Never Enough Read online

  “He got the problem within about 10 minutes of meeting [me],” said Tolhurst. “[He realised that] I’m not like other people. I can’t drink or do other things recreationally. I’m allergic to it and my whole psyche changes; my whole mind changes. It becomes an obsession.

  “He told me, ‘We need to take you to hospital for a week or so, and we need to go this afternoon.’ I wasn’t ready for it, but I agreed and after a week I felt much better. He’d told me about this other place that I should go, but I said that I felt much better and went home. Then I had the worst year of my life.

  “After a week I felt semi-normal, which was a mistake. The problem was that I’m not able to drink like other people; I’m an alcoholic. You can’t drink when you have what I have.”

  A couple of weeks after leaving hospital, Tolhurst figured that he was sufficiently straightened out to attend a party at a friend’s pub. He was very wrong, as he told me. “I figured I could have a couple of beers. It was like being on top of the roller coaster and looking down. It was too late, the obsession was back in me.”

  Smith could handle the trauma of another sacking; he wasn’t so sure he could deal with a tragedy. “It was much easier for him not to be in the band,” he figured. Tolhurst helped speed up his own departure by arriving for the Disintegration mixing session at RAK drunker than a lord. He then slagged the album mercilessly and a shouting match ensued.

  Tolhurst knew this was the end of the line. “By that time it had really gone too far,” he admitted. “I went along and Robert was playing me different things and asking me what I thought. I said something like, ‘Well, half of it’s good and half of it’s not a Cure record,’ and I left. That was the last time we talked for about 10 years. That was my parting shot. Now I realise most of it was frustration on my side at my inability to do things.”

  Just after Christmas 1988, Smith wrote to Tolhurst explaining why he felt the band’s co-founder didn’t belong in The Cure any more.

  “I got a letter from Robert,” Tolhurst recalled. “As soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘OK, that makes sense, that’s what he would do.’ There’s the other English thing – no confrontation. I called him up as soon as I read the letter.

  “On reflection, the letter was quite nice. It said, ‘It’s not just me, everyone feels the same and don’t put up a wall but I think you should get well and I don’t think you should go on the next tour.’ That was like a red rag to a bull for me at that point. I called him and he made himself unavailable; I had Mary to talk to for a little while.”

  Tolhurst knew what he had to do if he wanted to stay alive. He had to complete the detox sessions that he’d half completed the year before. Again he reached out to Dr Campbell, but this time he stayed for the full programme.

  “Yes, it was the same doctor,” he told me, “but then I went on to a rehab in London at The Priory on the edge of Richmond Park. Strangely enough I met someone else from another band, whose name I won’t mention, who was in for something similar. Which was cool, because I had someone to hang out with for lunch.”

  In February 1989, Tolhurst’s sacking was made official and Smith made this needlessly cruel statement to the press: “I was friends with him, but I was never really, really close. Lol was just there. From 1985 onwards I never had a conversation with Lol because we disagreed about virtually everything.”

  Tolhurst eventually replied to this in 1991. “What had started off as a band where everyone had their influence was getting eroded,” he said, “until it didn’t feel like there was anything that you could contribute even if you wanted to.”

  He went deeper into the issue two years later, stating how Smith told him, after he received the letter, to call him and they’d talk it through. “I did, but he decided he didn’t want to talk to me. And so that’s the point when I thought I shouldn’t be here [in The Cure] any more. I think it was on a completely personal level.

  “It was halfway through Disintegration that things weren’t working out so great,” Tolhurst added. “I wasn’t feeling that well in myself and I guess The Cure psychosis struck again, big time. For many years it was fairly democratic and it was a happy situation. And then it became undemocratic and a lot of people around the band, like the record company, found it better that way because they only had to deal with one person. And that was a bit upsetting, as over the years I’d put a lot of my life into it.”

  When I asked him about his departure and his alcoholism, Tolhurst was almost serene. “To be honest, it’s like that old Edith Piaf thing, ‘I have no regrets.’ If I hadn’t gone through that, I wouldn’t be the person I am now.* My existence is much, much happier now. I was quite a wealthy guy [at the time] but I was desperately unhappy. I don’t know if I have much more control, but I have a lot of peace.

