Musician (1989)

What's The Big Idea?

Robert Smith's Conception of the Cure By J. D. Considine

ON THE WHOLE, THE AVERAGE pop fan's image of the Cure is pretty close to the way the band appears in the video to "Fascination Street, " the first American single from Disintegration. Shot in the haze of what seems to be a mist-enshrouded alley somewhere in the depths of London, it shows the five band members all dressed in elaborate layers of black, performing with forlorn intensity as the dry-ice fog whips around them. Robert Smith, the Cure's singer and de facto leader, looks especially otherworldly. His black hair is spiked up in long, drooping tendrils; his dark clothes hang limply from his shoulders as if they'd been draped there and forgotten while he sings, voice almost breaking, about trying to drown the fear of intimacy in the noisy, beery bustle of bar life. But what's most striking about him as he stands there is his face: the sad eyes, the deathly pallor and his almost tauntingly androgynous clown's smirk of a mouth, painted a red brighter than any other color in the video. Seeing him onscreen or listening to him on record, it's hard to imagine him as anything but an awkward intellectual brooding aesthete, a man charged with anxiety and filled with alienation. In short, it's hard to imagine him being anything like he really is. But here he is, his smile a ghostly lipstick smear, his hair a spiky mushroom, crouched by a window in his Copenhagen hotel room, showing off his survival kit. "The only thing that saves me from cracking up on tour is being able to listen to something on a moment's notice," he says, indicating a black Sanyo boombox and two briefcases crammed with cassettes. "I carry this monstrosity of around 200 cassettes, and a couple of T-shirts. That's my priority. I just feel that music... it's not merely important, it's essential to me. To enjoy things, anyway. But yet I know people who don't listen to music for weeks at a time, " he adds wonderingly. "They don't actually sit down and listen to music, they've got it on while ironing. So it's just ...... His voice trails off. Smith, 30, listens to music much the way he reads: attentively, voraciously, incessantly. When I was ushered into his room, almost two hours earlier, he was playing Enya's Watermark, but "that was just 'cause it was sort of an Enya kind of day. " As he reels off cassette titles at random, his taste exhibits an astonishing eclecticism: "Cocteau Twins. Paula Abdul's new album. Suzanne Vega. Nico. Gregorian chant. Joy Division. Bulgarian Voices. Clannad. Romantic Forte piano. Erik Satie. Various classical musics. Shirley Bassey. That Petrol Emotion. Brandenburg Concertos. Sinead O'Connor. Elvis Costello. Neil Young. " Looking over his shoulder, I notice one cassette labeled "Cure Disco" and ask about it. "Ah," he says, laughing in vague embarrassment. "This is something that we did when we were doing the demos for the Kiss Me album." He shows me the cassette itself, which features a skull and crossbones along with the warning, "Aaaaagh! Dangerous!" "Want to hear it?" he asks. How could I resist? According to Smith, the tape was made on something of a lark. "We'd heard [a record] the night before in this disco," he says. "We were thinking what it would be like to do an album of our worst-ever songs, rather than our favorite-ever songs. And as we were getting drunker and drunker, it seemed like a really good idea to get an album of these songs. And this was as far as it got. " He turns on the tape. After a momentary synth squall a disco beat kicks in, complete with octave-stepping bass and chirping syndrums. Smith looks over anxiously when the hook makes its appearance and, noting my uncomprehending frown, smiles. "Good, " he says relievedly. "You've never heard of it. " The Eurodisco number in question, Kelly Marie's 1981 single "Feels Like I'm in Love, " was a big hit in Britain but proved something of a bust Stateside, never denting the Top 40. That hardly dampened the Cure's enthusiasm. As Smith yowls the melody-"I realized I didn't know the words once I started," he says sheepishly-in a ragged falsetto, sounding less like Marie than some Leo Sayer from hell, his bandmates energetically (and quite credibly) chime in with the chorus. It may be a joke, but it's delivered with a passion and precision which, were he in a darker mood, would probably appall Smith far more than the original record. As it is, though, we have our laugh and Smith ejects the tape. "One of those things that did seem like a funny idea at a disco at three in the morning, with everyone revved up," he shrugs. "And the next day, when we tried to put it into practice, it turned out to be a very poor idea indeed." Well, yes. But Smith's reservations about that tape aren't the same as yours or mine. Although he argues the joke "isn't that funny if it's taken out of context, " the truth is more subtle. For those of us outside the band, hearing the incredibly serious Cure reprise some hoary Eurodisco hit is still a laugh, but it's a hoot of a different color: The Cure may poke fun at the giddy banality of the original, but what tickles our fancy is the spectacle of the Cure wanking around with some two-bit disco song. Two separate laughs entirely.

