by Jeff Apter
“For about three months, the rest of the world just took a back seat and I didn’t worry about anything except making the album. It’s been 10 years since I’ve done that.” (Smith would cheerfully report that the band was “all good friends” again once the sessions ended and the album was finally released.)
Of all The Cure’s dozen studio albums, Bloodflowers is probably the most overlooked, the most unreasonably neglected. Yet as a sustained piece of work, a lengthy meditation on melancholy, it works almost perfectly. It’s clear why Smith would include it as the final act of the Berlin Trilogy shows in November 2002 – just like Pornography and Disintegration before it, Bloodflowers clung to a single mood with the persistence of a leech. Not since Disintegration had Smith sounded more solemn; each song seemed like a eulogy for the rapidly fading flower of his youth. His inclusion in the liner notes of a quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Princess’ – “tears from the depth of some divine despair … and thinking of the days that are no more” – wasn’t done on a whim, it was a perfect summation of Bloodflowers. The album’s title was actually an amalgam of two similar works of art – a reference to a book of letters from the painter Edvard Munch, and a line of poetry from a book Smith had read that reflected on World War I.
“He [Munch] had said that he was sure that he had done a good artwork when he felt that a blood flower popped out from his heart,” said Smith. “[And] one of the poems described how a wound in one of the soldiers, hit by a bullet, opened a blood flower in his body. I liked this analogy, between pain and art.”
Yet Smith somehow managed to steer clear of the melodramatic claptrap that Bloodflowers could well have become. His emotions here seem convincingly real, unlike, say, Faith, where he was simply a coked-up Crawley 20-something with a chip on his slouched shoulders. Bloodflowers truly does sound like The Cure’s farewell (little was the world to know, of course, that yet another Cure resurrection lay a few years down the line). Throughout the record, Smith sounds exhausted, physically, mentally and creatively drained. When he bemoans his lack of feeling and inability to articulate during ‘There Is No If …’, it’s clearly not the same guy who petulantly snapped “it doesn’t matter if we all die today” back in 1984. This was a guy whose wisdom and worldly insight have been hard earned. Sure, it isn’t ‘Just Like Heaven’ or ‘Inbetween Days’, but much of the album’s heavy-heartedness sounded truly authentic.
Smith couldn’t have written a better mood-setter than the opening track, ‘Out Of This World’. It’s a song where Smith sounds so down, so lost in the twilight world, that it’s a shock that he actually found the energy to sing. And when he does move towards the mic, he delivers a lyric that proved just how intent he was on capturing a singular mindset throughout Bloodflowers. When he sings about the inevitability of nostalgia it’s as if he was channelling some sad-eyed nightclub crooner, necktie loosened, large brandy in hand, half-empty pack of cigs nearby.
And throughout Bloodflowers, Smith tapped into the more reflective side of his nature, which was quite different from the chronic self-flagellator at the centre of Seventeen Seconds and Faith. During ‘Watching Me Fall’ he even appeared to be floating outside his body, looking back at his life. Smith sees himself falling eternally through space, growing smaller until he disappears completely. The band, meanwhile, cooked up a tempestuous guitar storm behind him, creating the perfect soundtrack for Smith’s heavy heart.
Like the surlier moments of Kiss Me (especially ‘From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea’) and Disintegration, nothing is rushed on Bloodflowers. (“The intros to Disintegration were even longer,” insisted Smith.) These nine slow-burning tracks unfold slowly, gradually growing in atmosphere and tension as guitars are piled up like sonic building blocks, while Gallup and Cooper anchor the sound with a succession of hard-rock grooves (Cooper’s playing is especially steady-handed). Only one track, ‘There Is No If …’ clocks in under four minutes; ‘Watching Me Fall’ runs to a tad over 11. It was clear that when Smith confessed to a love of The Smashing Pumpkins and Scottish noise-makers Mogwai, he wasn’t merely jumping on the nearest bandwagon. (Mind you, he was also tuning in to opera at the time, his father’s music of choice, “a sure sign I’m getting old”.)
Even if The Cure was back in commercial favour in 2000 – which they weren’t – finding a song for radio amidst Bloodflower’s sonic and autobiographical blood-letting would have been as tough a task as trying to run a comb through Robert Smith’s bird-nest hair. Only ‘Maybe Someday’ had something resembling a trademark Cure melody, but even then the track ran to a very radio-unfriendly five-minutes-plus. Elektra knew this. Smith told the press that the label’s response to The Cure’s final album for their US master was about as positive as their first take on Disintegration. Smith sprinkled their words “commercial suicide” quite liberally throughout interviews upon the album’s release.
