by Jeff Apter
Of all the hopefuls, the London-born, Bath-raised Cooper was the least seasoned. Apart from some session work, he’d played with Strangler Jean Jacques Burnell, as well as Billie Ray Martin, and had also composed music for TV and films. But what he did have going for him was this: he was a dedicated Cure fan. Cooper’s father, who worked for Virgin Records, had handed his teenage son a copy of Seventeen Seconds, “which I played extensively”, Cooper told me. Cooper had seen The Cure at Glastonbury in June 1990, but his strongest connection to the band was much more intimate. “My favourite memories are listening to Faith drinking cider,” he admitted.
At Cooper’s first audition, he played along to the demo of ‘Jupiter Crash’. When he was invited back to jam with the band they played ‘Disintegration’ and ‘From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea’. Smith was impressed, as was Steve Lyon. “Mark [Price] was a very, very good drummer but I thought that Jason would fit better into the odd marriage of people in the band at the time,” Lyon said. “Jason was a very big Cure fan. I said to Robert that I thought he would fit. I think I had a slight influence on him joining the band.” Cooper’s youthfulness didn’t do his claims any harm, either, as the rest of The Cure weren’t getting any younger.
Now that a permanent drummer was on board, Smith was about to make Lyon an offer that he would have some trouble refusing. Mood Swings’ engineer was about to be promoted to co-producer. “I was flattered,” Lyons said, “but I had to ask, ‘How long is this going to take?’” Smith requested that Lyon not take on any more work until the album was finished. In exchange, Smith would compensate him (handsomely) for any jobs he had to pass up. “Little did I know that it would take about 18 months,” Lyon said.
The album sessions were first put on hold during March; Smith then devoted the next couple of months to rehearsals for their European summer dates, which ran from June 6 until July 18. Not only was the money useful (these sessions weren’t cheap) but it was also a chance to road test some of their new songs.
When work finally resumed on Wild Mood Swings (a title that had actually been the proposed moniker for Smith’s solo record), the focus of the first four months had gone slightly askew. More recording was done at Haremere Hall in Sussex, while strings for several tracks, heard to best effect on ‘Numb’, were recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studio. A cover of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ that ended up on a 104.9 XFM compilation was pieced together at another roomy country home just outside Bath that was owned by a model railway nut. When Cooper walked into the garden, where the owner’s treasured railway set looped in and out of his rose bushes, he realised he’d visited the house as a child.
Then Smith told Lyon that he also wanted to mix the album away from the studio, which presented a whole new series of challenges. A few early mixes were attempted at St Catherine’s, but while the house that Dr Quinn built may have been ideal for late-night jams, it wasn’t conducive to fine-tuning songs. Band and gear was bumped out and re-established in Haremere Hall. It was there that co-producer Lyon got a very clear picture of Robert Smith’s wealth.
They’d been renting a Neve V-series console, a mother of a mixing desk that was roughly four metres long, two metres deep and two metres high. “It’s a massive thing,” Lyon said to me. It was also valued at £100,000. Frustrated by having to rent the desk week by week, Smith went away, did some sums, and then told Lyon that he was going to buy the monster. “He said it was cheaper than renting,” Lyon stated.*
Wild Mood Swings broke down, yet again, when The Cure was asked to join Page & Plant, The Black Crowes and The Smashing Pumpkins for a three-week-long South American jaunt during January 1996. As Lyon recalled, “That put the kibosh on that for the moment.” He did, however, get to work on the band’s live sound. “I had a fantastic time, but got no work done on the record.”
For a record that had such a leisurely, stop-start evolution, things changed when Cure and crew returned to the UK in early February. Up to now, Smith had been avoiding Chris Parry’s calls to the studio, leaving Lyon to invent excuses for his absence. “I had to say things like, ‘He’s asleep,’ or ‘He’s not here right now’; I think Robert took advantage of that situation sometimes.”†
But this time Parry did get through, and he told the band that the album’s scheduled release date was two months away. Not one track had been mixed.
According to Lyon, the haste to finish the album led to the most disappointing part of his lengthy sojourn with the band. He and Smith knew they had no option but to outsource the mixes, which wasn’t going to help an album that was already madly eclectic in nature.