  “When we first started in the music business,” he continued, “it was almost expected of us, to be these out of control people. There was always plenty to drink and whatever. We were three suburban boys who’d never seen anything like that go on. Eventually you become like that. I’m grateful to have been like that and come out the other end and survive. I’m alive.”

  But that was in the future. After his sacking, Tolhurst was still very bitter and sued the band for what he believed to be outstanding royalties. The court case would effectively put The Cure out of commission for a couple of years, and by the time they finally returned from their enforced hiatus, popular music had moved on.

  This didn’t matter in 1989, of course. With Tolhurst gone, keyboardist Roger O’Donnell had been made a full-time Cure-ist during the Disintegration sessions, fleshing out the well-established Smith/ Williams/Gallup/Thompson line-up. And his input on Disintegration was crucial.

  Ever since Seventeen Seconds, way back in 1980, keyboards had played a part in The Cure’s bleak wall of sound. But with O’Donnell in the band, they played an increasingly important role in Disintegration, the album that finally, precisely, fused Smith’s thematic hang-ups (mortality, death, despair) with music that was both grand and highly hummable. O’Donnell crafted huge, monolithic slabs of sound, the Great Wall of keyboards. They added the necessary gravitas to Smith’s latest life crisis, something that Tolhurst’s two-fingered noodling could never do.

  “The songs flow at their own leisurely speed,” noted Rolling Stone in its four-star write-up of Disintegration, which dropped in May 1989, “carefully piling layer after intricate layer of synthesized demi-classical textures on top of Smith’s now-familiar plaintive cries and troubled love songs. Disintegration can be heard as The Cure’s career-summing peak or an epic, art-rock snooze-athon.” (By October 20, 1989, five months after its release, a million North American converts had sided with the former point of view. Globally, it would go on to sell 2.6 million copies.)

  ‘Plainsong’, just like Kiss Me’s ‘The Kiss’, set the mood for Disintegration perfectly, unravelling ever so slowly in a shower of synths and guitars, before Smith steps up to the mic, uttering snatches of lyrics (“I’m so cold”) as if he were reading from something as sacred as the Dead Sea Scrolls. If Smith and the good ship Cure were going to go down with Disintegration, as he’d threatened they would, they were going to go out in the largest possible way. This was symphonic rock, the kind of widescreen soundscapes that wouldn’t have been lost on Smith’s teenage hero David Bowie, especially in his Station To Station daze. Smith knew that ‘Plainsong’ was the perfect mood-setter. “I wanted something very lush, very orchestral.”

  Balance, of course, was something Smith came to understand more clearly with each Cure album. Accordingly, the more immediate and accessible ‘Pictures Of You’ followed ‘Plainsong’, a sort of synth-pop yin to ‘Plainsong’s pathos-heavy yang. That’s not to say it was any less morose in tone, but it had a melody that would have been wasted if it were buried somewhere in the midst of Disintegration; it was the perfect song to follow such a funereal opener. And when Smith wails how he remembers when the object of his affection was curled up in his embrace o
r how he hoped to feel her deep within his heart, while synths ebb and flow behind him, it almost made sense that he’d become a pop idol, of sorts. This was a love song, albeit one viewed through the eyes of a guy having major trouble dealing with the big 3-0.

  Rumbling drums opened the next track, ‘Closedown’, before another swirling, skyscraping keyboard texture swept into the picture, this time matched to a spindly guitar line. Here, Smith is in especially despondent form – and that’s saying something – as he lists his shortcomings. As Smith bemoans the absence of love in his heart, a symphony of synths swells behind like a one-man orchestra. Then it’s another about-face, this time with the far more upbeat ‘Lovesong’, which was about as honest and sincere a valentine to Mary Poole that Smith was ever likely to write. Touchingly, like many a more traditional songwriter before him, he sang of the contentment he felt in her company. For a man who preferred to sing about loathing rather than loving, it was a fearless confession. The soundscape was infectious, too, built around a sinewy keyboard riff and an uncomplicated rhythm from Williams, which was pushed way forward in the mix.

