo take on The Beastie Boys, ‘Stutter Rap’ or M/A/R/R/S’s dance anthem ‘Pump Up The Volume’. And the usual suspects ruled at the Grammys, where U2, Sting and Paul Simon cleaned up.

  But it wasn’t the state of modern music that led to Robert Smith’s latest existential funk: it was his Dorian Gray-like fear of growing old. In April, he celebrated his 29th birthday with the usual gusto, but then hit what he called a “bad patch”, when he realised that in 12 months he’d be 30. Part of his concern was the simple fact that he felt that The Cure, despite their platinum-plus success, were yet to deliver a genuine masterwork. He knew that the true rock’n’roll legends – The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, Bowie, even Alex bloody Harvey – had all reached the pinnacle of their craft well before hitting 30. Almost as soon as Smith had puffed out the 29 candles on his birthday cake, he set to work writing “the most intense thing The Cure has ever done”. If Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was a summation of The Cure’s music for the first 10 years of their life, and a celebration of all the music that they loved, Smith wanted the next album to be way more personal, a return to the introspection of Pornography.

  “I had wanted to get it all done before I was 30. [Then] the day after I became 29 I realised that next birthday I was gonna be 30,” stated Smith. “It’s like a paradox. I think the younger you are the more you worry about getting old; in my case it’s true. I think the darker side of that record [Disintegration] came from the fact I was gonna be 30.”*

  In fact, Smith was shocked that he’d made it this far: like a post-punk Pete Townshend, he’d always thought he’d be lucky not to die before he got old. Smith made a pact with himself that there’d be no way at 30 he’d still be fronting the band. And Smith had another, far more pressing issue to deal with, as he started writing new songs: were they right for The Cure? By early summer a Cure summit meeting took place at Boris Williams’ home, where Smith introduced the band to the home demos he’d recorded. He also wrote some other Disintegration songs, such as ‘Lullaby’, while sitting outside Williams’ house during rare afternoons of English summer sunshine. “The demos were really, really good fun, brilliant fun,” Smith recalled, and most of the band agreed. That’s all it took to convince Smith to shelve, yet again, his solo LP plans.

  “I would have been quite happy to have made these songs on my own,” said Smith. “If the group hadn’t thought it was right, that would have been fine.” But when the band started to play along with him, Smith knew that these were Cure songs after all. Smith had brought along a 16-track recorder to this summer jam and 32 songs were recorded at Williams’ house. When the sessions ended, Smith retired to continue scratching out his lyrics.

  At the time, Smith had also started work on a musical sketch called ‘Lovesong’, a song that had a noticeably different mood to the rest of his new material. It was a gentle strum in the midst of some genuine fire and brimstone. For Robert Smith it was a first – and the title said it all. “It’s an open show of emotion,” he admitted. “It’s not trying to be clever. It’s taken me 10 years to reach the point where I felt comfortable singing a very straightforward love song. In the past, I’ve always felt a last-minute need to disguise the sentiment.”

  What Smith was actually writing was a gift to Mary Poole – a wedding gift. “I couldn’t think of what to give her,” said Smith, “so I wrote her that song – cheap and cheerful. She would have preferred diamonds, I think, but she might look back and be glad that I gave her that.” Finally, after 15 years together, they were married in Worth Abbey on August 13, with much of The Cure (including the increasingly unstable Lol Tolhurst) along for the party. Simon Gallup was best man, while Smith played DJ for much of the night-long party that followed their nuptials.

  “We just got married to have a nice day,” Smith said soon after, “so that Mary could walk down an aisle in a white dress and [so we could] just have all my uncles and aunties there. It’s really dumb but I was sort of overcome.” For Smith, the decision to get hitched boiled down to simple maths: he and Poole had known each other for more than half their lives, so it was time to make it official. Smith, however, wasn’t quite ready for parenthood. When asked by a local reporter after the wedding, he simply replied: “No, I don’t think I’m cut out for fatherhood at the moment – and I’m lucky in that Mary doesn’t think she’s cut out for motherhood at the moment, either.” They did, however, “adopt” two children through a World Vision-type scheme – Smith, a Guatemalan girl; Poole, a Haitian boy. They also decided to get the hell out of London and return to Sussex.

  “I was going to kill my [Maida Vale] neighbours,” Smith explained. “In Sussex you can have a house and a garden for the same amount of money and be really boring and normal. But it saves me [from] going to prison; I hate the sound of people walking around on the top of my head.”

