by Jeff Apter
In the wake of Wild Mood Swings, Smith was reluctant to start planning another album, as he was still smarting from the subdued response it had received. “In the UK, Britpop did kill us,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “For the first time, NME and Melody Maker were right in their view of how the public perceived us. It was the first album in The Cure’s history that didn’t do better than the last one.” (Melody Maker’s take on Wild Mood Swings basically amounted to this: “Smith looks exactly the same as ever, and his Cure haven’t exactly engaged in fearless pursuit of innovation either.” The New York Times was equally disparaging. “For all the torments of heartbreak, the anguish doesn’t seem so earthshaking as it was the last time, and all the times before.”)
Smith – rather than The Cure – made a low-key return to public life in early 1997, after he returned home one night to find a message on his answering machine. “Hello, Robert, this is David Bowie. I’m hosting my 50th birthday party at Madison Square Garden and want you to come along and play. It’ll be a blast.” Almost 25 years had passed since Smith first laid eyes upon Ziggy Stardust on Top Of The Pops and experienced one of his first musical revelations – now he had the chance to sing alongside the Thin White Duke himself. But Smith was a natural-born sceptic: “How is it,” he asked Mary, “that Bowie could have my unlisted number?” At first, Smith was convinced it was a Cure buddy taking the piss. Cautiously, he called Bowie’s number, leaving a wary message. “I’ll call you back,” he said, “I’m not sure.” Deep down inside, though, Smith was euphoric – especially when Bowie phoned again and confirmed that the request was legit.
The show was staged on January 9, 1997. Also there to help Bowie blow out his 50 candles were Lou Reed, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, The Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth. Smith and Bowie duetted on two songs: ‘The Last Thing You Should Do’, from Bowie’s most recent album, Earthling, and Hunky Dory’s ‘Quicksand’. To most, it was the highlight of the night. Backstage, the co-producer of Earthling, Mark Plati, looked on in amazement. Two of his life-long musical heroes were sharing a mic, only a few yards away.
“They were both stellar,” Plati said to me, “genuine highlights of the gig.” Plati, who was soon to play a key role in the next chapter of The Cure, didn’t have such a shabby musical history himself. New York-based, he’d been engineer to production king Arthur Baker, and had worked with revered DJ Junior Vasquez, tweaking remixes for Janet Jackson, Talking Heads and Prince (he’d worked on his Purpleness’ Graffiti Bridge album), before signing on to produce Earthling with Bowie.
Plati’s relationship with the cult of The Cure had started in a fairly unusual place. “I lived for a time with an all-female band in Dallas, Texas,” he said to me. “I was an intern at a local studio and I exchanged free studio time for a space on their couch for a few months. On one occasion, one of them listened to ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ for around 36 hours straight. That struck me as being rather serious.” Plati was a fan of the band’s more “commercial” side – or at least their heaviest selling records – including Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Disintegration and Wish. “On the production side, I really loved the records they did with Dave Allen. I felt that they didn’t sound like anyone else out there, which is always something I find attractive.”
The after-show party for Bowie’s 50th was held at the downtown loft of artist Julian Schnabel. Plati was making the rounds with long-time Bowie guitarist Reeves Gabrels (who was also soon to work with Smith). As befitting such an A-list party, Plati revealed, there were “various libations on offer”. Having been actively involved in the production of the birthday show, Plati was exhausted and needed to let off some steam.