Why? Because from the outside the Cure seems anything but frivolous. The band's albums are dark and intense, very serious indeed. The first Cure single, 1978's "Killing an Arab, " started things off by condensing the existential crises of Camus' murderous Meursault into a two-and-a-half-minute ditty. Subsequent efforts have spelled out a dread of sex, death and intimacy in frightfully personal terms. Some of the earlier Cure albums, particularly Faith and Pornography-recordings to which Smith repeatedly compares Disintegration-have almost a funereal air to them, a clangorous darkness that prompted one English critic to smirk that "Ian Curtis, by comparison, was a bundle of laughs. " In real life the Cure is nowhere near so serious. On the bus headed for soundcheck at the Roskilde Festival, they seem like any other rock band-talking about what and how much they drank the night before, joking about the terrible floor show in the hotel bar, laughing among themselves. Smith turns out to be quite the sports fan, poring over the football (that is, soccer) pages of the London Sunday papers, animatedly discussing the standings of his favorites. Inasmuch as there's nothing quite so impenetrable as sports chat from another country, most of this goes by in a blur; even so, it's hard not to notice the wit with which Smith addresses his topic. Granted, hearing Robert Smith laughing over football scores isn't the same as watching Paul Shaffer clown around with David Letterman. But it doesn't exactly reinforce the Cure's image as angst-ridden eggheads. That, however, is not an image on which the band itself is especially keen. For instance, they've billed this current round of concerts in support of the new Disintegration as "The Prayer Tour"-despite bassist Simon Gallup's worries that fans might confuse the Cure with Madonna as a result. "But 'The Disintegration Tour' just sounds wrong," Smith says. "It sounds like everyone would be falling apart, and everything would be going wrong. It's tempting fate to call a tour something like that. I think the tour is an exciting aspect of what we do, so I thought 'Prayer' would be a little more optimistic. It gives it a bit more hopefulness than 'The Disintegration Tour. "' He pauses. "As it was, we started by missing the ferry. Overall, Smith insists he's looking on the brighter side of things these days. "For me personally, things have got better. Because I don't worry about what I'm going to do anymore. That was a big worry in school, because I didn't know if I'd be able to do what I wanted. So that's been sort of a triumph.

"I actually do feel more self-confident than I used to," he adds. "I was never really nervous before, 'cos I could walk into a room of people, but I could never look at anyone." He reflects for a moment, then laughs. "It's not really self- confidence, I suppose. I just don't like people. "