“I found it difficult to say to him, ‘No, this is not the right thing to do,’ because Robert is his own man, he’s been doing it long enough, and at the end of the day it’s his record. But I do think that some of the material lost its edge because we’d worked on it for too long and then it had been farmed out to people who hadn’t been part of the history of the song.”
Those people included Mike “Spike” Drake, who mixed ‘The 13th’ and ‘Numb’ (“No good at all,” according to Lyon), as well as Flood, whose mix was “really good” to Lyon’s ears, but didn’t make the album’s final cut. Tim Palmer was also hired (Lyon: “I thought his mix of ‘Jupiter Crash’ was also very good”), as was Paul Corkett, who worked on ‘Mint Car’ and would go on to produce the next Cure long-player. Smith and Lyon co-mixed five Mood Swings’ cuts, including ‘Jupiter Crash’ and ‘Gone!’
“For me,” Lyon continued, “that was the only disappointing element of the whole thing. I think we needed to mix in the studio – that would have been a better option. But I didn’t have the power to do that; Robert was so set in the way that he wanted to do it.” This led to the one true showdown between Smith and Lyon, who was becoming increasingly frustrated as the sessions leaked into their third calendar year. “The band was getting ready to go on tour; they hadn’t decided on a single; there were all these mixes flying around – it was kind of a confusing situation.
“I said to Robert, ‘Look, I don’t agree with everything that’s going on and I don’t think that you’re necessarily making all the right decisions.’ I don’t think that he liked that very much.”
These differences of opinion extended into the choice of first single, which only contributed to Mood Swings’ indifferent results (if you can call million-plus sales disappointing). Lyon was keen on the more upbeat ‘Mint Car’, which Smith had tried out on his mother, who allegedly loved it. But Smith, whose vote was final and non-negotiable, opted instead for ‘The 13th’. As Lyon recalled, “There were long, long – overly long – discussions about that. By that time, however, some of the edges were a bit blurred; I’d been working on the record too long.” Lyon also felt that the record ran over time at 14 tracks; he felt 11 tunes would have been just right.
Single selection and album length weren’t the only problems faced by Smith and The Cure. During their lengthy absence, as they tried to piece together Wild Mood Swings, put the band back together and deal with the drawn-out Tolhurst vs The Cure court case, the orbit of the musical world had shifted. Acid house and Madchester had blazed briefly then burned out, likewise grunge and the British shoegazers. But Britpop, with Blur, Suede and Oasis as its main banner-wavers, was now in the midst of its second coming. Even the US market was tuning in to such breakthrough records as Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, something that hadn’t happened to Happy Mondays or The Stone Roses. Lyon was convinced that The Cure could have slotted comfortably into the movement – after all, they had opened up America unlike any British band this side of The Beatles or the Stones – if only they’d had Mood Swings ready earlier. “But with the first single chosen, and the time that elapsed, I think it suffered a little because of that.”
Robert Smith, however, would defend this patchy, unpredictable batch of tracks, insisting it was the moment where he rediscovered his smile. “There are some pretty demented songs on there,” he reflected in 2004. But you wou
ldn’t think so on the evidence of the opener, ‘Want’, which was very much Cure angst-by-numbers, propped up by the usual dense guitarscapes. But the album took its first odd turn with ‘Club America’, where Smith tried a new voice, much raspier and lower than his Lovecat moneymaker. For the first time on record, Smith sounded as if he’s singing from somewhere deep in his boots, as he growls like a predatory sex machine, hoping to score with a creepy come-on about how the object of his desire’s eyes have been burning a hole in his head since the moment he caught sight of her. It was hardly Julio Iglesias (or Charles Aznavour for that matter, whom Smith had mimicked back in the days of ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’), but if you wanted a clear sign that Wild Mood Swings wasn’t completely Cure by-the-book, here was Exhibit A.
