by Jeff Apter
The Cure might have kept their tickets reasonably priced (somewhere between $18 and $20), but that didn’t stop the cash from pouring in. The opening night in New Jersey grossed a handy $966,189; two nights later they drew a house-filling 16,500 to Landover, Maryland, which deposited a further $321,750 in The Cure coffers. A sell-out in Philadelphia at the 15,000-plus Spectrum grossed more than $250,000, while two shows in Chicago at the end of August brought in almost $500,000 more. Their September 9 show at the 13,000 capacity Oakland Coliseum was another sell-out; The Cure then filled the 20,000 seat Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, the 12,000 capacity San Diego Sports Arena and The Summit in Houston, where they pulled 13,185 punters and a cheeky $250,000. The biggest money-spinner of the tour, however, was their September 8 gig at LA’s Dodger Stadium. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house – and the night grossed a useful $1.25 million, which no doubt helped to line the coffers of the Robert Smith retirement fund. Of the 14 shows of the Prayer Tour where box office figures are available, The Cure grossed almost $6 million, drawing upwards of 270,000 punters. It was a very good year.
Behind the scenes, however, the mood wasn’t so flash. While the epic sprawls of Disintegration were ideal for the cavernous US stadiums and concrete bunkers they were filling, the band’s mood fluctuated on stage. After the tour, the biggest of The Cure’s life, Smith would play various bootlegs of the shows, amazed at the many faces of The Cure on stage.
“Some of the nights we played were kinda really emotional,” he said. “I was hysterical. I was tearing my hair out at the end of the tour. It was just a difficult tour. There was a lot of shit going on backstage.”
That shit included the requisite recreational drugs that go hand-in-nostril with a band playing at this platinum level. For Smith, this only added to his already rapidly growing sense of self-worth, which was an intriguing twist for a man who once sang “it doesn’t matter if we all die” – and believed it. Smith was even starting to indulge in rock-star like purchases: while in New Orleans, he picked up what he would describe as a “Red Indian invisible shirt with herb pouches all over it”. UK Customs held onto the shirt for seven months, trying to work out what was in the pouches, which hadn’t been opened in 200 years. Smith wore it exactly once before retiring it to the back of the wardrobe.
“It didn’t seem like me,” Smith said afterwards, reflecting on his on-tour mindset, “but that was part of the drugs as well. I was living two really different lives on the Prayer Tour. I was like really nasty. [And] if one person decides to act in a certain way, [then] everyone else is kinda really fucked.”
To put additional stress on an already fractured relationship with all those around him, Smith would remind any journalist who felt like asking that this was their final tour. There was no question about it, at least to Robert Smith. The Cure was never meant to get this famous. He’d had enough. He just wanted to disappear in his backyard at Bognor Regis with Mary and his telescope and his father’s home brew (and, of course, his handsome bank balance). But there was also one unanswered question: just how big could The Cure go?
Smith knew that there were external influences dictating the future of The Cure, including Fiction and Chris Parry. “You’ve got people like Bill [Parry] saying, ‘Oh, you’re at your peak, you sell more records, you’ve got to play for more people, you can only get better and get bigger.’ But all the bases are the same. It’s like, ‘You can make a lot of money.’”
What Smith needed, once the band returned to the UK after 24 sell-out North American dates, was a new sensation. He was sick of the recording/promo/touring grind; he was keen to break the cycle. The idea he came up with, which would be known as Mixed Up, was probably the most misunderstood and maligned of his life.
But even before Mixed Up appeared, The Cure had a lively 1990, especially so for a band that was supposedly in hibernation. In February, ‘Lullaby’ was given the gong for Best Music Video of 1989 at the annual Brits. The award was well justified: the clip, where a bedridden Smith is oh so slowly digested by a gargantuan arachnid, while his cobweb-covered bandmates looked (and played) on, was a full-blown Gothic nightmare, quite possibly Tim Pope’s finest work with the band. The £80,000 clip – “they’re getting a feature film production ’ere,” Pope said from the set – was shot in a south London warehouse. The “spider” was actually a large, furry orifice that, according to a Q report, was “full of some sticky gunk that looks and smells like Airfix glue”. A trussed-up Smith, once again suffering for his art, was suspended from the ceiling and repeatedly lowered into the sticky, stinky black hole.
