Faith, pornography and the laughter of death

Frequently mentioned by pretentious parvenus of contemporary alternative rock like Hot Hot Heat and The
Rapture, The Cure is ‘cool’ once again.

By Alexis Petridis

On June 1982, The Cure performed at the Brussels Ancienne Belguique. It was the last date of the promotional
tour for Pornography, an extraordinarily moody and unpleasant trip around Europe, in support of a gloomy and
difficult album. They used to get on stage with lipstick smeared around their eyes and mouths. Sweating under
the heat of the lights, the lipstick melt and ran, giving the appearance, according to Robert Smith, “of have been
punched in the middle of the face”. The whole idea was to symbolize the implicit violence on the new songs, but a
violence much more tangible had plagued and withered the tour since the beginning. By the time they arrived at the
Ancienne Belgique, the vibe between Smith and Gallup had became homicidal. At the backstage, Smith had
refused to sing, insisting he wanted to play drums instead. Gallup decided to play guitar and drummer Lol Tolhurst
moved to bass. The mess exacerbated even more when a “secret guest” called Gary Biddles got staggering
onstage and, taking over the microphone started to rant against Robert Smith, calling him unbearable. Another
fight rose. While Smith, Biddles and Gallup beat up each other and the audience hissed and booed, the unhappy
and very professional Tolhurst kept on playing bass. For everyone interested, such a happening spelled the end of
The Cure, a small new wave group, characterized by their somber behavior and with only one moderate successful
hit in their career.

 Twenty one years later, Robert Smith gets lazy in a couch at the Olympic Studios in London. He appears friendly
and charming, although a little confused in the face of the effort that supposes “pretending I can’t remember what
happened” with The Cure in the early eighties, a period that saw these post punk losers became the most
important alternative band in the world. Just as often as has been underlined, in Smith’s personality an enigmatic
charisma melts with a certain street coarseness. Today he put on black liner and a stain of red lipstick, and shows
a certain amount of thick, bad taste jewels, all of which, along with a ruddy face hidden behind plaits of black hair,
make him seem like a gothic taxi driver.

 According to Robert Smith, the life as a member of The Cure a year before the release of Pornography (1982)
was far from being a barrel of laughter. The group was on the rise.

 They had got a successful stylistic mutation from the Buzzcocks pop type from their first record, Three Imaginary
Boys, to the dark, mysterious and ominously introspective post punk from their second LP, Seventeen Seconds.
The commercial fruits were immediate: the record became a hit in Europe and New Zealand. They appeared on
The Top Of the Pops program playing “A forest”, a hit in the April 1980 charts. But the sessions for Faith turned
out to be tense and the following tour got everyone discouraged. The music had became exaggeratedly glacial and
somber, even to the all dressed in black audience of The Cure. Their attempt to get a second single into the charts
failed. The wild parties of the band were marked by a desperation exacerbated by the presence of Siouxsie And
The Banshees bassist, Steve Severin, who accompanied the opener Lydia Lunch. Severin had induced Smith to
try LSD, besides doing his best to spread the chaos in The Cure lines. “I used to steal Lol’s drinks and sprinkle
them while he was playing”, says laughing. “I spent the time pushing Robert to end The Cure and enter The
Banshees. I definitely dedicated to seed the Apple of Discord”.

 “At the end of the tour, our psychic state was not in the better conditions”, Smith says. “Night after night,
playing these songs. The night forays that followed the concerts were demented as a reaction at what we were
doing musically. Between 1982 and 1983 I was extremely depressed, I used to do a lot of drugs. Everyone used
to. It wasn’t really a problem because we were very young and we could manage it, but inevitably, you felt how
your mental balance was going off the road. Looking back, I think I felt very disappointed at what we were doing.
I thought we had wrong the way, not regarding fame, but it seemed to me that we should be doing music next to
the Mahler symphonies, not pop. I was fed up with everything the group represented. It seemed to me we were
going downhill; the typical 20’s crisis”. The tone of the sessions was characterized by bad mood and tension, a
situation increased thanks to alcohol and acid, besides the group’s decision to save some money by staying in the
main offices of their record company, Fiction Records. “It made me feel caught in an endless return”, Smith
complains. “You knew exactly everything you were going to do, you knew what drugs you were about to take, and
you knew very well how you were going to feel at the next day. It became a routine kind of bizarre. In those times I
lost all my friends, with no exception; my behavior was hateful, horrible and selfish. I was obsessed with the idea
of making a great record. You could feel the tension, although in a strange way all of that turned out fun because
of the wrong it was going”.

