by Jeff Apter
Francombe witnessed the moment where Gallup suffered his breakdown. “I can see the show,” he told me, “but I can’t remember which [city]. He was suddenly screaming, and then crying, and Brian Adset was comforting him. I don’t think he cared about the feeling ill side of things; he just wanted to go home.”
Suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency, Gallup was given a Vitamin C shot before playing a show in Milano on October 31, “and did the show in a bad mood”, as Francombe told me. And that was it – Gallup was flown home the next day. His departure changed the entire mood of the tour. “It was pretty crap until Simon came back,” said Francombe.
Smith saw Gallup’s breakdown coming, but felt powerless to stop his long-time friend and tightest Cure ally from falling apart. “It’s really difficult,” he said, “when there is someone that you love a lot and you try to make them do something, you try to make them see what they’re doing is wrong, and they pay no attention to you. [But] I shouldn’t have waited for Simon to be so bad that he had to be flown home to hospital.”
Stand-in bassist Robert Suave was brought in for Gallup, but by then the steam had gone out of the Wish Tour. By November, as the roadshow finally started to wind down, Smith was looking forward to another extended break. “[The tour] seems much longer than six or seven months,” he admitted. “It seems like about 20.” What Smith couldn’t have predicted is that it’d be another four years before The Cure went out on a full-blown, coast-to-coast tour again, and by that time, the Britpop revolution – aka Cool Britannia – had rendered them pretty much obsolete.
Despite his own wariness about fatherhood – Smith was convinced, and probably with some justification, that he wasn’t the most responsible man on the planet – by the early Nineties he was a devoted uncle, with many of his 20-plus nephews and nieces frequently staying with him and Mary in Bognor Regis. Smith, a man for whom money was not in any great shortage, would even grab a random selection of younger Smiths and whisk them off to Euro Disney for the weekend, on a whim. This surrogate parent role would consume increasingly large chunks of his time during the Nineties, as would such grounding, not-very-rock’n’roll chores as gardening. Upon returning from the final Wish show, in Dublin on December 3, that’s exactly what Smith did: he got a little dirt on his hands.
“I went into the garden and pulled out two years’ worth of weeds,” he reported. “I really enjoyed it.” Smith was even slowly adjusting to The Cure nuts who’d set up camp just outside his home. Occasionally he’d step outside to speak to them, but usually he just let them be. Fanaticism took on a different perspective in England; Smith knew it was unlikely that any of the nutters in his front garden was likely to do him or Mary serious harm. This wasn’t Hollywood.
Smith’s plans for the next couple of years – the band would play one show in 1993 and none at all in 1994 – were very straightforward: he wanted to continue tinkering with his never-ending solo record. And he also planned to guide the recently filmed Show to completion. This consumed most of his time between January and April 1993, but he wasn’t thrilled by what he saw on the screen.
“When the director’s cut came back it was awful,” said Smith. “I was really disappointed and I couldn’t believe someone could make us look that boring and bad on stage.” By the time the film was ready for its premiere, Smith was happier with the celluloid Cure, so much so that he showed up at the screening. “I think it’s good,” he finally admitted, before adding, “but I would say that anyway.”
The Cure’s latest large-screen indulgence was really only a diversion for their leader. The Tolhurst court case cast a large, dark shadow over almost everything The Cure did in the mid-Nineties. Smith’s mood towards his former Cure comrade and school friend fluctuated: Smith had actually checked out Tolhurst’s new band, Presence, in 1991, several months after Tolhurst had written to him threatening legal action. Smith felt Presence were “dull, boring. Lol’s at the front pretending to play keyboards and he didn’t play anything all night. Nothing’s changed.” But Smith’s mere presence at the gig suggested he was up for a little peacemaking. Things changed quickly enough, though. By the time of the Wish Tour, Smith and band were taking aim at a Lol Tolhurst dartboard, the gift of a Cure associate. When asked about the pending lawsuit, Smith was blunt: “I can’t fucking wait for the court case,” he whooped.
