Never Enough

by Jeff Apter

  By spring 2004, Robinson and The Cure convened at London’s Olympic Studios for six weeks of recording. The band brought 37 demos into the sessions, which would eventually be culled to a dozen tracks. The original plan had been to record in LA, but Smith had the final say and insisted on working closer to home. (“We convinced him that the doom and gloom of London is more conducive to making our music than sunny California,” Smith chuckled.) Robinson, just like Mark Plati before him, was lucky to make it through the first day, because he found it so hard to keep a lid on the sheer thrill of working with one of his all-time favourite bands. His first move was to simply let them play for an hour – much of the resulting album, The Cure, was cut live in the studio – and then talk through his plans with the band. At the end of that first hour, however, Robinson was jumping out of his skin.

  “He just went absolutely mental,” said Smith. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t you know who you are? You’re The Cure. What the fuck are you doing?’ Everyone in the room thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s really saying obvious things.’” The Cure was not a band comfortable with confrontation or over-exuberance, and now a bespectacled American rap-metal geek was dancing in front of them like a madman. According to Smith, “Suddenly we had this bloke kicking things over, going, ‘Do you realise who you are?’”

  Smith, however, was overjoyed with Robinson’s attention and zealousness. “I was almost crying with happiness,” Smith admitted. “I knew at that moment it was going to work.”

  But the rest of the band wasn’t so fond of Robinson’s extreme working methods, his odd attraction to method record producing. Simon Gallup, for one, was quite willing to slam Robinson. “Don’t tell me he’s a great producer,” said the bassman, who was still coming to grips with his problem boozing. “For me he’s only been a nightmare. From my mouth will never come a positive word about him; he’s just an idiot.” When we spoke, guitarist Perry Bamonte was a tad more diplomatic. “It’s been said that Ross’s approach is a little contrived, but I think he had a very real passion for what he was doing. Not everyone shared his vision and it could well be argued that he’d not quite understood The Cure, but he believed completely in what he was doing and I think that’s a very good thing.”

  Though not quite as sprawling or one-dimensional as Bloodflowers, The Cure was still an album drawn from the moodier, heavier side of The Cure: this clearly wasn’t Kiss Me revisited. “I started writing really heavy songs, because, when you’re working with Ross, he’s bound to want dark and moody,” Smith said when the album was released on June 29, 2004. “What became very apparent is that he liked all the kinds of things we did. He’s really into the melodic side of the band and the pop side of the band.” Again, just like the sessions for Bloodflowers, The Cure became hostages of the studio, not leaving for months. “We had no visitors. No one was allowed in. It was quite a surreal experience,” Smith said.

  “It was treated as almost a long live event. Every day it was a different song. We’d be facing the control booth so we could see Ross and we would figure out the technical stuff. He put us in a very confined space, right on top of each other, with eye-to-eye contact. At night, we’d face the other way, light the candles and suddenly it became very real. I would stand up and away we would go.

  “Everything we’d done before was going to culminate on this record – that was the mindset that we had when we were in the studio. And I would say that more passion went into the making of this record than all the others combined.”

  While The Cure wasn’t a runaway hit, it sold slightly better in its first week than Bloodflowers, shifting 90,000 copies and muscling its way to number seven in the US Top 10. It was a useful reminder that the American public hadn’t completely moved on from the Lovecat and his crew.

  But Smith had a new plan in mind for the band’s latest US roadtrip. The Cure had been invited to headline the appropriately named Curiosa Festival, which also featured Smith’s hand-picked favourites Mogwai, Interpol and The Rapture, along with other acts such as Muse and Auf Der Maur. Curiosa stopped in 22 cities, opening on July 24 at West Palm Beach and closing shop in Sacramento five weeks later. The attendances were lower than expected – in Atlanta a little over 7,000 turned up to a venue that could hold 15,000, while in Cincinnati only 5,700 fans were spread liberally throughout a site that was ready for more than 20,000. At the closing show in Sacramento, a paltry crowd of just under 5,000 filed into a stadium built for 17,000-plus. (Daily takings typically ran between $200,000 and $400,000, bottoming out at $159,000 in Cincinnati.) As for The Cure’s headlining two-hour set, it was a case of something old, something very blue. They mixed the obligatory singalongs – ‘Inbetween Days’, ‘Just Like Heaven’, ‘Lovesong’ and even ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ – with the heavy guitar workouts of their two most recent long-players.