“By the time I got to Robert’s end of the room, where he was camped out at a table with director Tim Pope, I was out-and-out shit-faced. In all honesty, if I hadn’t been in that state I probably wouldn’t have found the nerve to approach him.” Plati chose the subject of the ‘Lullaby’ video as an icebreaker; he asked Smith how it felt to be eaten alive. “I tried to get him to tell me what made him think up such a thing, and what it was like to have all those legs and whatnot, all the while trying to keep my composure in the face of overwhelming drunken giddiness. He and Tim probably thought I was bonkers. They probably still do.”*
Bonkers or not, Smith commissioned Plati to work on a mix of a new Cure track, ‘Wrong Number’, that was to be added to the upcoming retrospective, Galore. Studio time was scheduled in London for early in the northern summer, at around the same time that Bowie’s Earthling tour was doing its UK run. Plati called Gabrels and suggested he come down to the studio. “I’m pretty sure that was Robert’s intention all along. He was a big fan of Reeves’, as it turned out. [And] I might have mentioned [to Gabrels] that bringing a guitar wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
By this stage, Smith and the band had recorded ‘Wrong Number’ and handed it out to Adrian Sherwood and Mark Saunders for mixing. “At first, Robert was just looking for a remix,” Plati said. “At the same time, he really liked the previous attempts of the song, but didn’t think he’d cracked the definitive version yet.” Plati and Smith pulled the track apart and rebuilt it around a new beat, based upon a sampled Jason Cooper drum loop. They also added a few new keyboard parts and effects.
It was around this time that Gabrels walked into the control room; within a few hours he’d laid down a “gazillion guitar tracks”, according to Plati. Then Smith realised he needed to re-cut his vocal, because the song was now so radically different to the original. For a fan such as Plati, it was almost impossible to conceal his joy when Smith took his place at the mic.
“When Robert began to sing, I was really blown away – it’s always amazing to hear somebody’s voice, but when a voice like Robert’s comes out of the speakers, it’s a whole other ball game.” At one stage, Plati couldn’t control his glee – he began jumping up and down, shouting, “It’s Robert Smith! It’s Robert Smith!” to no one in particular. Smith stopped singing and asked Plati whether he had a problem. “I had to tell him how fantastic the whole thing was for me. His reply was something along the lines of, ‘Really? Nobody ever gets excited when I sing.’ I thought it was sweet.”
With Smith’s vocal and Gabrels’ guitar in place, all that was needed was one final touch: Smith needed someone to state “You’ve got the wrong number,” which would give the song an added hook. “It sounds easy,” Plati recalled, “but it took forever.” They eventually settled on the number of a high school friend of Plati’s. Smith called, the wife of Plati’s friend answered appropriately, and the track was complete.
“I think it turned out much better than we hoped,” Plati added. “It became the single. It was much, much different from either of the versions he’d recorded up to that point. The Adrian Sherwood version was fairly ‘dubby’, with horns and female backing vocals – and this was miles from where we landed. We were a lot more rock in the end.”* Smith preferred the Plati mix, too; he felt it was a handy companion piece to ‘Never Enough’, the one new track from their Mixed Up set.
Once released in late October 1997, the initial response to ‘Wrong Number’ was positive, and it reached the number nine spot on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart. (Galore featured four tracks that had topped that Billboard chart: ‘Fascination Street’, ‘High’, ‘Friday I’m In Love’ and ‘Never Enough’.) But even though The Cure upped their American profile considerably in the latter months of the year, Galore failed to connect in the same way as their first best-of collection, Standing On A Beach. “No radio station played [‘Wrong Number’] in the UK,” Smith said. “I even wondered if it wasn’t a conspiracy.”
Mark Plati, for one, had no real idea why the song and the album didn’t become heavy sellers. “There are a hundred explanations for why something is or isn’t a hit,” he told me. “In the end it’s down to luck, timing, the moon, whatever. I still think ‘Wrong Number’ is a great track – Robert’s vocal is outstanding, the guitars are twisted and the song takes
chances. It’s an awesome miniature event.”
As good as it was, the failure of the single and Galore had a powerful impact on Smith. “I think that’s what killed The Cure as a pop band,” he said. And Smith wasn’t feeling much love for his US label Elektra, accusing them of indifference towards Wild Mood Swings. “They were thinking, ‘Well, they’ll sell a couple of million records and we don’t have to do anything.’ We owe them a certain amount of money and it goes in their budget on fucking idiot bands that are never going to go out and sell a record in their lives. Because we’re older and unfashionable, there isn’t anyone who will go out on a limb for us.” He was livid.
The Cure had one more album to run on their contract. Convinced that the band was a spent force commercially, Smith decided that The Cure should bow out with a record that reflected their deeply serious character, rather than their ‘Friday I’m In Love’ side. He was going to write and record the third and final part of his accidental trilogy of despair and heartbreak, which had begun with Pornography and continued with Disintegration. But first he had to save the world.