Entreat was the next reminder that The Cure was only sleeping. Comprising live takes on ‘Fascination Street’, ‘Pictures Of You’, ‘Prayers For Rain’ and various other tracks, culled from their Wembley shows of the previous summer, it was offered as a limited-edition freebie by HMV, on the proviso that the dedicated Cure fan also bought two albums from their back catalogue. Smith had originally planned Entreat as a promo-only album for Cure diehards in France; he was understandably pissed off when fans started moaning about the need to buy older albums to grab a memento of their most recent shows. Smith eventually intervened, but it wasn’t until 1991 that the album was readily available in the stores.
As Smith did his best to soothe the savage Cure fan, a third Disintegration single, ‘Pictures Of You’, started the climb to number 24 on the UK charts at the end of March, which said a lot about the staying power of an album released 10 months earlier. It was a sign that despite a barrage of Cure product over the past three or four years, for some it was simply never enough. Already Smith was having second thoughts about killing off the band. When they were asked to headline Glastonbury for a second time, he didn’t need a lot of enticement to agree. Pushed for a comment, Smith insisted that he’d only said that the band would never tour again. Simon Gallup was more direct. “The old bastard just wanted to do it again,” he told the press.
In a move that would foreshadow a lot of Cure activity over the next decade, Smith and band hired a country mansion, the one-time home of actor Dirk Bogarde, to knock a set into shape for this one-off show. But again there were rumblings in Camp Cure – Roger O’Donnell, whose soaring soundscapes had been so crucial to Disintegration – had quit for a solo career. The band’s official line was that the recently recruited keyboardist had fallen out with Williams and Gallup to the point where “they couldn’t work together” (not until 1993, anyway, when O’Donnell rejoined).
His replacement was loyal Cure roadie Perry (“Teddy”) Bamonte, a move that had all the logic of shifting Lol Tolhurst from drums to keys eight years earlier, because Bamonte was a guitar tech. Bamonte, who’d attended St Nicholas School with future Depeche Mode mainman Martin Gore, had actually been discouraged from playing guitar at school, especially when he tried to play left-handed. “Consequently I never started playing guitar until I was 17,” he told me via e-mail.
A big fan of Glam heroes Bowie and Bolan, and guitar wizard Jeff Beck, Bamonte served his musical apprenticeship in long-forgotten outfits such as Anorexic Dread, The School Bullies and Film Noir. There was a reason for their anonymity, he told me. “All these bands were rubbish. I played with them all so I could get on stage and make a noise. There was no direction, no real spark of potential.” Anorexic Dread did actually get signed, but based “mainly on our looks,” said Bamonte. “Think Virgin Prunes meets The Lord Of The Flies.”
Via his brother Daryl (then a Depeche Mode roadie, now The Cure’s manager), Bamonte scored a roadie gig with The Cure in 1984, gladly leaving his latest band. “The pay was better,” he said, “and I got to watch one of my favourite bands every night.”
“I never saw a possibility to join The Cure,” Bamonte continued, “there was never a shortlist, because nobody intended leaving.” During the Kiss Me sessions at Miraval, Smith’s sister Janet took the time to teach Bamonte keyboards, hence his recruitment. “With the patience of a saint, she spent a month
teaching me the rudiments of playing piano. Before this, I knew nothing.” But once again his recruitment was as much a recognition of his dedicated services as a long-term Cure insider as it was a nod to his musical brilliance. It was similar to the recruitment of Gallup back in 1980: Smith was as keen as ever to surround himself with loyal friends, even if Bamonte, as he admitted, was “not a serious drinker – and I don’t support any football team.”
“We could have hired a professional to take his place,” figured Smith, “but why not use someone who knows all the songs?” Bamonte explained how his roadie role with The Cure extended way beyond broken strings and mid-gig tuning. “My transition to band member was easy, because I was friends with everyone already and spent all my time with them. It was pretty seamless.”
The next few months didn’t just typify the year of The Cure 1991, but pretty much their entire Nineties: for every highlight there were several backward steps. Bamonte made his debut in Paris, at The Cure’s annual Bastille Day show.