  Despite its mixed box office, Curiosa was still amongst the more successful US summer festivals of 2004, a solid achievement in a holiday season most notable for failures, including the cancellation of the once peerless Lollapalooza extravaganza. (Morrissey was a Lollapalooza headliner, which must have made Smith chuckle quietly.) The reviews of the Curiosa shows were just as fawning as the other bands’ attitude towards their veteran headliners. Melissa Auf Der Maur was one of many acts to thank The Cure from the stage, declaring Curiosa “the most romantic tour of the summer”.

  “Frontman Robert Smith kept to himself throughout much of the set,” MTV noted of the New York show of July 31, “stepping away from the mic to rock gently with his head down. Luckily the props, light show and a large video screen … made up for the lack of visual allure.”

  If Smith was a subdued on-stage presence, then Simon Gallup was a man resurrected, wielding his low-slung bass like a jackhammer. “Compared to Smith and his other stiff bandmates, Gallup was a dance machine on par with the most fervent in the crowd,” MTV declared. “Shuffling his feet and throttling the neck of his instrument, he energetically rode the songs’ weaving basslines that are responsible for The Cure’s grooviness … often overlooked in favour of Smith’s gloomy lyrics, uppity hairdo and penchant for wearing black.”

  While Curiosa wasn’t quite the cash cow promoters had hoped for, The Cure hit the jackpot with three Mexico City sell-outs on September 4 to 6. More than 50,000 fans turned up in total, earning The Cure a handy $696,622 each night.

  Back in London, a buoyant (and flush) Cure was given the full MTV Icons treatment. Looking like the Gothic answer to the English royal family, the band watched on while AFI, Blink-182, Razorlight, The Deftones and the evening’s host, the God of Fuck himself, Marilyn Manson, worshipped at the altar of The Cure. Backstage, past Cure-ists such as Porl Thompson mingled with the current line-up, which was fast approaching its first decade together. One Cure insider, with whom I spoke, was underwhelmed by the night. “The band looked bemused and bored at the same time,” I was told. “The after-party for this ‘event’ was mostly uneventful, unlike other Cure after-parties. It was mostly drunken band members dealing with people asking them what brand of hair products they favour.” But the simple fact that MTV anointed The Cure as icons almost 20 years after they first played the Tim Pope clip for ‘Let’s Go To Bed’ said plenty about these suburban survivors.

  Most people I spoke to for this book weren’t that surprised by The Cure’s reluctance to lie down and die. To Phil Thornalley, former Cure producer and bassist, it simply comes down to Smith’s ability to pen killer tunes. “To me, anybody who writes great pop songs, that’s how you attain longevity in my arena. If somebody has a lot of hits, for me, that’s why you remember them. I think Robert has written some cracking pop songs. Sure, the other artistic thing has come along the way as well, but frankly I’m not interested in that.”

  Cure co-founder Lol Tolhurst, quite reasonably, figures that the band’s ongoing success is more than the work of one man. “The whole thing for Robert is that The Cure is his whole life; sometimes it’s a bit of an albatross, as well. But I’d have to say th
at without other people’s input, it wouldn’t have happened. Simon’s still there, but that’s about it. It’s not the way it was. I think it’s telling that Robert is yet to embark on a solo career – The Cure is more than Robert and more than an idea. It’s a whole set of circumstances and people, without whom it would never have happened. It’s a big soap opera, pretty much.