 The music they created in the studio astonished both those who knew the band and those who didn’t. Pornography
represented a whole contrast because it didn’t sound like anything else. It was a cavernous, reverberant record,
dense and unfortunate, powerful in the resonant sound of the drums, and it contained what may be the most
depressing verse in rock: “It doesn’t matter if we all die”, mourned Smith on “One Hundred Years”. And the rest
of the album was not a paragon of happiness either; the lyrics overflowed acid, fragmentary images: birds falling
from the sky flies just squashed, people spitting all kind of objects. It sounded like a band threw at full speed to a
brick wall.

 After its release, Pornography became the most successful record in The Cure’s career; it reached number nine
in may 1982: a remarkable feat given its content. It surprises that at that point Smith not only considered it not
just an artistic failure, but even a commercial disaster: “I didn’t think I had made a record as good as they said.
To everyone seemed just an acceptable recording, but that was it. Very few liked us. From Faith to Pornography
we didn’t rise in the slightest. We had appeared in Top of the Pops with “A Forest”, but “The Hanging Garden”
came across with a cul-de-sac. We didn’t have airplay, and our records were not released in the U.S. We didn’t
intend to achieve that kind of success, but it was a barometer. They hated us”.

 Smith’s temper barely could stand the subsequent tour. To this must be added his deteriorate relationship with
bassist Simon Gallup. “There had been always a slight tension between us because I used to get more attention
than him”, Smith says. The tour went fiercely through Europe, until tensions finally erupted in a certain Strasburg
club. “I was chatting with people of the group who would open when suddenly a whole scandal unleashed in the bar”
, remembers Laurence Tolhurst. “For some reason, Robert and Simon had became involved in a fight, and then
they disappeared. I thought that was the end of the band”. Back in England, Smith spent a month camping at Lake
District: “in order to clean myself up, I just drank beer”, and reconsider his options. He had decided to please
Steve Severin and join The Banshees, at that time far more popular than The Cure, but he had also wrote some
new songs. Smith then saw himself confronted with the election of satisfying his need of playing “serious music”
as a guitarist for The Banshees, or lead a new Cure, with a orientation to pop, that, according to him, had made
him more pragmatic. After ending the sessions for Hyena, Smith and Severin decided to embark in another
project, a psychedelic record with vocalist Jeanette Landray, under the name The Glove, releasing Blue Sunshine.
The sessions were a paradise of excess, even for Cure parameters. “It was a great time”, Smith remembers. Acid
made me feel so connected with Severin. We liked to take walks around London, immerse in a cartoon world like
Yellow Submarine. They were good times, because all the negative vibe I purged it with Pornography. When you
have got acid with someone you really like it could be a lot, but a lot comic.

 While Smith was expanding his conscience, The Cure had became a successful group almost by accident. “I don’t
remember the Pornography sessions to had been problematic in any way, never raised violent discussions. Robert
said they were looking for a bass player and I was playing bass since I was fourteen. I said to him that I’d try,
even if it was risky. I think my ego swelled by having in mind the possibility to play in a rock band that already
enjoyed of a whole legion of fans”, Phil Thornalley says.