“Before we did Bloodflowers I actually wanted it to be a short album, because I find that 70 minutes of one artist is, almost without exception, too much,” Smith admitted a few years after its release, an observation that was as much a comment on the CD age as it was on the band’s tendency to overcook their songs. So with Bloodflowers, Smith had set himself and the band an album target of 45 minutes, but editing was never one of The Cure’s strongest suits, as the overly long Kiss Me had proved back in 1987; likewise the 14-track Wild Mood Swings much more recently. “I realise, in hindsight, that it’s the songs themselves that probably need trimming back, but I think that they benefit from their length,” Smith believed.
Smith had actually performed a home edit on the 11-minute opus ‘Watching Me Fall’, which trimmed five minutes from the track, but felt that it just wasn’t the same song. And even after cutting more than 90 seconds from ‘Out Of This World’, having been advised it needed an edit for radio, he was told that the intro was still too long. “But I like that slow development,” Smith said, “and I didn’t want to impose the three-and-a-half-minute structure on anything I was writing, because it just felt stupid. We did a couple of what we’d consider to be pop songs at the demo stage and they just sounded so shallow.” Such highlights from Bloodflowers as ‘The Last Day Of Summer’ and the title track would have been ruined if their languorous, sprawling soundscapes had gone under the knife; they set the tone perfectly for the sad songs that followed.
As it turned out, of all The Cure LPs, of all the millions of records they’ve shifted over the past 25-plus years, Bloodflowers remains very close to the top of Robert Smith’s list of favourite Cure albums. “Recording Bloodflowers was the best experience I’ve had since doing the Kiss Me album. I achieved my goals, which were to make an album, enjoy making it, and end up with something that has real intense, emotional content. And I didn’t kill myself in the process.”
Bloodflowers wasn’t quite the failure that Elektra suspected it would be. It was released in the midst of Supernatural mania, in which Woodstock veteran and cosmically inclined blues guitarist, Carlos Santana, had reinvented himself with a lot of help from such new kids as Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas. In the same week that Supernatural shifted a cheeky 219,000 units in the USA, Bloodflowers debuted at number 16, which was the best performance that week (mid-February) from a new release. (The Cure sold 71,000 albums.)
As ever, The Cure found themselves amidst some unlikely chart buddies, including wailing popster Christina Aguilera, Eurotrash Eiffel 65, Kid Rock, Backstreet Boys and R&B lady-killer, Sisqo (who was casting his seductive spell with a little charmer called ‘Thong Song’). ‘Maybe Someday’, the song that was eventually lifted from Bloodflowers for radio, also charted surprisingly well, reaching number 12 on Billboard’s R&R Alternative chart. ‘Watching Me Fall’, meanwhile, had been included on the American Psycho soundtrack, keeping The Cure very much in the spotlight.
Their subsequent US tour was a scaled down version of their late Eighties, early Nineties heyday: it was a five-week stretch, where the band mainly played amphitheatres
rather than the corporate-sponsored super stadiums of a few years earlier.
Buoyed by the reasonable sales of an album that he knew was not designed for Cure fans reared on ‘Just Like Heaven’, and the solid ticket sales from their Dream Tour 2000, Smith started to revise his plans for laying The Cure to rest. But that was hardly out of character – by now Smith must have realised that he shouldn’t do interviews at the end of a physically and mentally draining stretch. He had a tendency to make bold statements that he’d live to regret.
“If it’s going to be the last album with The Cure – [as] I thought – I have to be sincere,” said Smith. “Now everyone around me is saying that the record has had a positive impact on me towards the band, and I have to admit it’s true, because I have changed my mind during the last six months thanks to Bloodflowers. I found new enthusiasm in the group. I have found out that The Cure are a great band again, an important one – to me, at least. I don’t give a fuck what the rest of the world thinks about us.”
