by Jeff Apter
Smith, understandably, was as much incensed as he was dismayed by Tolhurst’s actions. “It’s really stupid,” he said at the time. “He’ll lose and he’ll have to pay costs and it’ll cost him more than he can hope to win. And he’s going to lose any credibility he had as regards what he did in The Cure, because it’ll all come out.”
Smith was very clearly referring to the way Tolhurst’s creative input had diminished record by record. Allegedly, when Smith dropped several thousand pounds buying Tolhurst an Emulator keyboard during his shift from drums to keys post Pornography, he hadn’t even turned the machine on three months later. Instead he’d spent the time working on a coke habit. Tolhurst denies this. “I did try and learn it,” he told me. “Back then you needed a physics degree to work out things; it had all sorts of hexadecimals and all that.
“At that point [circa The Top] I was the only person willing to investigate that kind of stuff. The band was kind of Luddite: if you couldn’t hit it or bang it, you didn’t want to play it. I wanted to try to understand that new technology. We were all interested in it but I was the only one willing to learn it.” Justin Jones, of And Also The Trees, backed this up. “I recall Lol being much more interested in keyboards than drums [when] he was switching from one to another in The Cure,” he said.
Tired of a court case that he considered completely pointless, Smith decided to retreat to the studio. By September, he and the band had finally started sessions for their next album, Wish. So taken by their pre-Glastonbury experience in Dirk Bogarde’s old digs, the band set up Camp Cure in Shipton Manor, a rambling Tudor mansion-cum-studio in the Oxfordshire countryside, owned by Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson. If the band needed a retreat from the bad vibes being stirred up by the Tolhurst court case, this was the perfect place – it was both spacious and secluded. As one writer reported from the site, “They’re surrounded by advanced plushness: mammoth antique mirrors reflect heavy velvet curtains and sumptuous Persian rugs [and there’s] a fireplace you could live in and a wooden table the size of Lord’s.”
Branson’s spread was pure olde worlde, except for one very gaudy, very modern touch: a huge trompe l’oeil mural that decorated the Manor’s atrium. This was Branson’s own Sistine Chapel of Eighties Britpop, a daily reminder to The Cure of pretty much everything they reviled in music. Whenever they walked through the atrium they’d look towards the roof and be subjected to the larger-than-life images of Boy George, Mike Oldfield, Bono, Feargal Sharkey, Jim Kerr (a particular target of Smith’s scorn over the years) and Phil Collins looking down on them. Oddly, Branson’s children also featured in the mural.
The band was holed up in the manor that Virgin built for several months, but it didn’t take that long for them to become involved in a little creative redecorating. Perry Bamonte, in particular, proved to be quite the artist-in-waiting. By the end of their stay, Phil Collins’ smug grin remained, but his flowing locks had been replaced by a shiny pink pate, a way more accurate representation of the early Nineties version of Mr Sussudio. Bamonte had pulled off this piece of artistic sabotage during a late-night raid on the Branson mural.
Bamonte’s artwork also extended to brutal caricatures of the group and their partners. These drawings were scattered throughout the studio, alongside Smith’s dog-eared collections of Emily Dickinson poems, pictures of Tank Girl and favourite headlines clipped, poison-pen-style, from The Sport and the News Of The World. Bamonte’s sketches also appeared on “The Merry Mad Manor Chart”, which documented the advancing mania of each of the residents of Shipton Manor during the Wish sessions. (Louise, the manor’s housekeeper, won in a canter, followed by Gallup, Bamonte, Smith, Thompson and Williams.) It was almost a repeat of the band’s high times at Miraval during the making of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, only with a few line-up changes and no vineyard at their disposal.
The band, along with regular producer Dave Allen, had also taken up pyromania while camped at Branson Manor. In fact, there were more fireworks on display outside the studio than inside: while the London demo sessions for the album had been relatively smooth, translating those to tape proved extremely difficult. Bamonte, who recalled the Wish sessions as “a wonderful time in a beautiful place”, became The Cure’s very own rocket man. He tapped into a pyrotechnic mother lode and the skies would light up night after night.