During the early Nineties, the litmus test of a rock’n’roll band’s coolness was gauged by one simple fact: had they cameod on The Simpsons? The Matt Groening-created cartoon had long been the edgiest thing on the small screen, drawing guest appearances from former Beatles (George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney), arena rockers (Aerosmith, U2) and the headliners of the Lollapalooza Generation (The Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, et al). But things changed in the mid-Nineties, thanks to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, two bratty film students from the University of Colorado. In 1991 they pieced together an animated short going by the name of Jesus vs Frosty (also known as The Spirit Of Christmas). Crudely made and packed with expletives and random acts of violence, the short made its way into the hands of execs at the Fox network. In 1995 Fox’s Brian Graden commissioned the pair to make another seasonal short, which would be distributed amongst fellow suits. This one was formally titled The Spirit Of Christmas and featured a lively martial arts battle between Jesus Christ and Santa Claus. A hit on the fast growing internet (an information network that The Cure had also started to exploit with some success), The Spirit Of Christmas led Parker and Stone into serious discussions with Fox, and then Comedy Central. The iconoclastic and seriously fucking irreverent South Park premiered to an unsuspecting public on August 13, 1997.
If Bart Simpson had been the cause of renewed interest in juvenile delinquency (as many wowsers wanted the world to believe), then the kids of snowy, remote South Park – Stan, Kyle, toilet-mouthed Cartman and Kenny, doomed to die a bloody death in each episode – were clearly the devil’s spawn. No subject was too puerile, no taboo was safe from Parker and Stone (the show actually copped a TV-MA rating for its predilection towards swearing and gore). The 1998 film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, featuring the sensitive ballads ‘Blame Canada’ and ‘Uncle Fucka’, even received an Oscar nomination. In true Simpsons-style, the show had drawn some A-list cameos, including an ex-president (Bill Clinton), a murder suspect (O.J. Simpson), an escape artist (David Blaine) and various rock acts either cool (Korn, Radiohead) or cold (Stevie Nicks, Toto).
The February 18, 1998 episode of South Park began in typical fashion: Cartman discovered an ancient triangle, which he passed along to Kyle. When Kyle was interviewed on TV, it drew the attention of film critic Leonard Maltin and fading diva Barbra Streisand. It turned out that there were two triangles – Streisand had the other. If she recovered the second she would have the power to rule the world (as she has always hoped to, clearly). Only three people could stop her – Matlin, legendary actor Sidney Poitier and, erm, Cure mainman Robert Smith. When Smith reached South Park, old Babs had morphed into the murderous Mecha-Streisand, which meant that Smith had to adopt his own superhero persona, Smithra. An epic battle of Godzilla vs Mothra scale ensued, during which Smithra grabbed Mecha-Streisand’s tail and tossed her deep into space.
The world now saved from the evil that is Babs, Smith prepared to leave, but first had to recover a walkie-talkie that he’d left with Cartman. When the fat kid with the foul mouth refused to hand it over, Smith kicked him in the balls. As a triumphant Smith walked into the sunset, cowboy-style, Kyle yelled out: “Disintegration is the best album ever.” Cartman then added, “Robert Smith kicks ass.” A bigger rap simply didn’t exist in Parker and Stone’s twisted comic universe. (It was such a big rap, in fact, that “Robert Smith Kicks Ass” T-shirts would soon be doing a healthy trade amongst Cure fans.)
Smith couldn’t have found a better gauge to determine if he still featured on the pop culture radar. But at first he was somewhat hesitant about doing the South Park voice-over. Stone and Parker, both major Cure fans, had sent him a tape of an episode that featured a gay dog called Sparky (voiced by Hollywood hunk George Clooney). “I really laughed,” Smith said, “but at the same time I found it ignoble.” Eventually Smith grew to trust Parker and Stone – but he couldn’t have imagined the favourable response to his cameo, especially within the Smith clan.