But rather than disappear back into the studio, Smith decided that he’d prepare two career backtracks for Polydor: yet another “traditional” greatest-hits set and a four-disc journey through The Cure’s back pages. And if it happened that The Cure didn’t get around to making another studio album, at least Smith could boast that he was actively involved in compiling what he thought would be the definitive Cure collection.*
Smith also had some personal history to reconsider. He and estranged Cure co-founder Lol Tolhurst had exchanged letters around the time of Bloodflowers. It seemed to both that enough time had passed for them to be able to resume their lifelong friendship. As Tolhurst told me, “I wrote to Robert and said this is what I did, this is what I’m sorry for, and I’d still like to be friends, because that’s what we were in the very beginning. He wrote back, we met in LA and sat up all night talking about things.” Smith had some very frank admissions to make: Tolhurst wasn’t the only member of The Cure to fly a little too close to the sun.
“He told me that three or four years ago Simon hit a brick wall with all this stuff [drugs and alcohol],” said Tolhurst. “Robert’s constitution is such that as soon as he gets too near the brink, the abyss, he’ll pull back and stop. He’s been close a few times. I got to the abyss, looked over and jumped in.
“I think it’s part and parcel of being in a band like The Cure. I also think of bands like Nirvana and Joy Division – people expect you to look into the abyss for them, that’s part of the experience. It goes with the territory. I’ve been close enough and fallen in, so has Robert and Simon.”
Despite the guiding hand of Robert Smith, the differences between The Cure Greatest Hits, which appeared in 2003, and 1997’s Galore, weren’t that vast. There were 18 “hits” on each and although the song selection was markedly different, there was still a strong focus on the commercial side of the band. Both of these collections effectively compiled The Cure’s best-known songs, the singles and the radio standards. While ‘Wrong Number’ had been the bonus new track on Galore, Greatest Hits featured ‘Just Say Yes’, a good-natured vocal trade-off between Smith and Republica shouter Saffron, and ‘Cut Here’, another Plati/Smith co-production. The key difference, however, was an extra bonus disc for Greatest Hits, which added acoustic renditions of ‘Lovesong’, ‘Lullaby’, et al, plus two discs of mainly Tim Pope-directed videos.
Join The Dots, of course, was a vastly different baby. Subtitled ‘B-Sides & Rarities 1978–2001 The Fiction Years’, it was an authoritative and exhaustive backtrack, a 70-track, four-disc journey into Cureworld, which ranged from the little-heard ‘Do The Hansa’ to Mark Plati’s reworking of ‘A Forest’. And it was squeezed tight with curiosities, such as ‘Harold And Joe’, Simon Gallup’s tribute to the pair from Aussie soap Neighbours (a Gallup small-screen fave), which had previously been buried on the B-side of ‘Never Enough’. There were also alternate mixes (Mark Saunders’ take on ‘Wrong Number’, the Dizzy Mix of ‘Just Like Heaven’ and others) and one-offs, including covers of Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’, The Doors’ ‘Hello I Love You’ (in three different flavours) and Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’. These were served up with hard-to-find soundtrack cuts from the films Judge Dredd and The Crow, plus ‘More Than This’, a track recorded for TV’s X-Files. (Like Fox Mulder, sky-watcher Smith, a devoted viewer, also wanted to believe.)
Join The Dots was purely for Cure completists, but unlike most releases that Smith had intimated would be the band’s farewell, this smartly packaged backtrack actually had all the trappings of finality. What better way to sign off than to trawl through the archives and return with 70 tracks of obscurities and ephemera?* Whispers about The Cure’s demise grew stronger and louder when it was announced that Chris Parry had sold Fiction to Universal Music – much to Smith’s chagrin. Smith made it known, every chance he had, that Parry had sold him out. But as one member of The Cure inner circle told me, the truth is slightly different.
“The whole story about Chris selling to Universal without Robert’s knowledge is complete bullshit,” I was told. “Chris has been on Robert’s case for many years, asking him to buy him out of Fiction. Problems with Robert’s attitude and him refusing to look into options for Fiction led to the sale to Universal. Robert knew about all this.” By this stage of a relationship that lasted longer than many marriages, Smith and Parry communicated mainly by fax – and even then Parry spent most of his time at sea on his boat.†
So all indications were that The Cure was ready for the knackery, leaving Robert Smith to get back to a solo album with one of the longest gestation periods in the history of rock’n’roll. But Smith and the band were about to meet Ross Robinson.