  Smith felt that ‘Lovesong’ was a key track on Disintegration. Without it, the album would have been the ultimate bummer, the biggest comedown of all. “That one song, I think, makes many people think twice. If that song wasn’t on the record, it would be very easy to dismiss the album as having a certain mood. But throwing that one in sort of upsets people a bit because they think, ‘That doesn’t fit.’”

  ‘Lullaby’ followed, a brilliantly constructed ode to one of Smith’s many nightmares. “That’s the sort of lullaby my Dad used to sing when I was younger,” Smith explained. “He used to make them up. There was always a horrible ending. There would be something like, ‘Sleep now, pretty baby’ [followed by] ‘Or you won’t wake up at all.’” Clipped strings and sharp stabs of rhythm guitar formed the perfect foil for Smith’s hushed, increasingly desperate vocal. While the Tim Pope video was so right for the song that it actually outweighed the single it was designed to promote, ‘Lullaby’ was another example of Smith finding the perfect balance of pop and pathos.

  Disintegration then wound through the dense ‘Fascination Street’, ‘Prayers For Rain’, a bummed-out sprawl that seemed to be as low as Smith had ever sunk, ‘The Same Deep Waters As You’ and the title track, before eventually drawing to a sadly beautiful close with ‘Untitled’, a song that was all wheezing accordion and bleak Smith wordplay. When it was over, it came as no real shock that Smith wanted to kill off the band – the Lovecat was completely drained; he had absolutely nothing left to give.

  Yet not even Smith’s contrariness could stop the rise of Disintegration and The Cure; the album was a massive worldwide hit. “I realised at this time that, despite my best efforts, we had actually become everything that I didn’t want us to become: a stadium rock band. Most of the relationships within the band and outside of the band fell apart. Calling it Disintegration was kind of tempting fate, and fate retaliated. The family idea of the group really fell apart too after Disintegration. It was the end of the golden period.”

  Their record company agreed, at least on first listen to Disintegration. A month before it was completed, an advance listening party was organised with Elektra execs. According to Smith, they walked in expecting Kiss Me the sequel, and walked out muttering something inaudible. It was very similar to Smith’s clash with Tolhurst during the mixing of the album – this wasn’t the reaction he’d anticipated. “There was just this look of absolute dismay on people’s faces,” Smith recalled. “I was informed about a week later that I was committing commercial suicide. They wanted to push the release date back – they thought I was being ‘wilfully obscure’, which was an actual quote from the letter [Smith received from Elektra]. I actually kept the letter and I cherish it because Disintegration went on to sell millions. Ever since then I realised that record companies don’t have a fucking clue what The Cure does and what The Cure means. I thought it was my masterpiece and they thought it was shit.”

  Melody Maker’s Chris Roberts was every bit as confused as the suits of Elektra. “Disintegration is about as much fun as losing a limb,” he wrote in May 1989. “How can a group this disturbing and depressing be so popular?”

  One false step Smith did take with Disintegration, however, was the cover image, a solo shot of the Cure leader, another Parched Art design. Given the recent sacking of Lol Tolhurst, and the increased prominence of Smith as the star of the band, it seemed a strangely self-serving move. Maybe Disintegration was closer to the solo album that Smith had been murmuring about for years.

  Accordingly, Smith received flak from both the music press and bandmates, but defended the move, insisting that he and the rest of the band had approved the image. He would also go into some detail about the shared songwriting on Disintegration; half of the dozen tracks had substantial musical input from other members of the band. It wasn’t just Robert Smith and band, even if it felt and sounded like that was the case.

  As for the album’s title, Smith knew it would be read as The Cure’s obituary, but that wasn’t really his intention. It was more about the Dorian Gray effect. “It wasn’t really to do with the group,” he said when the album appeared. “It’s more like an interior disintegration, and it’s something which I felt really keenly and which I’ll feel even more keenly as I’m getting older. It’s that sense of everything falling apart.”