According to Perry Bamonte, the band’s attitude towards the Tolhurst case was to laugh it off. “We spoke about Lol a lot during the case, lots of silly jokes. I guess we were really pissed off about the whole deal so joking was a good safety valve. It was a pretty surreal and stupid affair and with hindsight I feel sorry for Lol.” Bamonte, along with the rest of the band, were asked to testify. “But I didn’t have a lot to offer.”
Smith, however, was a slightly rattled man, especially as more and more correspondence bounced between their lawyers. “At the time,” said Smith, “I tried to ignore it, but I was getting letters on a regular basis, because I didn’t really want to go to court because I knew it would be a waste of time and money. [It] distracted me quite a lot. I got really fed up with them.” For the first time since The Cure formed in the Seventies, Smith had thoughts of killing off the band for reasons other than road weariness or fatigue. If this is what success reduced you to, he’d had a gutful.
Smith was spending more and more time in London in heavy discussions with his legal crew; the case was due to be heard in the High Court by early 1994. Songwriting was the last thing on his mind. Instead, he was poring over old Cure contracts and thousands of other documents. Smith knew that if he lost – which was unlikely – he might even lose the rights to The Cure’s name. “Had Lol won,” Smith realised, “it would have meant a lot.”
The case of Tolhurst v. Smith was finally dragged through the courts in February and March, 1994. Just before the trial began, Chris Parry called Tolhurst and asked him to reconsider. This only made Tolhurst more determined to proceed. “The way I was thinking was that if they’re willing to do that there must be something they’re hiding – and we’re going to go on with it,” Tolhurst said.
On September 16, 1994 a decision was handed down, and Tolhurst had lost. Mr Justice Chadwick ruled that the latest Fiction deal was not unfair, which left Tolhurst to deal with a legal bill estimated at more than one million dollars, a figure he confirmed when I spoke with him.
The judge rejected claims that the band’s 1986 deal, which gave Tolhurst some 2 per cent of gross sales, was signed under undue influence, and said Tolhurst was lucky to get that much because he was only being kept on because he was a founding member of the group.
Tolhurst was by that time wealthy enough to handle the financial blow, but only just. “Up to that point I was pretty wealthy, I had a nice house, money in the bank,” he said to me. “But I got divorced at the same time, because it’s not easy to have a relationship with someone who’s been on that self-destructive bent. The judge told me that 75 per cent of my income would go directly to court costs and that I would receive 25 per cent of my royalties, which was my only source of income. I was also paying tax on that. It took me to last year [2003] to clear everything and be a normal person again. Financially it was gigantic.
“My honest take on it now is that none of the good things that have happened since may not have happened. I may have ended up as the sad figure in the local pub at Devon; I would have become everything I didn’t want to be in the first place. But out of the pain has come forth joy.
“I could have done without losing a million dollars, but it’s only money. Sixteen years ago I was quite wealthy and very miserable, now I’m not so wealthy and very happy.”
When the decision was handed down, Tolhurst had had enough of England. In late 1994 he shifted base to Los Angeles and hasn’t returned since. As for Smith, it took him some time to recover fully from the drawn-out ordeal. “Lol … had taken away more than a year of my time,” said Smith. “Our argument puts a shadow over my life.” Gradually, hostilities wou
ld cease between the pair – they even exchanged letters not too long after the court case was finally settled. “Ultimately, he’s the person I’ve known the longest in my life,” Tolhurst said soon afterwards. “Things between us are never going to be the way they were before, but our friendship is still there, though it has evolved.”
When Smith and Tolhurst did eventually reconcile, Tolhurst had a confession to make. “I told him that my motivation for the case was my resentment and that wasn’t right. I know now that it wasn’t right. It was a Catch 22 – there was no way Robert could have told me, ‘I love you but get right and come back, or whatever’ – it couldn’t have worked. I realise that now.”
Robert Smith found the time to revisit Giants Stadium in New Jersey during 1994, but it wasn’t to headline a show in front of screaming Cure fans. Not quite. Along with Perry Bamonte’s brother Daryl, producer Alan Wilder, and Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore and Dave Gahan, Smith had far more pressing concerns on June 18. He was in town to check out the Ireland versus Italy first-round clash of the 1994 FIFA World Cup.* It was in this very Smith-friendly environment – beer and football being Cure staples – that the Wild Mood Swings album started to take shape. During their far-ranging conversation, as the East Coast heat beat down on these big-haired, pale-faced football fans, Smith mentioned that he was on the lookout for a new producer for their next record. His relationship with Dave Allen, which spanned such huge successes as Kiss Me and Disintegration, had run its natural course. The uncomfortable, somewhat unfulfilling sessions for Wish were proof of that. When the name Steve Lyon was raised, everyone there agreed that he could be the guy to solve The Cure production conundrum.