But people, or pop fans anyway, like the Cure. Thanks to the band's lighter side-flippant, bouncy numbers like "The Lovecats, " "The Caterpillar" and "Why Can't I Be You"-the Cure has earned a surprisingly large, increasingly pop-oriented audience. That's particularly the case in America, where this splash of pop joviality made the Cure's dour, black-clad image seem cuddly enough even for MTV. The band's last album, the double-disc Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, finally pushed the Cure into the U.S. mainstream, selling a half-million copies and spending a full year on the Billboard album charts. And thus, on the verge of a major breakthrough, the Cure release ... Disintegration? The very title will leave some fans wondering if the group is about to break up. Not a very commercially savvy move. "I suppose, in a perverse way, that's part of the reason," Smith says. "That's not actually the reason for calling it Disintegration, but it's a very good reason not to call it Disintegration. I was aware it might put some people off who might think, 'Oh, this is the last record.' "But then, I always think it's the last record, so I don't see why everyone else shouldn't get that feeling. Hold on-he literally figures, "This is it"? "Yeah, every time we come out of the studio I think that's it. After Kiss Me I didn't think we'd make another record or play any more concerts for at least eight months. I was convinced of that. Then when I'm out with the others, it just sort of falls back into place again, and we start doing things. " This isn't a recent development. "It's been going on ever since Seventeen Seconds. It's just that if you have any kind of feelings that the group's going to carry on regardless, it introduces complacency into people. That comes across in the studio: 'Maybe we just do the record even if we haven't got good songs.' Or 'If this one isn't too good, we'll make the next one better.' "The way we work now, I try to make everyone feel like it's the last time we do something. And like this tour, I've told them already-we haven't even started, but this is it. This and the American tour is it. "Each time I say it," he adds, "I feel stronger that it's probably true. But then I said it last time, so they've started to disbelieve me. I blew my trump card too early, I think. " Even so, ending the Cure wouldn't be a simple task. For starters, the Cure as it exists today is very much a different band from the one that cut "Killing an Arab"or "Let's Go to Bed," or "The Lovecats. " With the departure of Laurence "Lol" Tolhurst (of which more later), the only common thread to these Cure records is the name... and Robert Smith. "What has happened in the past is that the group actually just changes, and that satisfies me a bit," Smith says. "I think it's just that I'm worried about being tied to that, I suppose, too tightly and it would be too difficult to stop. " In a sense, the Cure was almost defined by its changeability. That left Smith with a somewhat unusual sense of who, or what, the Cure really is. "In those days, when the group used to change almost with every record-someone left, and sometimes someone else joined, sometimes two people joined, sometimes no one joined-it was always really natural, " he says. "We never worried, and still don't, about the idea of the group, of a face disappearing from the group. "The Cure's always been, and it sounds really pretentious, but it's been more like an idea. The others argue with me about this, because they say if I wasn't here it wouldn't carry on. And it's got to the point where they're right. It wouldn't. "But there was a time when I could probably have left-two points, really, one after Seventeen Seconds, and one after Pornography. The Cure wouldn't have been anything like it is but it could have carried on. And I would have started something else." In late 1982 Smith almost did start something else, going "a bit mental" after Pornography and joining up with Siouxsie and the Banshees for a couple of albums (the live Nocturne and the studio Hyaena). But that seemed more an act of desperation than anything else. Deep down, Smith not only knew that the Cure was his primary vehicle, but that it had many miles left. "When I started, " he explains, "all the people that I despised, all the groups I do despise-they never knew when it's right to stop. They're scared of stopping. I think when we stop, it will be because we don't enjoy it, or I don't enjoy it. We've been really lucky in that we haven't been forced to stop, with plummeting record sales and no one coming to the concerts. But as it is, I haven't wanted to stop. " So wherefore is it Disintegration? What prompted the title? "It wasn't really to do with the group," he says. "Because none of the words to it are to do with the group. It's more like an interior disintegration, and it's something which I felt really keenly, and which I'll feel ever more keenly as I'm getting older, as I'm sure everyone does. It's like when you lose the ability to absorb things and to learn. You can't feel things as keenly, as deeply. It's that sense of everything falling apart. "It's really strange, as well, talking about Disintegration as a record when most of the words were finished before the end of last summer. I finished singing it before Christmas. Always after a record like this-the same after Faith and Pornography-I feel better." He chuckles ruefully. "The next thing that happens is usually pop. So I expect if we do go make another record, it would be the most hideous pop music in the world." The Most Hideous Pop Music in the World. That's a title. Smith laughs. "Wild Mood Swings is the title of the next thing we do, " he says. "If we do something. " Should all this seem a bit sour for a band on the verge of stardom, it's perfectly in character for Smith. "There's two types of getting famous, " he muses at one point. "There's one where you struggle to, and there's one where you struggle not to. We've fallen into the second category. We've become sort of well-known and popular despite ourselves, almost. We haven't really tried to stop it, but we haven't encouraged it that much, I don't think. " Nor has the band had much truck with the pop-star trappings that come with that sort of fame. Truth be told, Smith seems fairly nauseated by most pop group behavior. "The awful thing about doing this," he says of the music business, "is that you tend to meet particular groups who feel that they are somehow better than everyone else. And I think that the idea that you treat people how you'd like to be treated"-a philosophy Smith says he inherited from his father-"is the one thing that's saved me from being like that. Because I don't think I'm better than anyone else. "Not for the reason of being in a group, anyhow. When I was in school I thought I was better than the teachers. But I despise the view that if you're doing something [creative] somehow you're worth more. It's not true. Some people want to do something or feel they have to. Other people don't. "I mean, Mary [Poole], who has been my girlfriend and is now my wife-I find it weird to think of her as my wife-she doesn't 'do' anything. She helps mentally handicapped people but she doesn't create anything. She likes to help other people. And thus I always find it really objectionable when these people in groups think they're worth more. Quite often, they're worth less. It's so self-indulgent, a lot of it."