  “To me, sometimes it feels very strange to read stuff about myself that refers to me 16 or 17 years ago,” added Tolhurst. “It’s like I got frozen in time. I was that, but I’m not that any more. My part in The Cure was all encompassing, all involving. That’s really what I want people to know: it really was my baby, too, for a long time. But I have no axe to grind, I would really, really hate to be seen as the Noel Redding to Robert’s Jimi Hendrix. I’m not an old, bitter man – it’s something I’m very proud of. There’s always two sides to the story – the truth is that it’s a little more involved than people might have thought.”

  The Cure’s original bassist, Michael Dempsey, is convinced that their success is based upon Robert Smith’s “unshakable” approach to his craft. “What motivated him then [when the band first formed] motivates him now,” he said, when we spoke in 2005, “which is quite an achievement. He has the same kind of ethic now as he had then. Generally, he’s unshakable in the way he’s gone about it – he’s hard working, solid. He has a sense of purpose that’s gone through fashion and fad. It’s quite rare to see a band do that and prosper.”

  “There are a lot of Cure fans out there now,” figured Steve Lyon, the producer of Wild Mood Swings. “It’s also cool to like the Banshees and The Creatures now, they have that rebellious nature.” Fellow musicians, such as Mark Francombe of Cranes, credit some of The Cure’s longevity to their deft ability to move in and out of the spotlight. “[They’re still about] because they know how to rest,” Francombe said. “Do an album, tour it and then take a few years off. And luckily there are 500 Goths in every town in the western world, so their albums still get bought.” Yet the band continues to hover on the brink of a break-up: even current member Perry Bamonte has no idea what lies ahead. “It’s really hard to call The Cure’s next move,” he told me in 2005. “The Cure are always on the verge of imploding, but have lasted 25 years. I never take a single day for granted.”

  Whatever his next move, Robert Smith – who, of course, now truly is The Cure – stands as one of rock’s great survivors, fronting a band that simply refuses to die. His immediately recognisable appearance has transcended the world of rock’n’roll and multi-million sales – simply look at Edward Scissorhands, the Tim Burton creation given life on screen by Johnny Depp: that’s Robert Smith, just with added hedge trimmers. It was one of the most iconic Hollywood looks of the Nineties and could be traced directly back to the man from Crawley.

  As 2005 dawned, and Smith finally approved the reissues of early Cure albums, reports of The Cure’s demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Smith has threatened that, just like Stone Mick Jagger, he might keep rolling for some time yet.

  “I can even imagine doing this at 60; I don’t care what others think,” Smith said recently. “As long as I make music with people I like it’s wonderful; it’s something most people dream of. But 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.”

  Whatever he decides to do, however, it’s clear that wherever a black overcoat and eyeliner is to be found, there’ll be a clutch of Cure fans, ever faithful, still arguing the merits of Pornography over Faith or Disintegration. And no one can lay claim to the same evangelical level of adulation from their devotees as The Cure. Irrespective of the band’s future, however, Robert Smith has given one concrete assurance: “I will most certainly not be wearing black and lipstick in 2011. That’s a guarantee.”

  * Smith didn’t hold back at the after-show party either, as it turns out. He even argued with Bowie about floating himself on the stock market, which had produced a handy $50-plus million pay-off. “We disagreed on almost every point,” Smith said afterwards. “I had drunk too much and I was quite aggressive.”

  * The Mark Saunders mix found a home on Join The Dots.

  * In 1997 he predicted this, stating: “The final thing that will come out will be my version of the greatest hits. It will be my personal selection of what I think our best work is.”

  * Mind you, the same could be said for The Cure Trilogy DVD, which captured their November 2002 one-off in Berlin where the band played Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers, back to back.

  † No figures are publicly available regarding the sale, but Parry – who then retired to his native New Zealand and rejoined Fourmyula – clearly pocketed many millions of pounds.

  Postscript

  Of course, there’s always an unexpected twist lurking nearby in the Cure saga, and early 2005 was no exception. However, this time it occurred at a point when it seemed as though the current band members were finally at peace with each other. But then again, The Cure had a long history of flameouts, if you consider the sackings of Lol Tolhurst or Andy Anderson, or the mind games that eased out Michael Dempsey to make way for Simon Gallup.