 
Smith’s mood, however, had soured considerably by the time he and the band reunited in Hook End Manor Studios in Reading, to begin recording Disintegration. While Smith insisted that the main cause of his meltdown was a desire to record the band’s career-defining album, and the realisation that 30 was just around the corner, there was also the issue of Lol Tolhurst that Smith knew he couldn’t avoid for much longer. The honeymoon was most definitely over.

  But Smith’s behaviour was still hard to understand. The band had just enjoyed a truly purple patch, with gold (Standing On The Beach) and platinum (Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me) albums and full houses across Europe and North and South America. But when they knuckled down to fine-tune the demos they’d pieced together at Williams’ house, Smith sank into what he would call “one of my non-talking modes”, shutting himself off from the same bandmates he’d partied long and hard with a few months earlier at his wedding.

  “The others thought I lost the plot,” said Smith. “They were still caught up with the idea that we were becoming a really famous band, and they weren’t grasping that the music I wanted to make was incredibly morose and downbeat.”

  Despite their runaway success at the cash register, Smith was convinced that their more successful albums lacked the kind of gravitas that was all over Pornography. That’s what he was striving for with Disintegration.

  “It sounds really big-headed, but everyone wanted a piece of me [at the time],” Smith said in 2004. “I was fighting against being a pop star, being expected to be larger than life all the time, and it really did my head in. I got really depressed, and I started doing drugs again – hallucinogenic drugs. When we were gonna make the album I decided I would be monk-like and not talk to anyone. It was a bit pretentious really, looking back, but I actually wanted an environment that was slightly unpleasant.

  “Everyone expected me to be writing songs that were gonna follow up ‘Just Like Heaven’. They thought that we were gonna keep things light and bouncy with an occasional bit of gloom, but we did the opposite.” Once again, as he had during the time of ‘Let’s Go To Bed’, or when he signed up as a touring Banshee, Smith was doing an about-turn, rejecting the audience that had made him one of the few chubby, bed-haired, smudged-lipstick-fancying millionaire pop stars on the planet. What Smith was hoping to do was resurrect the side of The Cure that he felt he’d neglected. He was seeking “more depth of emotion. It’s inherent in the music,” Smith felt, “the same way that a piece by Beethoven is more emotive than a Bros single.”

  Smith envisaged Disintegration as an extension of the band’s darkest musings: Faith, Seventeen Seconds and Pornography. (He would later include it as the second instalment of 2002’s quite painful The Cure Trilogy, where Pornography, Disintegration and 2000’s Bloodflowers were played live, from grim beginning to miserable close, before a stadium of equally dour Germans.) It was only now that Smith had the budget and the time to sink deeper into the emotional mire than he ever had before.

  “I know why the songs are like this,” Smith explained. “It’s got a lot to do with turning 30, getting married … things that have nothing to do with anyone else, really.” To his credit, Smith was being true to himself: he’d tried writing in a more upbeat frame of mind, now he was feeling blue, so the music reflected that. As self-flagellating and indulgent as that seemed, it was hardly a new move on Smith’s part – much of The Cure’s career (the less commercially successful part, of course) had been built around heavy emotions and bleak thoughts.

  “It’s how I felt when I wrote these songs,” he figured. “I didn’t feel particularly, um, good at the time. The same things bother me and they always will. They are intrinsically tied to my own deterioration and they get more acute as I get older. When I was young, I could think about things that bothered me in an abstract way. Now I don’t. They’re too real.”

  Smith even visualised prospective listeners; he’d picture them in his mind’s eye while he was buried somewhere deep inside Disintegration’s vocals, which took five long, hard nights to record. “I had various imaginary and non-imaginary people who listened to the record,” he explained, “and I found out what they’d feel listening to the songs. They were all in different rooms in this hotel. No room service.”

  Smith had laughed off Kiss Me as “a party record”, a reasonable analysis that conveniently overlooked the reason why that album connected with so many listeners: it was loads of fun. The band’s whimsy during ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’ and ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’ was almost tangible. But with Disintegration he was trying to make the kind of album that would not only end parties, but also have revellers reaching for the razor blades. In fact, death was very much in the forefront of Smith’s mind during the sessions at Hook End Manor. Two New Zealand teenagers had recently committed suicide in a bizarre death pact; the subsequent investigation revealed that The Cure had provided the soundtrack. Smith was fully aware of the story – so much so that he had a newspaper clipping reporting the double suicide stuck to the studio wall during the sessions.