“I spent the day watching them construct the stage,” he recalled, when we spoke, “thinking how it must have looked the same for prisoners seeing the guillotine being built. It [the show] lasted about an hour and a half, but it felt to me like 20 minutes, a daze of noise and light and black and white keys.”
The Cure’s headlining set at Glastonbury, which was followed by eight European festival dates, was well received, but Smith felt that the event was badly organised. (“I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” as he looked out over the huge crowd.)
Just prior to Glastonbury, the new Cure had spent time recording a planned EP with producer/remixer Mark Saunders (whose CV would go on to include Erasure, Lisa Stansfield and Tricky). Although the sessions were a mess, the hiring of Saunders was a very clear statement by Smith and the band that they hadn’t been totally shut off from the outside world. The acid house movement had broken out all over England, having been transplanted from Chicago by such ground-breakers as Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P. Orridge, who’d frequented Chicago’s clubs in the late Eighties. Mixed with the relatively new drug MDMA (street name, Ecstasy), the movement attempted to find some common ground between guitars, psychedelia and groove, and had led to such era-defining records as A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ and 808 State’s Newbuild. The Happy Mondays’ Bummed soon followed – Smith was a fan, calling their sound “brilliant” – as did The Stone Roses’ self-titled debut from 1989 and the monumental Screamadelica from Primal Scream. The cultural shift even inspired Irvine (Trainspotting) Welsh to write a book, imaginatively titled Acid House. Acid house also spawned such derivatives as “baggy”, which seemed to be as much about wearing embarrassingly flared strides as it was the loved-up, white-man’s-funk that was being delivered by such bands as Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets.
Smith had acknowledged the new sound of the UK, the so-called Summer of Love, if only to denounce it. “It all seems dreadfully contrived, what goes on in London,” he told the Chicago Tribune’s Tom Popson. “I think it’s all to do with T-shirt sales more than music.”
His mood soon changed, especially in the light of the sessions with Saunders, which were a mess. “We were actually doing a lot of electronic stuff,” Smith said, “and I thought now would be the time for us to really get to grips with it, whether or not it worked.”
The only song that survived the Saunders sessions, ‘Never Enough’, was a loose-limbed, positively filthy guitar workout with a funky undercurrent, and it became The Cure’s first new piece of music for the Nineties, making it to number 13 in the UK chart by late September. The Pope video, where much of the band was squeezed into a box for the first time since ‘Close To Me’, featured Chris Parry in his first on-screen cameo since The Great Rock & Roll Swindle. He can be spotted at the opening of the clip, in the guise of a freak master. It was clearly a case of art almost imitating life.*
Intrigued by the possibilities of the dance remix, which could effectively breathe new life into old songs, Smith started commissioning old songs, with vague plans of a Cure remix album. DJ/remixer Paul Oakenfold, a veteran of the Ibiza rave scene, was offered ‘Close To Me’. ‘The Walk’, which had to be re-recorded (the original tape had been accidentally scrubbed), was given to Mark Saunders, as was ‘A Forest’. William Orbit worked on ‘Inbetween Days’, while Bryan “Chuck” New was handed ‘Pictures Of You’. Mixed Up started to take some tangible shape in the last few months of 1990, as Smith rebooted The Cure for the final decade of the millennium.
Smith, reasonably enough, defended the expected accusation of bandwagon-jumping. “We’ve had dance stuff done since 1982, and it was really only Depeche Mode and New Order from that same period who were doing dance. We’ve never been perceived as very fashionable or contemporary or cool, which is fine with me because it means we can do stuff and disregard what we’re supposed to be doing. [And] if there was a bandwagon to jump on, it left a long time ago.”
If anything, Smith and The Cure were slightly ahead of the pack. By the end of the decade, remixes were as commonplace as big-budget videos and all-mod-cons tour buses for everyone from U2 to Linkin Park, while such hip-hoppers as Sean “Puffy” Combs would try to prop up their dodgy reputations by declaring that they invented the remix. Yet The Cure’s Mixed Up, despite a Top 10 chart debut in mid-November, slipped quickly out of the charts, having left Cure fans more confused than chilled. Robert Smith realised that in order to stay gold, The Cure would have to think more about guitars and less about groove.