  On April 6, 2005, Craig Parker, the webmaster of Cure fan site Chain of Flowers, heard a rumour that roadie-cum-guitarist Perry Bamonte and long-time keyboardist Roger O’Donnell were no longer in the group. On a more official level, it was confirmed that manager Daryl Bamonte was relieved of his duties on April 18 and that Smith would now control all Cure business.

  Then, when Parker heard from a reliable source that Smith had actually started work on a new Cure album, he contacted O’Donnell, who denied knowing anything about the record. By May 20, however, as Parker told me, “things really went insane”. An official release announced that the Cure had booked summer festival dates in France and Spain (plus an appearance at the Bob Geldof Live 8 extravaganza). The unofficial word was that this would be a “new” three-piece Cure of Smith, drummer Jason Cooper and long-time Smith ally Simon Gallup. Again, Parker asked O’Donnell about the shows and was told that “it was probably just rumours”.

  Meanwhile, a fake email began circulating that the “new” Cure would comprise Smith, drummer Keith Airey and former Smith confidante (and toxic twin) Steve Severin. Given that Smith and Severin had fallen out almost 20 years earlier, without as much as a Christmas card in between, this reunion seemed very unlikely. Although Parker quickly began to doubt the authenticity of the email, he posted this “news” on his website, and a source close to the band wrote to him to confirm that The Cure was now indeed a trio, but denied the involvement of Severin and Airey. (“It is true that we are talking again, but I haven’t spoken to Robert since this story broke,” Severin told Billboard.com. “All I know is that we are working together on making the most exciting remaster of Blue Sunshine possible.”) Meanwhile, on the band’s official website, www.thecure.com, Smith began attacking Parker and disputing the accuracy of the news section of Chain of Flowers.

  Again, Parker emailed O’Donnell, and between them they dismissed the Severin rumours as “a bad joke”. When Parker went back to his Cure “insider”, he was informed that Team Cure 2005 had actually recorded five songs, having reunited with Three Imaginary Boys’ producer Mike Hedges. It was like 1978 all over again.

  And this news was true: Smith, Gallup and Cooper had re-recorded the tracks ‘Three Imaginary Boys’, ’Seventeen Seconds’, ‘Faith’ and ‘Pornography’ for a planned iTunes special, along with a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Love’ for an Amnesty International CD.

  Yet as late as May 23, neither O’Donnell nor Bamonte had been contacted by Smith regarding their place in the band or these new sessions. But a day later, on May 24, O’Donnell emailed Parker one more time and advised him that both he and Bamonte were now officially out of The Cure.

  Writing on his own website, www.rogerodonnell.com, on May 27, O’Donnell tried, but failed, to hide his disdain. “As of Tuesday this week I
am no longer a member of The Cure,” he wrote. “It was sad to find out after nearly 20 years the way I did but then I should have expected no less or more.” His solo album, The Truth In Me, heavily influenced by Bjork’s voices-only set Medulla, was released in October 2006.

  When I asked O’Donnell about his dismissal, he was abrupt. “I’m more interested in the future than the past now,” he wrote via email, “and I think I can only do harm by talking about the past. But thanks for your interest.”

  Perry Bamonte was just as surprised, and upset, by his sacking. On his website, www.perrybamonte.de, he spelled out his reaction to the news and the feedback he’d been receiving from startled Cure fans. “I’m really overwhelmed by the amount of fans who have written to me and you and to all the Cure websites – I never knew I had that much of an impact or how important a part of The Cure I was for so many people. Please pass on my thanks to everyone for their support and compliments and their best wishes for my future. I wish the band well and bear no grudge. I have no definite plans at this time but will inform you if I become involved in any other projects. Once again – Thank You!” He later described his reaction to the sacking as “something like relief”. Bamonte now runs Bamonte Artist Management, representing Das Shadow and Paul “P-Dub” Walton. His long-finished country album, recorded under the alias Pat Gently, has yet to be released.