The following track, ‘This Is A Lie’, was Smith in darkly beautiful form, virtually reciting his lyrics while real, live strings ebbed and flowed behind him. This was the nearest that Smith had come to replicating the autumnal blues of Nick Drake, a perennial favourite. Then, suddenly, the band slipped into what Smith would describe as a “sort of crackpot salsa vibe” for ‘The 13th’, a failed but brave experiment in redefining The Cure’s musical future. Such unexpected right-turns would lead to some of the worst press The Cure would ever cop when Wild Mood Swings finally appeared in mid-1996.
“It was a shame, because it got slagged when it came out,” said Smith. “Fans hated it as well. It’s the only time I’ve been hugely disappointed. I suppose it was because [‘The 13th’] was the first thing that they’d heard from the band in years, and I don’t think they gave it a chance after that.”
‘Strange Attraction’ is another breezier moment of Wild Mood Swings, an ever-so-cheesy song of seduction underscored by frothy keyboards and a repetitive, hollow drum sound. The Cure wouldn’t come any closer accidentally to replicating the sound of The Thompson Twins, one of Smith’s most despised pop peers (who, admittedly, had driven both Boris Williams and Roger O’Donnell to the more hedonistic Cure). Then came the mysteriously titled ‘Mint Car’, another light-hearted effort from a band who’d been missing a funny bone for years. When Smith exploded with fizziness at the sunrise, it was the most upbeat he’d been since declaring that ‘Friday I’m In Love’. It made for a peculiar flipside to the champers-and-pills celebrations of Oasis, even if the Britpop kings currently lorded it over The Cure in the charts.
Wild Mood Swings may have still sold a million copies in the USA, but that was a big commercial comedown from Wish and Disintegration. The writing was very clearly on the (Elektra) wall: The Cure’s salad days were just about over.
It’s unfair to completely write off Wild Mood Swings as a brave failure, as little more than Robert Smith’s folly. ‘Jupiter Crash’, a contender for the album title at one point (ditto ‘Bare’), is a stylish ballad-of-sorts, an insider’s portrait of Robert Smith the Bognor Regis stargazer, looking into the sky through his telescope and inquiring about what happens when a star falls. During ‘Round & Round & Round’ Smith seems positively jolly as he hints at his own legendary indecisiveness. I mean, what else could he be getting at when he shrugs and admits – characteristically obliquely – that he’ll never overcome his own uncertainty. The album then bounces between moods either delirious (‘Return’), solemn (the string-sodden and quite haunting ‘Numb’ and the equally stirring closer, ‘Bare’, where Smith comes clean on “what I’ve really become”) or somewhere in between (‘Trap’).
Robert Smith had some very clear-cut explanations as to why exactly the 14-track-long Wild Mood Swings failed. “The album suffers from being too long,” he explained. “And it’s disjointed. I was trying to write in different styles, and wanted us to sound like different bands, almost going after the Kiss Me idea. But, because we’d lost Boris, and before Jason [Cooper] settled in, we had a different drummer every week. I would often forget the name of the person who was drumming.”
Smith took aim at the usual target: his record company. “Every album up to that point had sold more than the last one, and suddenly the record company was confronted with this horrifying drop in sales, and they didn’t have a fuckin’ clue as to why we’d ever sold records in the first place,” Smith figured. “They didn’t really know what they were promoting or who to.”
And for the first time since the very early days of Three Imaginary Boys, The Cure seemed like the wrong band at the wrong time: a bird’s nest of hair and a slash of smudged lippy didn’t quite fit with the Loaded sensibilities of such middle-class bands as Blur, or the thuggish swagger of Oasis’ Gallagher brothers.
In 1996, The Cure was old and in the way.
“I will most certainly not be wearing black and lipstick in 2011,” insists Robert Smith. “That’s a guarantee.” (SIN/Corbis)
Gallup, Bamonte, Smith, Williams and Thompson (from left). “I can even imagine doing this at 60; I don’t care what others think,” Smith said recently. (Ebet Roberts/Redferns)
Band of the Tear at the Brits: “It’s a fucking travesty,” Smith said, “because I thought we were the beat band the year before as well.” (LFI)
Chris Parry, The Cure’s long-term manager. “Robert told me in 2000 that he hadn’t spoken to Chris in six months,” Tolhurst revealed. “He said he’d gone crazy.”