“What I actually did during our stay at the Manor,” Bamonte said, “was build relaunchable rockets – first in kit form, then building my own, increasingly larger, designs. The best ones were the night launches, where I installed lights into the nose cones that would illuminate the parachutes as The Rocket descended. OK, I’m a geek, but it was really good fun.”
And though the band didn’t surpass their wine-guzzling feats from the Miraval sessions for Kiss Me (Cure legend has it that the band polished off 150 bottles and upwards per week), there was enough booze at Shipton to inspire the band to try their hand at the secret art of fire-eating. The sessions might have been a hard slog, but the nightlife was a blast.
When not lighting up the sky (or themselves), Smith and the band was finding it hard to re-establish themselves musically. While Mixed Up had been a failed attempt at experimentation, a sideways step into the world of remixing and Acid House, The Cure was now adjusting to a more guitar-heavy line-up. Bamonte had shifted across to his more familiar role as riff man, making for a triple-guitared assault. At the same time, the so-called “shoegazing” movement had gradually eroded the impact of “baggy”. Many of the bands who’d stumbled out of Madchester in the late Eighties, including Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, weren’t making any new music – they were too busy falling apart in an orgy of dollars and drugs. Now hogging the music-press-generated spotlight were such bands as Slowdive, Ride, Lush and My Bloody Valentine, all peddling an effects-heavy, humourless (and sometimes tuneless) take on rock’n’roll.
When asked if shoegazing had any impact on Wish, Smith simply said this: “I definitely think it would have been a totally different record if we’d had the same songs but recorded them at the time of Disintegration.”
What is clear is that Wish was the last gasp of The Cure at their commercial peak. The album would debut at number one in the UK and number two in the USA, selling a million copies Stateside a month after its release. Released on Smith’s 33rd birthday, the album is leaner than Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me – it ran six songs less than their breakthrough hit of 1987 – and lacked much of the psychodrama of Disintegration. Instead, Wish was the sound of The Cure stripping back a few layers. With Roger O’Donnell out of the band, The Cure went easy on the towering synthscapes that had so dominated Disintegration. Wish’s arrangements were leaner, more guitar-reliant, even if its predominant mood was just as dark and foreboding as what had gone before.
Smith was clearly in a very literal mood because Wish opens with, erm, ‘Open’ (and ends with ‘End’). ‘Open’ was a signature Smith outpouring of mixed emotions and surly guitars that he simply described as being about “parties”. But it’s pretty easy to read the song as Smith’s reaction to The Cure’s five whirlwind years in the spotlight, especially when he sings of his despair at the PR pressure to gladhand those who might benefit his career – and the company’s record sales – when he’d clearly much rather be in bed. It was virtually an assault on the sycophants and yes-men he’d been surrounded by since Standing On The Beach went supernova in 1986. It was also a big gamble on Smith’s part, daring to taunt the very people who made him a star. But it was hardly out of character for one of the most contrary men in pop.
But Smith still understood the power of expectation – why else would he include such breezy pop gems as ‘High’? Built around a Gallup melody, it was a very traditional few minutes of love and regret, set to a near-ethereal guitar line from Porl Thompson. But there was something not quite right, not entirely convincing about the track – it was as if the Lovecat was merely staying in character, seduced by the possibility of just one more hit. (Wish, while hardly
a flop, didn’t generate a single with quite the across-all-formats potency of ‘Lullaby’ or ‘Just Like Heaven’, even though ‘Friday I’m In Love’ was quite possibly the cheeriest Smith would ever sound on record.)
Wish then took a much deeper, darker turn with ‘Apart’ and the album’s centrepiece, the windswept ‘From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea’, a deceptively simple yet no less epic song built around an insistent guitar riff and Smith’s six-verse-long emotional purge. When asked about the song’s subject matter, Smith would simply reply: “Drugs”. If ‘Deep Green Sea’s motivation was truly something that direct, then Smith had been taking some top-shelf intoxicants – what else would explain such terminally depressing lyrics that describe the prelude to love-making in a matter of fact, disheartening fashion that climaxes with dutiful surrender and not satisfaction.