Of all the people least likely to help mount The Cure’s 2004 resurrection, American Robinson would had to have been near the top of the list. Robinson started out in the late Eighties as a tearaway guitarist in a long-forgotten thrash metal outfit alongside future Machine Head drummer Dave McClain. His first studio credit – assistant engineer – was for his work on WASP’s 1993 LP, The Crimson Idol. Not long after, Robinson made a crucial connection (for both his reputation and bank balance) with angst-ridden nu-metallers Korn, possibly one of the most miserable bands this side of, well, The Cure. Robinson produced their first two albums, 1994’s self-titled debut and their multi-platinum hit from 1996, Life Is Peachy.
Robinson’s place as the Phil Spector of nu-metal was well and truly confirmed when he worked the desk for Limp Bizkit’s 1997 breakthrough, Three Dollar Bill Y’All. The Bizkit, with an oversized shit-stirrer with undeniable ambition by the name of Fred Durst out front, and Korn, led by the pimp-like Jonathan Davis, fronted the rap-metal vanguard that would dominate MTV and airwaves throughout the late Nineties. When Robinson went on to produce albums for art-rockers At The Drive-In and anarchic clowns Slipknot, he’d done his bit to start a revolution.
Not that Robert Smith was a huge fan of nu-metal. Smith said just that back in 2001, while in conversation with misty-eyed acolyte, Brian Molko of Placebo. “I like some part of the guitars,” he said, “[but] the problem is that, with these kind of bands, I don’t like the voices, [the way they] scream the same way. And I’ve got the feeling that nu-metal is horribly cynical; they must be too dumb to understand they’re victims of a huge marketing plan.” One of Smith’s nephews was a nu-metal diehard – he’d played his Uncle Robert his Slipknot albums, but Smith remained unimpressed.
“Slipknot?” he said. “They look like Alice Cooper, but they can’t hold a candle to him.”
Ross Robinson had met Smith backstage in California at the annual Coachella Festival in 2004. While still no great fan of his work, Smith was charmed by the man – how could he not be when Robinson confessed to being a huge Cure lover? “We got along immediately,” said Smith. “He has more zest for life than anyone else [I know]. [But] some things Ross did, like At The Drive-In, I really like. Limp Bizkit, however, does nothing for me.
“I’d read things about how he said he’d di
e to make the [next] Cure album,” Smith continued. “I didn’t expect we’d get on.”
Ross Robinson was a man of admirable commitment and focus. He was so determined to make a record with Smith that after their first meeting he almost drowned the Lovecat in letters and faxes, spelling out why they should work together and how they’d create sonic magic in the studio. Finally, Smith relented and signed a three-album deal with Robinson’s I Am Recordings, having just knocked back an offer from Virgin Records. By 2004, as unlikely as it seemed, The Cure found themselves labelmates with Glassjaw, Slipknot and Amen. Smith even promised to cede all studio responsibility to Robinson; he hadn’t been so acquiescent since Three Imaginary Boys, and he only did it then because he didn’t know any better.
Smith’s original plan was that Robinson would produce the now almost mythical Robert Smith solo LP. “But he didn’t agree,” Smith said. “He said, ‘The time is right for a new Cure album. I have a gut feeling.’”
Robinson’s commercial instincts were pretty damned sound. Having spent years on the fringes of the land of cool, especially in the UK, The Cure was suddenly being namechecked all over the music press. There was a revivalist spirit sweeping rock’n’roll. While the glacial grooves of Pornography could be heard in the sound of New Yorkers Interpol, you could be mistaken for thinking that Steve Bays, the vocalist for Canadians Hot Hot Heat (a Cure steal in itself), was actually channeling Smith. If it wasn’t such a compliment, Smith should have been talking to his lawyers about some kind of copyright infringement.
Other breakout acts, including The Rapture, Razorlight and Smith’s much-fancied Mogwai, all paid dues to Smith and The Cure, both in conversation and on record. The White Stripes’ Jack White even stated that he wouldn’t be a musician without Smith’s influence, while such other bands as AFI and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club emulated the various stages of The Cure’s career in their breakthrough records Sing The Silence and Take Them On, On Your Own respectively. For a band that had seemed dead only a few years ago, The Cure was suddenly very much alive. Smith was also popping up in the strangest of places, putting in musical cameos with punk-popsters Blink-182, Dutch cut-and-pasters Junkie XL and elsewhere. He even joined forces, once again, with guitarchitect Reeves Gabrels for the excellent ‘Yesterday’s Gone’. Tickets for their one-off show during March at Barfly in London were fetching a neat £2,000 apiece.