  “I know it’s tragic,” Smith said, “but at the same time it’s grimly funny because it obviously had nothing to do with us. We were just singled out.” Smith was frustrated with being stuck in a pigeonhole alongside such rock’n’roll ghouls as Southern Death Cult and The Fields Of The Nephilim. He was convinced, not surprisingly, that The Cure had more to offer than an easy exit and a graveside dress sense.

  “Everyone was joking about it being suicidal music and how I upset people with the words,” he said. “They’re [his songs] certainly not uplifting, but there’s a satisfaction that comes from listening to something that you know a lot’s gone into. You can tell that there are people involved and that those people care. I care a lot.”

  But caring about the music The Cure was making at Reading wasn’t especially high on Lol Tolhurst’s checklist of priorities. His boozing was now right out of control. Allegedly he spent most of the Disintegration sessions glued to the small screen, watching MTV, although he would tell me that his input to Disintegration was more substantial than many other albums. “I remember Dave Allen saying to me on Disintegration that I’d played more on that album than the last couple, but I don’t remember it.”

  His monotone mood dragged the sessions – which had been briefly interrupted by a fire in a bedroom attached to the studios in December 1988 – down even further. While Smith’s studio perfectionism was exhausting Thompson, O’Donnell, Gallup and Williams, Tolhurst simply shrugged and kept drinking. “Up until my last couple of years in The Cure, The Cure was my whole life, my whole existence,” Tolhurst admitted to me. “Towards the end I got kind of sick and that destroyed a lot of things. Before that I put in everything I had.”

  The rest of the band, unable to get to Smith, who was locked away in his world of Disintegration, would taunt Tolhurst, even to the point of physically abusing him, just to get some kind of reaction. According to Smith, “The only way we could communicate that he was turning into a complete parody of himself was by beating him up. I didn’t know who he was any more and he didn’t know who he was either.”

  “Making the Disintegration album, I used to despair and scream at the others because it was fucking insane the way we were treating him,” Smith continued. “I kept him in the band because I felt a certain responsibility towards him.”

  But the band couldn’t take it any more: they gave Smith an ultimatum that Tolhurst had to go or they’d walk. They’d come to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that there was simply no way they could tour an album as grim as Disintegration while also carrying an alcoholic. They also felt that it was unreasonable that Tolhurst actually received a greater royalty than everyone bar Smith, despite his limited input. Although Smith, too, knew that Tolhurst had to go, it was a much tougher move than squeezing out Phil Thornalley or having Andy Anderson escorted to Tokyo Airport. Smith and Tolhurst had been incredibly tight; Tolhurst had even given the band their name (albeit with an additional Easy). He’d toughed it out whe
n The Cure seemed to be going absolutely nowhere, apart from up and down a seemingly endless procession of motorways in Smith’s dodgy green Maxi van. Tolhurst had endured the arduous Hansa liaison and had, of course, been a key creative contributor. During the days of The Top, The Cure was just him and Smith.

  But their relationship stretched back even further – they’d been schoolmates at the freethinking Notre Dame Middle School and the not so progressive St Wilfrid’s. They had a lot of history. Yet Smith also knew that if Tolhurst stayed in the band, he’d most likely drink himself to a very public death.

  On reflection, Tolhurst understands the reaction of his then Cure bandmates. But he also believes that history played a big part in the imbalance within The Cure. “Up until the new [1986] deal with Polydor it was 50/50, me and Robert. And along the way all these guys joined the band and were treated very well, but their percentage worked out less than mine. They’d see me living the life of Riley and being this crazy guy. I understand their frustration.

  “[But] the other side of it is that once I was removed, the problems weren’t necessarily removed. In a perverse way I kind of thought to myself, ‘Maybe I have to accept that; my behaviour wasn’t the best.’ In the last year, there was a point where I’d wake up and not be able to tell what was going to happen that day. I was very afraid; I thought I was going insane. I didn’t know where I was going to end up. Frequently that’s what happened. It was very scary.”

  Porl Thompson saw that, too, because during the Disintegration sessions he approached Tolhurst and asked him whether he was ready for rehab. In fact, Tolhurst had actually been through the first stage of detox about a year before he left the band. With the help of his London neighbours, an Australian couple, Tolhurst had approached a Harley Street doctor by the name of Campbell, who agreed to help him through the process.