This isn't just talk. The next day, when the Cure's bus rolls into the backstage area at Ros- kilde, I see Smith's modesty in action. Because the Roskilde festival grounds aren't designed for rock shows-it's more like a county fairground, with sheep pens, cattle sheds and a huge green tent serving as the theater-only a seven-foot fence separates backstage from the audience. Consequently, eager Danish fans angle for a glance at their heroes all afternoon: A Kilroy-like assortment of noses, foreheads and hands periodically yelp "Robert! Robert! " whenever anyone looking like a Cure member passes within view. Management eventually reparks the band bus, alleviating the situation somewhat. But when Smith heads over to retrieve something from the vehicle, the yelling starts in earnest. Now some stars would absolutely bask in this sort of attention; others would assume a Sean Penn-style belligerence. Smith seems almost embarrassed, waving shyly and smiling slightly like a kid being cheered by his classmates. Nor does he sequester himself in the gypsy trailer the band has been allotted as a dressing room. For most of the four hours preceding the Cure's set, Smith is sociable as hell, joking with his bandmates and chatting up the support bands. Lowest on the bill (but receiving equal attention from Smith) is Dinosaur Jr., which has just released a revved-up remake of the Cure's 'Just Like Heaven.' Why? "We liked it, " Dinosaur Jr. guitarist J Mascis explains laconically. "It's not often we find songs we like that we can do. We recorded it for a compilation album, but when we finished it we liked it so much we didn't want to give it to them. " Dinosaur Jr. did give a copy to Smith, though: "I met them last week; they had their photo taken with me. They sent me their album last year, and a demo of 'Just Like Heaven.' I think it's great; Porl [Thompson, the Cure's guitarist] now wants to do it like that. " Smith chuckles. "I told him to get onstage with them and ask if he can join in." (He didn't.) Smith's words more than match his deeds. "It's good when something comes out of [being in a group], but it's useless when you're just in a group," he says. "That's nonsense. That's what happened to Laurence [Tolhurst], really. That attitude sort of crept in, that you expect to be treated differently. I don't think you should. " There seems to have been more to Tolhurst's departure than bad attitude, though; if anything, that was but the straw that broke the camel's back. Tolhurst's tenure with the Cure stretched all the way back to Malice, Smith's earliest schoolyard attempt at a band. Tolhurst came up with the name Easy Cure, which Smith shortened. Tolhurst was originally the group's drummer but shifted to keyboards in 1982, apparently feeling he'd risen to his level of incompetence as a percussionist. Talk to the others, though, and it seems as if on keyboards Tolhurst had only just begun to realize his potential for uselessness. "When I joined the band [for the Kiss Me tour], " says current keyboard player Roger O'Donnell, "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 practicing. He just liked being in the group. " "He really wasn't much use," agrees Gallup, who first signed on with the Cure a decade ago. "He was good for videos, and for photos and interviews. But he didn't contribute much otherwise." (Tolhurst, contacted through the Cure's British record company, refused to comment.) How much Tolhurst contributed to Disintegration is hard to say. He's ambiguously listed as playing "other instrument" on the album's inner sleeve, and is cited along with the others in the group's joint composition credits. But he apparently got his letter of dismissal before the band shot its new videos, for he's in none of them. Tolhurst doesn't seem much missed, either. He was the butt of numerous jokes on the band bus, and even a few in the tour program: O'Donnell's "fave raves" page includes the line, "Favourite wooden object: Lol," though O'Donnell protests, "The others made me put it in!" It's hard to imagine the parting being an easy one, as a part of the Cure has always had as much to do with Smith's background as with his musical aspirations. He and Tolhurst, after all, were classmates at both Notre Dame Middle School and St. Wilfred's Comprehensive back in Crawley, Sussex. But Thompson, too, dates back to those days. "He had a real reputation when we were back in Crawley growing up, " Smith recalls. "He was the guitarist in Crawley. In fact, he was in the very first incarnation of the Cure-because he was the attraction. We used to go play in pubs when we were 16. People would come see us purely because Porl was playing guitar. They didn't even know the name of the group, it was just Porl playing guitar. So it was quite funny. "He played on the original demos of 'Killing an Arab, "10. 