 Robert Smith’s image had gone through a kind of revision. The bleeding eyes were gone. In its place it established
the style that eventually would beget a thousand of plagiarists of sixth category: a tangle of stiff hair and the bad
applied lipstick. Steve Severin hurries in pointing at the similarity between Smith and Sioux, as if the former
wasn’t no more than a male version of the latter: “Robert had been hopelessly influenced by Siouxsie. You just
have to look at his image before and after his journey with The Banshees to realize of it. I have my own version
about where his lipstick came from. Sometime we went to this place called Legends. We added opium or LSD to
our mix of drinks and moments after, Robert borrowed Siouxsie’s lipstick; then he stood up to go to the bathroom
and when he came back he had that characteristic stain. And it was like that for ever and ever”.

The subsequent tour through England ended up in a very optimistic note, documented in the live album, Concert.
However, when the group arrived at the continent the atmosphere transformed. Thornalley was the first in quitting
the band: “I don’t like very much doing tours, but I liked the experience. Similar lechery it’s none of my business.
I’m the kind of person who can’t stop drinking, for example. I was in the wrong group, definitely”. But his departure
was eclipsed by the erratic behavior of Andy Anderson. With him, things got from bad to worse. “People used to
tell us: ‘You should recruit Andy, he’s an excellent drummer’, but nobody warned us about if he spent too much
time on tour he was prone to go insane”, Tolhurst says. People who had worked with him in the past asked us: ‘Is
he crazy already? Yes, thank you very much”.

 With Boris Williams on drums, Porl Thompson on guitar and keyboards and the return of Simon Gallup, The Cure
started to work on their seventh album. The instructions were that it had to be so different to The Top as Let’s Go
to Bed” had been to Pornography. “When we recorded The Head on the Door I realized instinctively that it was
meant to be very popular”, Smith says. “The sound was vibrant, the group was great. It all turned out so simple,
the recording sessions, it all came out in the first takes. It was a pleasure working on that record, so I figured it
out as a new start”.

“I wanted us to became more conspicuous, I was looking for a larger audience. It had nothing to do with being
known; I wanted that many people listened to us. I thought we were in risk of disappearing. I suppose I liked the
taste of glamour, I wanted to make a brilliant album, like the old Beatles records; something so vivid that resulted
impossible not to listen to, not to play it on the radio”. His instinct proved no wrong. Released in the summer of
1985, The Head on the Door was the album that catapulted The Cure to the top of commercial success. It made
them the alternative band par excellence: accessible enough to take over radio airplay and appear in the cover
magazines.

 Tolhurst had became completely a problem. “He became alcoholic. I was an ingenuous angel compared to Lol”,
Smith says. “I wasn’t paying enough attention to decide what the problem was. I just thought, “well, I think it’s
better to keep on drinking”, Tolhurst says, who has not taken a drop since the early nineties. Tolhurst was thrown
out in 1990. Soon afterwards he sued Smith with the intention of having a bigger part of the royalties. Most of the
spectators agree in that the battle was violent. Tolhurst lost the case. After a mutual, intense gossip the pair got
reconciled in California, where now Tolhurst lives, playing with a new band, Levinhurst.

 Robert Smith, now 43 [?] years old, gives his beer a last drink and offers us a thought as conclusion. Opposite to
appearances, says, there’s no a big difference between the man he’s today and that 21 year old boy who sometime
attacked the members of his band onstage at the Ancienne Belgique. “I still get irritated by the same things I got
irritated when I was 21. It’s just that I don’t let them to ruin my life anymore. You would be really an idiot if you’re
more than 40 and you still keep behaving in the same way. Or you could be dead. If I tried to live my life the way I
lived in 1982 or 1983, I would end up killing myself”. He stops, as if he was considering the implicit wisdom in his
words. Then he just let go a few laughter. “Even so, you will die, soon or later. And, you know something? what
difference does it make if we all die”.

(This article appeared in the May 2004 issue of the Mexican edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Alexis Petridis wrote the article for Planet Syndication, so it was translated to spanish by Rolling Stone again, and I translated it back to english.)