Up to that point, Steve Lyon had been very much Depeche Mode’s man. As much an engineer as a record producer – exactly the kind of sonic sidekick Smith preferred – Lyon had worked on several Mode albums: 1981’s Speak And Spell, 1982’s A Broken Frame, Construction Time Again (1983) and People Are People from 1984. Just like Phil Thornalley before him, Lyon was not a dedicated Cure fan, as he told me when we spoke in late 2004. “I wasn’t an avid follower of everything they’d done. I’d seen Robert play with the Banshees and The Cure, at the end of the punk time. I think I owned a couple of records.”
Via Ita Martin, the long-time Fiction Records staffer, a meeting was organised between Smith and Lyon in a London pub. They spoke for a couple of hours. Several pints in, Lyon mentioned his indifferent take on the band, but Smith didn’t see that as a potential problem. “Completely the opposite,” Lyon related to me. “He said, ‘I want a fresh approach and someone who’s not intimidated by my past.’” Initially, Lyon was offered the gig of engineering the album, because Smith was adamant that he was going to produce. “He was fed up with the way the last record, Wish, had gone,” Lyon said, “even though it had done very well. He had a lot of frustrations.”
Smith’s frustrations extended beyond the million-selling success of Wish. Though he was about to reclaim the name of The Cure – the Tolhurst decision was still a few months away – he’d lost much of the band in the process. During this extended break, which had engulfed 1993 and half of 1994, The Cure had fallen apart. Smith’s brother-in-law, Porl Thompson (who, by now, had four children with Smith’s sister Janet), had been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by no lesser personages than Jimmy Page and Robert Plant who needed an extra guitarist for their touring band. A serious Led Zeppelin devotee, Thompson knew he couldn’t pass up the offer.* Drummer Boris Williams had also moved on, principally to work in The Piggle, a group formed by his girlfriend Caroline Crawley. What had started out as a temporary spot for the unstable Andy Anderson had become an almost decade-long residency for Williams in The Cure.
Also missing from The Cure fold circa 1994 was Simon Gallup. Even though the bassman had returned, post-meltdown, to complete the Wish Tour, he was still in a bad way when Smith tried to reassemble the band for this new LP. According to Lyon, “Simon had been in and out of the band; he had a lot of personal problems at the time.” Lyon declined to comment further, but it was relatively well known that Gallup’s drinking problems added to his dodgy emotional and physical state.† So when serious discussions began about their next album, The Cure was a gang of two: Smith and relatively new recruit Perry Bamonte. Smith may have been a dab hand at doubling up on his much-loved six-string bass, but The Cure was shy of a drummer, a keyboardist and a lead guitarist. Exactly what kind of an album could they make?
As Lyon related to me, “There were long discussions about how we were going to do this – because they didn’t have a band.” What Smith did have was some songs, or at least the fragments of roughly 20 tunes-under-development. During one of their pre-recording meetings, Smith played these demos to Lyon, but he found them very sketchy. “The demos didn’t have structure, really,” said Lyon, “no vocals, no top melody line – and I had no idea where the chorus, bridge and middle eight would go. I kind of guessed.”
Smith had obviously taken a liking to working in stately country manors, because he was insistent about revisiting the idea for Wild Mood Swings. Kiss Me, Wish and Disintegration had been recorded outside of the usual studio environment, and now Smith was intent on getting the mix of location and mood just right. It helped that Steve Lyon had already recorded with Depeche Mode in a rural setting. “He [Smith] was interested in my experience with that,” Lyon said to me.