Smith’s 20-plus nieces and nephews now realised that their strange Uncle Robert with the big hair was one very cool dude. “Being in South Park has made a huge difference to their lives,” he said. “When my nephews saw that, they worshipped me, but kept asking, ‘What is a disintegration, Uncle Bob?’ Now that I’m a cartoon character I’m fully accepted into their world. Everything I do – travel, experiencing so many things, making good-selling records – means nothing to them [but] since my appearance in South Park I’m immortal. Bastards.”
During the obligatory globetrotting in the wake of Wild Mood Swings, Robert Smith had begun to learn about a side of his nature that he didn’t realise existed: he was yearning to spend more time at home. Twenty-odd years of endless recording and touring can have that effect, as he discovered. According to Smith, “I have found out that I was feeling comfortable staying at home.” His many nephews and nieces played a key role in the life of the new Robert Smith. He was often spotted kicking a football with them or collecting a bunch of younger Smiths from school. “In the past,” he admitted, “there was no chance: I preferred touring and recording with The Cure [to anything else] and my whole life was going on inside the group. Drugs, drinking and the inevitable tensions – it’s not for me any more. I’d rather stay at home.”
Smith now had a well-established home studio in place and when the band completed their meagre 1998 commitments – 14 European festival dates in all – he began working on songs for another Cure album. This new-found domesticity and reflection would be a key creative spark for these songs, encapsulated, most obviously, in one song, ‘39’. As literal as ever, Smith had written the song as a birthday present for himself, in much the same way that ‘Lovesong’ had been his belated wedding gift to Mary Poole.
Bloodflowers was originally planned for a spring 1998 release, but demand for The Cure wasn’t running at its highest at the time. When it did eventually appear in February 2000, Smith blamed the delay on numerous things: the ever-changing moods of the album itself, the record company’s wariness about a pre-Christmas release date, as well as a sense within himself that this just could indeed be The Cure’s much ballyhooed finale. Smith might actually live up to his ongoing threat of killing off The Cure. There was a certain logic at work here: the sales of the band’s two most recent releases, Wild Mood Swings and the best-of Galore, had tapered off considerably from what had gone before; Smith was soon to turn 40 (a pensionable age in rock’n’roll); their record deal was about to expire – and there seemed to be a symmetry to shutting down the band at the end of the millennium. Smith was also starting to field other offers, such as filmmaker Tim Burton’s proposal that he score his film Sleepy Hollow (which didn’t eventuate).
“It definitely will be the last album we’re doing for our record company,” was all Smith would say at the time, “so it would certainly be easy to stop there. Whether or not it’s the last album … it’s a g
ood way to stop.”
Bloodflowers was an album of two key sessions, the first lasting about a month prior to Christmas 1998 and the second for a few months in spring of the following year. Paul Corkett co-produced the album with Smith, which was mixed in the English countryside at Fisher Lane Farm in Surrey.
As the recording progressed, a very familiar sensation overtook Smith: these sessions were very similar to those for the band’s massive 1989 set, Disintegration. Cure long-termers Simon Gallup and Roger O’Donnell recognised that, too – and not with any fondness. Two weeks in, they told Smith just that. By mixing time, the whole band had disappeared, leaving Smith alone with Corkett. Increasingly convinced that this was going to be The Cure’s grand farewell, Smith was burying himself in the project, alienating his bandmates in the process. It was hardly the freewheeling, several-months-in-the-country affair that was Wild Mood Swings or Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me’s French connection. This was almost method record-making; to get right into the mood, on the night before recording officially began, Coach Smith had played the band both Disintegration and Pornography, insisting that he was after a similar intensity for Bloodflowers.
“In order to have any chance at being the best Cure line-up,” he told Gallup, O’Donnell, Bamonte and Cooper, “you have to come out with an album that’s got this kind of emotional impact. What [The Cure] is remembered for is albums like these.
“When we made Wild Mood Swings,” he continued, “the house was full of friends and family and people laughing, 26 people at dinner, that sort of vibe. With Bloodflowers, absolutely no one was allowed in the studio that wasn’t recording. Everyone thought I was being really horrible, and I guess I was because I wanted everyone to really focus on the album.