The Cure’s 1991 started in an even more low-key manner than 1990. There were a few moments of action – a “secret” gig in January at London’s Town And Country 2, where they were billed not-so-secretly as Five Imaginary Boys, and another Brit award in February, this time for Band of the Year.
Presenter Roger Daltrey was clearly thrilled that a “real band”, rather than another cookie-cutter pop act, had won the gong, making a caustic aside that it was a relief to hand the Brit over to humans and “not a drum machine”. Robert Smith, typically, wasn’t so impressed by the night. “It’s a bunch of idiots,” he stated at the after-show party at the Grosvenor Hotel. “And also the votes are really corrupt. It’s just a fucking travesty, because I thought we were the best band the year before as well.” Smith was of the opinion that the Brits’ organisers had roped in The Cure to add credibility to the awards. (Other winners on the night included the soon-to-be-maligned Betty Boo, plus MC Hammer and Lisa Stansfield, so it was hardly a banner year in music.) Clearly incensed, and without the help of a backing track, unlike most of the other performers on the night, The Cure ripped up ‘Never Enough’ and then got rip-roaring drunk.
But the Brits debacle was nothing compared with the foul wind that was starting to blow in Smith’s direction by mid-1991. Lol Tolhurst may have moved on from The Cure, first marrying Lydia, his girlfriend of several years (his son Grey was born soon after), and then forming a new act, Presence, with erstwhile Cure roadie Gary Biddles. But he was still torn up about his dismissal from the band. He also felt that he hadn’t been fully compensated for his 12 years with The Cure.
In August, it was reported in Select magazine that Tolhurst was suing the band, demanding money he felt he was owed. Although other reports hinted at any number of core reasons for Tolhurst’s suit – even ownership of The Cure name was mentioned, as was the misuse of royalties owed to him which were redirected back into the band’s touring fund – the key factor for his lawsuit was this: Tolhurst’s lawyers believed that the band’s renegotiated deal with Fiction and Polydor, signed in December 1986, gave both Smith and Chris Parry an unreasonable slice of The Cure’s recording profits. Tolhurst had signed the contract, but was now insisting that he had done so without receiving proper advice and information about the new deal. He said that he’d relied on Smith to talk him through the contract – and now he very clearly regretted that. (Anybody who played on a Cure album post 1986 would receive songwriting credits and performance “points”,
rather than a wage or flat fee. Given that by the end of the Eighties The Cure had sold eight million albums worldwide, if anything, it was an especially generous deal on Smith’s part. Perry Bamonte, for one, confirmed this. “All band members receive what I consider to be a very generous cut of the musical royalties for every album,” he told me. “Robert is both shrewd and fair in this regard.”)
“The court case – I had a lot of resentment,” Tolhurst explained to me. “At the time, I don’t know, I felt ill-treated.
“I went to see [a lawyer] in London … [to] see if I was contractually free to sign a new contract for Presence. He said, ‘You are, but did you notice that in your 1986 contract you went from being a partner to basically a shareholder – and the partnership may not have been properly dissolved? Perhaps we should write to them.’ I agreed. Which we did and that started the next four years off.
“I felt that at least I could explain to people and be vindicated in what I felt. I was upset at Parry more than Robert or anybody else.”
Tolhurst admitted [in court] his serious drinking problems and that it had affected his creative role within the band. He documented how his boozing had made him the lowest man on The Cure totem pole.
“I was drinking very heavily,” Tolhurst said, “and was the butt of everyone’s jokes and aggression. As a result of the continuous abuse and criticism, I became very ill and lost over a stone in weight.”
He also disclosed, in very frank detail, the “vicious circle” of drinking, how he drank to gain confidence but then found himself losing the right stuff to perform. This, inevitably, led to Tolhurst being abused by the rest of The Cure. “The other members of the band would constantly play practical jokes on me,” he revealed. “As the days wore on these jokes became more and more malicious.” (A cursory glance at any of The Cure’s videos from the Kiss Me LP onwards will show how Tolhurst had been reduced to band stooge. His situation was far worse away from Tim Pope’s camera.)