15' and 'Boys Don't Cry.' But he didn't actually like what we were doing. We didn't really like what he was doing either. We were becoming more and more stripped down, and leaving him just short gaps so people would keep coming to see us and we'd keep getting bookings in the same pub. "Eventually it just became absurd. We'd be playing something like '10. 15' and there'd be like a 16-bar section where he could play lead guitar. People used to really moan at us, 'Oh, Porl isn't playing guitar anymore, man. Oh no.' So we came to an agreement, and he left. "A few years later he started doing our artwork and I asked him if he wanted to rejoin. But, " he laughs, "I said he couldn't play anything like he used to play. It was weird, because in the interim he started going out with my sister-and in fact he married her last year. So it's a very closed world, the Cure. " As might be expected of kids who came up in late-'70s England, the Cure started out as a punk band. "I still think we're a punk band, " Smith says. "That, to most people, sounds ridiculous when you listen to the new record, but real punk was always an attitude. What took over in London was a fashion version of punk. " Smith has his own theory about what sparked British punk. "There was an experiment in the schooling system around the very early '70s, called the middle school, " he says. "It was introduced to bridge the gap between junior school and senior school. It was supposed to be a very liberal sort of two years, when you're 11 and 12. You had open class; if you had a class you didn't like, you could move to another class; you'd address the teachers by their Christian names- that sort of setup. That ended up after two years as the most fascist school I'd ever been to. You couldn't do anything. They re-introduced school uniforms, the whole thing; an entire process of completely clamping down. They realized that children don't accept responsibility. They thrive on anarchy. And that bred a lot of resentment amongst people of my age. We felt like we were used as guinea pigs. All my friends, we used to think, 'We've spent two years of hell just to prove something which we all knew anyway.' " As social theory, this seems a reasonable explanation of punk's rebelliousness and contemptuous dismissal of authority. But it also provides an illuminating insight into punk's central aesthetic. Think about all the unsupervised time and unfettered expression this "open classroom" approach tried to foster; then consider how close that is to what Smith describes as punk's attitude "that anyone could do it." This particular fruit didn't fall far from the tree. Perhaps the most obvious proof that "anyone can do it" in the case of the Cure is Smith's singing voice. Tremulous, fruity, sometimes maddeningly indistinct, it's so utterly unlike any other in rock today that it's easy to imagine hearing it for the first time and thinking, "Who told him he could sing?" As it turns out, no one did. "When we started, and were playing in pubs, I wasn't the singer," he admits. "I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs. We went through about five different singers-they were fucking useless, basically. I always ended up thinking, 'I could do better than this.' "So gradually I started singing a song, and then it was two songs, until I reached the point where I"-he searches for the right words. "I mean, I hated my voice, but I didn't hate it more than I hated everyone else's voice. So we went through a period where we just did instrumentals for about three months, while I was trying to work up the courage to say, 'I'll be the singer.' "I remember the first concert we did where I was the singer. I was paralyzed with fear before we went out. I drank about six pints of beer, which in those days was enough to knock me over. I was singing the wrong song; of the first three songs, I started on the second song. They carried on playing. No one even noticed. So I thought, 'If I can get away with that, I can be the singer.' I've worked on that basis ever since. " Perversely enough, he's also managed to become quite a capable singer in the process. Granted, no one would ever mistake Smith for Daryl Hall, and his singing is technically