By late 1994, Simon Gallup had recovered sufficiently to rejoin. Smith now told Lyon that he and Bamonte would handle the guitar parts, Gallup would play bass and they’d hire some session drummers to keep time. The band was as ready as it could ever be, although Bamonte realised how tough it would be replacing the best player in The Cure’s long history. “Moving from keyboards to guitar was actually quite hard,” he confessed, “because although guitar was my first instrument, I found it far more personal and expressive to play than, say, a synthesizer. I felt more exposed, naked. And remember, I was filling Porl Thompson’s shoes – quite a challenge for an accomplished musician, let alone an amateur like myself.”
As far as locations go, The Cure couldn’t have found a better hideaway than St Catherine’s Court, which was located near Bath. Just like Branson Manor, it was the kind of house to get lost in – quite literally. With its nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, six reception rooms, ballroom and Elizabethan dining room, the home was owned by no less a star than Jane Seymour, aka Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. And this was a spread with some history; its Benedictine origins dated back to somewhere around AD 950. As the lady of the house proudly proclaims in the St Catherine’s Court website, “This is a house where you can be very grand for dinner or muck about in jeans and take hikes.” The men of The Cure weren’t exactly the hiking types, but they did find the pool and the tennis court (and their scalextric set) very much to their liking. But St Catherine’s, unlike Hook End or the Branson Manor, wasn’t a working studio, so Smith, Bamonte and the band’s crew spent a week setting up in early November, Smith bringing in a lot of his home equipment, which included mics, a small sound desk, preamps and computer gear. They were soon joined by Lyon and Gallup.
As Lyon told me, there wasn’t a great deal of renovation required to turn Seymour’s stately home into a recording studio, apart from setting up the main desk in the library. As for the ballroom, it was tailor-made for a rock’n’roll band. “It was a massive ballroom,” Lyon said, “at least 100 square metres, which was fantastic – and very conducive to late-night jams.” (Lyon recorded many of these all-nighters; some even made it to Wild Mood Swings.) Smith and his wife Mary, who drifted in and out of the sessions, chose the bedroom directly above the library as their HQ.
Unlike most Cure albums – Pornography and Disintegration, especially – this was a record without a precise outline. This made it difficult for Lyon to approach Mood Swings like a typical production. “There wasn’t a grand plan,” he said, “it was just, ‘Well, we have these songs, let’s work on them and see what comes out.’ [Whereas] I’m more o
f a straight-ahead, practical person. It became evident in its infancy – they didn’t have a band, Robert didn’t know what the record should sound like and I think that those elements led to the fact that it was a very diverse record.
“There were moments I found incredibly frustrating but those were vastly outnumbered by the pleasurable moments I had being around the guys, working on songs and living in the house. I learned a lot; I’ve never worked with someone who works in the way Robert does. Everything flows around him, and that’s the way it is. Anyone who joined the band would be naïve to think that’s not the way it is.”
Smith was every bit the tinkerer – Lyon would mistakenly think that a song was finished only to find Smith spending hours rearranging it. And it didn’t help their forward progress, in those pre-Protools days, that much of their recording time was devoted to backing up their finished work. This, of course, didn’t stop machines from either breaking down or chewing up tapes (they did both during the Wild Mood Swings sessions).
Towards the end of 1994, Roger O’Donnell was asked to return to The Cure. He came back to a very new line-up, not just in members, but in the band’s more relaxed attitude towards the use of computers. (“There were now computers everywhere,” marvelled O’Donnell.) At the same time, Smith was trying out drummers, who would be put through two separate auditions. During the initial try-out, the tub-thumping hopefuls would play and be filmed by the band; those invited back would actually jam with the band. Smith was still planning to use a variety of drummers on the album (which he ultimately did), but he also knew that some lucrative European summer festival dates were in the offing. What The Cure really needed was a permanent sticks man.
Some well-regarded players put up their hand, including Mark Price from Goth popsters All About Eve, Louis Pavlou from The Cure’s Fiction labelmates God Machine, as well as Bob Thompson, Malcolm Scott, Martin Gilkes and Ronald Austin (Pavlou, Austin and Price would all get credits on the finished record). Another contender was Jason Cooper, who’d responded to a drummer wanted ad that The Cure placed, anonymously, in the NME. (“I bought the NME that week, fortunately,” Cooper told me via e-mail.)