Wish was a deceptive album: the return of guitars to the core of The Cure’s sound might have made for a simpler, more direct soundscape, but Smith was actually opening up even more lyrically. Unlike Disintegration, he didn’t have a dense sonic hedge to lose himself in this time around.
Of course Wish couldn’t get any bleaker – Smith may have wanted to shed a few come-lately fans with the album but he didn’t want to completely alienate everyone. Powered by the most funked-up Cure guitar sound since ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’, ‘Wendy Time’ was breezier and cheesier and probably the album’s weakest link, not quite sure if it was a pop song or some kind of funk-rock experiment.
‘Doing The Unstuck’ – with its “let’s get happy” chant – was the most vibrant Smith had sounded for years. It was the first song that the band had written while at the Manor. Smith was so taken by ‘Doing The Unstuck’, in fact, that he pinned the lyrics to the inside of the control room door, “so everyone would feel like they had to make the most of that day”. But the following track, ‘Friday I’m In Love’, would top even that for sheer good-natured exuberance. With a crisply strummed acoustic guitar and Smith in full Lovecat mode – made complete by a typically chaotic, whimsical Tim Pope video – ‘Friday’ was a sure-fire hit, even if a closer examination of the lyric hinted that its author was in the doldrums for at least six days of the week, until Friday lifted him out of his funk. (As it transpired, ‘Unstuck’ and ‘Friday’ were the two most recently completed Smith tunes on the album. Everything else had been written during the preceding two years when his mood was a little grimmer.)
‘A Letter To Elise’, one of the most darkly romantic and emotionally effective tracks Smith and the band had ever recorded, carried the obligatory literary reference, with inspiration courtesy of both Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles (which Smith had almost scored for the Royal Ballet nearly a decade earlier) and Franz Kafka’s A Letter To Felice. Smith characterised it simply as a song about “resignation”.
‘Cut’ and ‘To Wish Impossible Things’ kept the bad times rolling. The latter was another of Smith’s “relationship” songs. “In all relationships,” he said, “there’s always aching holes and that’s where the impossible wishes come into it.” Smith brought the album’s solemn mood to a new low with ‘End’. His insistent plea to fans that they’d misunderstood him was a shout-out to the band’s over-zealous followers, the acolytes who had forced Smith into an almost hermit-like existence, to simply back off. Almost 30 years earlier Smith had tuned in while his sister spun ‘Help!’, The Beatles’ very own cry of pain. Now Smith understood the downside of celebrity and fame almost as powerfully as the Fab Four.
“In one sense,” he said, “it’s me addressing myself; it’s about the persona I sometimes fall into. On another level, it’s addressed to people who expect me to know things and have answers – fans and certain individuals. It goes beyond my circumstances as a star.”
In 2004, during yet another Rolling Stone conversation, Smith admitted that he felt very isolated during the making of Wish. There were some parallels with the dark days spent recording vocals for Disintegration, with the rest of the band long gone. “[It was] like I was making the album on my own, and the others were just playing,” he said of Wish. “Some days it would be really, really great, and other days it would be really, really horrible. I felt we weren’t really doing anything different with it; I just felt we were making an album. I suppose that’s what was wrong with it. It was almost like consolidating where we were.
“We were gonna go back out and we were gonna get more fans and we were gonna play bigger places, and somehow I lost my enthusiasm. There were elements lyrically and the way I was singing that I was almost going through the motions.”
It was hardly a vote of confidence, given that yet another stint of globetrotting lay ahead for Smith, Gallup, Williams, Thompson and Bamonte. Stardom had delivered some major creature comforts for Smith and all the band, but it also meant that their lives – for at least six months of the year – didn’t really belong to them. It was no great surprise that Smith was writing songs such as ‘Open’, with its overbearing sense of entrapment, or ‘End’, where he simply requested that anyone too close should just fuck right off.
But what Smith didn’t know was that another Cure member was headed for a meltdown. Robert Smith was about to lose, at least for the short term, his closest Cure ally.