quite lacking: He has wobbly intonation, he doesn't project, he swallows his words... "Sing from the throat, " he suggests. ... He sings from the throat. And yet the melody pops right out from Smith's performances, whether in the quiet cadences of "Lullaby" or the scattershot scat of "Why Can't I Be You." Somehow it works. "Yeah, that's the thing, " he agrees. "It's like with the guitar tunings. I tune the high E string on the guitar slightly flat, even though the others are perfectly in tune. So when I'm playing a minor chord the last note I hit on a downstroke isn't quite right, and I like that. That's like how I sing. I'm aware sometimes of toeing up into that flatness. But I like it. "I think the weirdest thing about the way I sing is that most of the time it's like how I talk. Sort of stuttery. I'm a much better singer now than I used to be. I couldn't have dreamed of singing in front of an audience of more than 10 people 10 years ago. I used to hate the idea of it. And now I feel like the best thing about [Roskilde] will be being able to sing some of the new songs, just because they're so good to sing. " He's even gotten to the point that this former rhythm guitarist sheds his instrument for a good piece of the live show. "I've found that it's very undemonstrable to be tied to a guitar, " Smith says. "Because I don't flail, it looks like I'm utterly static, and it gets a bit boring for people to watch. When I haven't got a guitar I still stand there, but at least I twitch occasionally. " Curiously, though the lyrics for Disintegration had been written months before the album was recorded, Smith didn't come up with vocal lines until after all the instrumental tracks were done. This stems partly from the band's collectivist approach: Each member brings in demo tapes which are cannibalized for song ideas. Eventually a shape and arrangement are worked out-determined, in this case, by the "idea" of the album-and after it's on tape Smith begins to think about his vocal. "I've never sung the songs till I stand in front of the mike in the studio, " he says. "I've never worked out the melody. " That's not to say he simply gets up and improvises, though. With the new album's "Plainsong," for example, "I had the words to that written quite close to what they're like, but I didn't worry about the meter or the rhyme. The phrases were all there. When we work out the music I think, 'This piece of music will go with these words.' And when I'm piecing together, I sit in my room and I've got the tape playing over and over again, thinking how it should go, until I don't have to read it. Then I go stand in front of the mike, turn all the lights off, have a couple of drinks, and whatever comes out is it. "On this record, I think I did five of the songs on first takes, the five really slow ones. 'Disintegration' took me about 10 takes over 10 different days. I could only do it once a day; it was torture. But I wanted all the songs to be done in one go. There's no logical reason why. I just wanted it to be a performance. So a lot of time was spent in the studio waiting for me to get in the mood to sing the songs. " Strange as the Cure's methods sometimes are, the group's music truly seems to have found an audience. Even though Disintegration had barely arrived in record shops when the Cure arrived in Copenhagen, it was already shaping up as the band's most successful effort yet. "We've had our first Top 5 single ever this week, in England," Smith says, not sounding especially ebullient. "It seems very surreal to me because we haven't done anything and it's just rocketing up the charts. It's only been held back by people like Kylie Minogue. So we are a pop group as well. Which makes him feel ... how? "I mean, I... I like it," he equivocates. "I suppose it would be foolish to pretend I didn't. I would love the idea of the Cure having a number one single in England after all this time. I think it would be brilliant. But I wouldn't do anything to help it, " he laughs. "If it doesn't happen, it's tough. " So why does he seemingly take this triumph to be such a hollow victory? Because frankly, he says, the Cure hasn't really won; it has just sold a few more records than it once did. "Musically it's as stagnant now as it was when we started, " he mopes. "That's the problem. If our aims had been to displace the people that we despised when we started, we've failed. 'Cause they're still there, and they're still selling more records than they ever did. Our albums just present another choice."