“He was such a funny little chappy with hair that all stood up.” – Video director Tim Pope on Robert Smith. (Steve Double)
Another day, another few thousand miles. “If I work the next one or two years with The Cure thinking I’d rather be at home, then I wouldn’t be honest with myself.” (Paul Harris/Contributor/Getty)
Wish-list, April 1993: Gallup, Boris Williams, Smith and former guitar roadie-cum-munitions expert, Perry Bamonte (from left), outside Hook End Manor, where the band had recorded 1989’s Disintegration album. (Steve Double)
Smith leaves court during the case of Tolhurst vs The Cure, February 1994. “It’s really stupid,” Smith said. “It’ll cost him more than he can hope to win.” Tolhurst’s lawyers came away Slmillion wiser. (Chris Taylor)
Drummer Jason Cooper joins The Cure, 1995. “My favourite memories before joining are listening to Faith and drinking cider,” he admitted. (Steve Double)
Smith preaching to the perverted at Glastonbury 1995. Former bassist Phil Thornalley would describe touring with The Cure as “not for the faint-hearted”. (SIN/Corbis)
The Cure strike a pose with Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, 1996. Daryl Bamonte, the Mode’s former roadie, would eventually take over as The Cure’s manager. (LFI)
Robert Smith saves the world in South Park, February 18, 1998. “When my nephews saw that, they worshipped me, but kept asking, ‘What is disintegration, Uncle Bob?’” (WENN)
Record producer, Ross Robinson. Smith dismissed nu-metal as “horribly cynical”, yet the ageing star and the Limp Bizkit producer got it together for 2004’s The Cure. (Mick Hutson/Redferns)
Smith at David Bowie’s 50th birthday at Madison Square Garden. When Bowie first invited Smith, he thought it was a crank call. “We disagreed on almost every point,” Smith would later say. (LFI)
According to The Cranes’ Mark Francombe, “luckily there are 500 Goths in every town in the western world, so The Cure’s albums still get bought.” Certainly more than 500 people desperately tried to obtain tickets for The Cure’s Barfly gig in March 2004 – tickets on eBay reportedly nudged the £2,000 mark. (Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit)
The hands of time: Jason Cooper, Simon Gallup, Robert Smith, Roger O’Donnell and Perry Bamonte (from left) at the Hollywood Rockwalk induction of The Cure, April 2004. (LFI)
Robert Smith has no plans of killing off The Cure just yet. “As long as I make music with people I like it’s wonderful; it’s something most people dream of. (Kevin Estrada/Retna UK)
* “It’s a very apt title,” Lol Tolhurst told me. “I was disintegrating at that point.”
* As of August 2005, Tolhurst has been sober for 16 years.
* Not that this prevented him and some of the band saili
ng the QE2 prior to their next two American tours, of course. It made for one of the weirdest pre-tour demands in the history of rock’n’roll.
* Director Pope also cameoed in ‘Never Enough’, playing Turban Tim, the fortune teller.
* Ireland won, 1–0.
* A Cure insider told me that due to their strong family connection, it was much easier for Thompson to move in and out of The Cure over the band’s lifespan.
† Lol Tolhurst would tell me that he and Smith discussed Gallup’s toxic troubles when they finally resumed their friendship.
* Lyon, like many others I spoke to, had no problems with Smith’s largesse. “Robert’s a very generous person, both financially and socially.”
† Lol Tolhurst told me that within a few years, Smith and Parry barely spoke at all. “Robert told me in 2000 that he hadn’t spoken to Chris in six months. He’d send missives from his yacht. He said he’d gone crazy and doesn’t talk to him any more.”
Chapter Twelve
“I can even imagine doing this at 60; I don’t care what others think.”
– Robert Smith
LIKE the shark and the Abominable Snowman, sightings of The Cure in the late Nineties were mainly seasonal and not all that common. They toured Wild Mood Swings heavily, bringing it all home with shows at Wembley, Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham in December 1996. They’d followed that with an abbreviated US tour in late 1997, where they played little more than a dozen shows, as opposed to their usual 70 or 80. In 1998 they did another lap of European festivals during July and August, while in 1999 they played exactly one date, and even then it was a special promo gig at Sony Studios in New York.