Smith and the band decided, wisely, to ease themselves gently into another year-long promotional slog for Wish. After an acoustic session with the BBC’s Mark Goodier in March, they then set out on the cringingly titled ‘Cure Party Night’, a run of 10 UK club previews (with giveaways) of Wish. Next was an 11-date club and theatre tour, which kicked off on April 21 in Bradford. By mid-May they were back on board the increasingly familiar QE2 and heading in the direction of the city that never sleeps. Whereas with their Prayer Tour they stepped off the boat in New York and virtually onto the stage of Giant’s Stadium, this time Smith and band were confronted by an MTV welcoming breakfast, followed by a meet-the-press session at the Lone Star Roadhouse. Smith grimaced, tried his best to keep his food down and his head together, and faced the media.
While ‘Friday I’m In Love’ continued its chart rise on the other side of the Atlantic, peaking at number six in June, The Cure joined forces with British moodists Cranes for the Wish Tour, which ran virtually non-stop from mid-April to early December. Both Gallup and Smith had been devotees of Cranes’ Wings Of Joy album; so much so that they opted for the band over such other contenders as My Bloody Valentine, Curve and PJ Harvey. “We were as surprised as anyone,” former Cranes’ guitarist Mark Francombe told me. Their first show together was in Pittsburgh on May 23.
Francombe has vivid memories of the tour; he found The Cure an especially welcoming headliner. After their first date at Pittsburgh, The Cure even toasted The Cranes with champagne. It turned out, surprisingly, that the big-name headliners were somewhat apprehensive about approaching their support band.
“We were summoned backstage to say hi,” Francombe recalled, “and it was very scary and awkward – and I remember Simon coming over and stammering, ‘It’s just as scary for us to meet you.’”
Ice well and truly broken, the two English groups underwent some righteous bonding during the tour, sometimes opting for a game of backstage football instead of laborious soundchecks. There was even a running battle with water pistols. “It got a bit out of hand,” Francombe said, “and was stopped by the tour manager because we were making the corridors of the venues too wet for the roadies to load out.”
During a quiet moment, Smith told Francombe that The Cure often hand-picked their support acts simply to “have some friends on the tour – they needed other musicians to hang out with.” Hang out they did – when the roadshow had a pit-stop in Universal Studios they even filmed a Cure-created episode of Star Trek, with Perry Bamonte in the role of Captain Kirk and Cure security man Brian Adset playing a Vulcan. Cranes’ singer Alison Shaw also featured. Smith’s largesse was legendary: while in Florida, when the hotel bar closed for the night, he ordered a selection of booze and invited everyon
e back to Chez Lovecat, where the party continued.
And Cure creature comforts were not neglected backstage during the Wish Tour. The Cure entourage had continued to grow, despite their partners not being with them on the road for the entire tour, although they did turn up quite frequently. (“It must have been quite often,” recalled Francombe, “because I do know them all.”) And despite the hundreds of devotees that would camp in front of hotels and await The Cure’s every movement, the one thing the headliners didn’t have was groupies – Francombe insists they were “not that kind of band”.
Francombe remembers the backstage set-up as “very cosy, with candles and curtains and so on”. Smith also had a stereo, TV and mini-bar set up. On most nights, tapes of UK football games were couriered over and Smith would slump in front of the TV, keeping up with QPR’s every game. Unlike the Prayer Tour, drugs weren’t that common. “I don’t believe that drugs played an important part at all [in the tour],” said Francombe. “But they liked a drink. Oh yes, a drink or three.”
As the tour progressed, Gallup’s typically fragile physical state started to deteriorate dangerously. He was still separated from his wife Carol and his two children, and spent most of his time in the company of his then girlfriend (and now wife) Sarah. Gallup was depressed; he was also boozing way too much and barely bothering to eat. A total physical collapse was imminent. As Robert Smith would recall, “It was obvious that Simon was getting really ill, right from the first concert. I couldn’t believe how bad he looked when we started. I thought something was going to happen, because we had a lot of long journeys.”