"But I don't know. I suppose I still think of what we do in very naive terms. I still do it because I want to. I just want to do something. And I have no concept of it being a career. I think it's quite ludicrous that I'm sitting in this hotel today. "I still feel very strange walking out onstage," he adds. "Tomorrow night might be the thousandth concert, or probably more. I still won't be able to grasp, for a while, why everyone's staring. And it's not me being funny. There are huge areas of what we do that I still find very alien, and just very strange. And it's because I'm not a natural, I think, to be in a group. " Yet Robert Smith manages not merely to survive but to flourish, and for the most old-fashioned, un-punk reason imaginable: the love of a good woman. "I've known Mary since I was at school," he says of his wife. "She's the only person I know intimately that's known me since before the group, apart from my family. She's a calming influence. If I get too precious about things, she drags me back and makes me look at it. "And I think if I didn't have that, I would have got lost somewhere on the way. "

SIDEBOX

IN BETWEEN GEAR

ROBERT Smith's main guitar is a nation-shaped National. 'I don't know what it's called,' he shrugs. 'It's a bakelite thing.' He also plays 'a customized Fender Jazzmaster that's been sort of sculpted into a weird fish shape.' Why a fish? 'I just gave it to the girl, and that's what she come back with.' He says its a'62 Jazzmaster, just a year older than his Fender VI bass. His only other guitar is an Ovation 12-string acoustic. Apart from the Ovation, which runs directly into the board, Smith amplifies his guitars with a Peavey Stereo Chorus 100, driving a 2x12 cabinet; the Fender VI goes through a Music Man head with a 4x12 cabinet. His effects are all Boss pedals: noise gate, graphic EQ, flanger, distortion, 'a clever delay that samples' and a mother box for the guitar. As for strings, Robert uses a .010-gauge set, 'usually regular Rotosound,' except on the Fender VI, which uses Jet Bass strings, 'named after Jet Harris, the bass player in the Shadows,' says Simon Gallup. And what does Gallup play? 'I've got three basses,' he says. 'One Washburn, a semi- acoustic which I try to use as the main one; and a backup Music Man bass; and another Music Man that's D-tuned.' Pedals are by Boss, and include a graphic EQ, a delay, a flanger, an overdrive, a noise gate and a mother box, and are fed into a Tascam Portastudio before reaching a pair of Peavey Megabass heads and Black Widow speakers, two 15s and two 12s. His strings are also Rotosounds. Although guitarist Porl Thompson has quite a few Fenders at home, on the road he's the Cure's Gibson guy, using a stereo ES-345 and a '55 ES-175 for the bulk of his onstage playing. They're fed into two Marshall 50-watt heads, split between the pickups so each pickup has got a different head. Why? 'I use stereo echo,' he explains, 'so it pans across the two cabinets.' His strings are Gibson 748s, played with a Gibson Gripper pick. In addition to the Marshalls, Thompson also uses a Vox 8013, sometimes by itself, sometimes in conjunction with the Marshalls. He controls the mix with a Scholz Rockman pedal system and two t.c. electronics chorus pedals. When it's Roger O'Donnell's turn to give the tech talk, Smith teasingly points to the cassette recorder and says, 'He's got a C-120.' 'It's not that bad,' counters O'Donnell. And it really isn't much of a laundry list: A Yamaha KX88 mother keyboard and a Roland JX-8P, the latter just in MIDI line. There's an Elker MIDI footpedal module - 'bass pedals, but I don't really play basslines,' says O'Donnell. 'it looks like that but I'm actually playing chords with the foot pedals. It's for the sake of accuracy, my boots are a bit too big [for basslines]' - and a MIDI rack which consists of a Prophet 2000 sampler, a Roland MKS-80 MIDI digital piano, an Ensoniq Mirage and three Oberheim DPX-1 sample players which handle a combination of Emulator II, Mirage and Prophet 2000 disks. Outboard effects are managed by two Roland DEP multi-effects, and everything gets sorted out through a Simmons eight-channel programmable mixer with a 99-memory circuit and a Roland MIDI-Merge MIDI patchbay. Don't forget the Boss volume pedal. He hears it all through a Meyer monitor. Finally, Boris Williams keeps time on a Yamaha drum kit with four rack toms-10", 12", 13" and 15"-and a 22' bass drum. His snare is a 6 1/2" wooden Noble & Cooley, although he keeps a metal Ludwig Black Beauty as a backup. The heads are all Remos, with Emperors on the top and Ambassadors on the bottom. His sticks are made by the Rock Shed in London, and are model SS. His cymbals are Zildjians-two splashes and a China being the most used-and he has high-hats on either side of the kit. That's not for symmetry, either; 'On some beats it gives me more freedom to have my right hand over to the right' he says. 'It's just easier.' The high- hats are controlled by side-by-side pedals, the remote linkage for the right high-hats courtesy of Pearl. Williams' other hardware is mostly Yamaha.

Thanks to Robin Juric for the article

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