  If this really was the end of the road for The Cure, then someone had forgotten to tell their black clad public. Sprung on listeners in April, ‘Lullaby’ became the band’s highest-charting UK single, climbing to number five. By May 13, Disintegration had peaked at number three, another all-time high for the band. The Prayer Tour followed – Gallup, quite justifiably, given The Cure’s status at the time, was a little wary of the name, thinking that it might be confused with Madonna’s current Prayer tour.

  Smith realised that it was best to sign off in high style. Since 1987, he and Gallup had become increasingly wary of flying. So after the European leg of the Prayer Tour, which had seen them play to 40,000 Parisians over two nights at Paris Omnisports, and also venture behind the Iron Curtain for the first time, they decided against flying to New York to start their next North American tour. I mean, why fly when you can afford to sail on the QE2?

  The QE2 was as much a ruse as anything else in the career of Smith and The Cure. He told the world at large that because of his fear of flying (which Gallup just so happened to share), Smith couldn’t travel by 747 to North America. Sea travel was the only option. But the truth was this: by implying a fear of plane travel, Smith was hoping to reduce the number of shows the band had to play and increase the numbers of days free for travel. Maybe promoters would baulk at the expense and the band wouldn’t have to tour at all. Of course, that didn’t happen. And Smith didn’t realise what was up for grabs on the most up-market of cruise liners – there were as many bars onboard as waiters, while there was also a casino for those idle after-after-hours.

  “I arrived in America shattered,” Smith said of his Atlantic crossing. “It was five days in a boat with, like, 47 bars and a casino. It was like a tour before a tour.”*

  The next shock in store for the band was their opening 1989 US show at the 54,000 capacity Giants Stadium in New Jersey. More than 44,000 fans turned up – 30,000 tickets had sold on the first day – proving that The Cure had progressed way beyond cult band status. They were genuine pop superstars. Roger O’Donnell, for one, was gobsmacked by the reception the band received at Giants Stadium. “We had been at sea for five days,” he gasped. “The stadium was too big for us to take it all in. We’ve decided that we don’t like playing stadiums that large.”

  Meanwhile, on the continent, French President Mitterand had issued the band a personal invitation to Paris. When would this madness stop?

  “It was never our intention to become as big as this,” Smith declared, as the tour wound its way to the Spectrum in Philadelphia. “The whol
e point was to enjoy what we were doing at the time.”

  Kiss Me’s worldwide sales were sitting at two million and still rising, Standing On A Beach had reached 2.3 million. ‘Fascination Street’, the first US single lifted from Disintegration – due to a tie-in with the film Lost Angels – had already grazed the Top 40, while ‘Lovesong’ was fast charming its way to number two, the closest that The Cure would come to making it to the top of the US charts. Disintegration peaked at number 12 on the Billboard album chart, shifting its first million by mid-October; it eventually outsold even Kiss Me. So much for the “commercial suicide” verdict that Elektra execs had given the album.

  The band worked up more than 50 songs to flesh out their sets, which were now running well over two hours. And in order to give the masses what they truly wanted, they had a video cameraman roam the various stadiums beforehand, fielding requests. Smith and band would check out the tape before plugging in.

  When the Prayer Tour reached the West Coast, with The Pixies, Shellyann Orphan and Love And Rockets in tow, they were packing the 50,000 capacity Dodger Stadium. They had reached a level of fame enjoyed by such UK legends as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and – naturally enough – it inspired Smith to issue his latest in a long line of death warrants for The Cure.

  “It’s reached a stage where I personally can’t cope with it,” he said, “so I’ve decided this is the last time we’re gonna tour.”

  Smith’s entourage, naturally, had swollen in proportion to the band’s new status as stadium fillers, which also made Smith feel uncomfortable. “It’s weird to be at the centre of a group of 30 people all listening to what you’re saying,” Smith admitted. “[But] when that group turns into 300 people it goes on from weird. Some people revel in it, and I don’t.”