Fact #169517

Robert Smith : Steve and I had the idea to do a record together back at the time of Faith.

Steve Severin : We’d agreed to do it long before The Creatures (a Siouxsie side-project) decided to do something. I think it was around the time that Robert was doing Faith that we thought of doing something together because, at the time, Robert was completely in The Cure and I was in The Banshees, so it would have been a mixture of the two groups. When it finally came out, it seemed like the other half of The Banshees’ Creatures.

Robert Smith : It turned out very different to what we’d imagined. It sounded like fifteen different groups, almost like a compilation album.

It was a fantastic time. Acid made me feel very connected to Severin. We used to walk around London, living in this Yellow Submarine cartoon world. It was really upbeat and fun, because I’d got rid of all the bad stuff with Pornography. When you’re taking acid with someone you really like then it’s really, really funny.

Chris Parry (owner, Fiction Records) : I didn’t want Robert to sing on the album because it would have been too like a Cure record and it would have damaged Fiction – someone else would have got the royalties while he was still under contract to me.

Robert Smith : I was determined to do the record, but there were contractual stipulations that prevented me from singing on anything except Cure records. We had the studio booked and everything, so it became a huge fight between me and Chris Parry where I was insisting on my right to do the album. The irony of it, of course, was that I didn’t have a clue what I was going to record. We didn’t have any songs ready or anything.

In the end, I did a deal with Parry that meant he could release Let’s Go To Bed as the A-side of the next Cure single if I could sing on three tracks of The Glove album.

The deal with Chris Parry was that he said Let’s Go To Bed had to be a single A-side because double A-sides confuse people. He said, ‘If Let’s Go To Bed doesn’t get into the Top 20 in at least four major territories, then our deal is off. You can leave Fiction, do what the hell you want.’ We’d reached crisis point. I thought he was a complete arsehole by this time. All he was trying to do was stop me playing with The Banshees, stop doing The Glove, stop playing with Tim Pope, stop everything other than making The Cure into a successful pop group.

Jeanette Landray (vocalist, The Glove) : As soon as I found out that Steve And Robert were doing an album I kept on at them to let me do something on it. They auditioned a lot of people for it but I ended up being the lucky one…

Robert Smith : We still had to have a singer for the rest of the album so we brought in Jeanette Landray, who was the girlfriend of Budgie in The Banshees, and also a dancer in Zoo, the Top Of The Pops dance troupe. She had never sung before.

We chose Britannia Row studios out of irony. It was Pink Floyd’s studio and the album was psychedelic. It was terrible actually. I was out of my head the whole time – I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing.

When we went into the studio, we ended up with fifteen songs after three days.

Steve Severin : The sessions were pretty insane. I don’t think we actually took any acid while we were making it but there was an ongoing party in Britannia Row studios. Marc Almond’s band would be there, The Associates … it was like a train station.

Robert Smith : We spent twelve weeks in the studio but actually recorded for about five days. The rest of the time was spent having an endless party to which we invited a succession of people. It was like a station - once they got really out of it, they'd be moved on and the next batch brought in. In between all this we'd record a piece of piano or drum.

Steve Severin : We were recording from six pm to six am. We’d go back home and unwind by watching video nasties. It went on and on, day after day.

Jeanette Landray : They recorded it at night, so I was doing that at night and rehearsing for a dance during the day. I felt really cut off from everything.

Steve Severin : It just naturally came about that we ended up sleeping all day and then getting up and working all night.

It's not psychedelia, though. Don't forget that it was recorded during the night and we were sometimes drunk or worse. We'd just sort of stagger over the keyboards and record something. That's one reason why we didn’t play live. There was no way that we could hope to recreate some of those moments on stage. No way.

Robert Smith : We were virtually coming out of the studio at six o’clock in the morning, watching all these really mental Japanese films by people like Kurosawa, we must have watched about 600 videos in all, and then we’d go to sleep and have these really demented dreams.

As soon as we woke up we’d go straight back into the studio so it was a bit like a mental assault course by the end. A lot of ideas from the films would be coming through in the songs and we were also buying loads of junk magazines and cutting them up to make murals.

Steve Severin : We had a shared interest in psychedelia, but we didn’t have any set idea of what we wanted to do. After a few pointless discussions we just went in and started writing songs, and eventually honed in on shared interests, one of which happened to be late 60s garbage, but nothing hippy-dippy. The problem for us was how we could get Barbarella onto the cover of a record without being seen as idiots.

Jeanette Landray (vocalist, The Glove) : Because it was so clearly Robert and Steve’s project, I had a strange role – involved but not with any say in the way things turned out, almost like a session musician really.

Robert Smith : Jeanette didn’t have enough time to work on the songs and I remember her being quite shocked because she had to sing lines like, ‘Fuck me to death’ in Sex-eye Make-up, but she was incredibly patient with us.

Jeanette Landray : I don’t know what I’d actually expected, but if I was offered something similar again I’d have a much clearer idea of the problems involved. I’m not bitter about it but I have had to fight to get this far and it did get me some very useful exposure, but I just under-estimated how little expression I’d have in the promotion of the album. I still feel like a faceless voice to some extent.

Robert Smith : To start with, I lived in a hotel but I couldn’t stand the stares from the staff when I came in at ten o’clock every morning so I went off to stay in Severin’s flat where we’d endlessly watch videos like Bad Timing, Videodrome, The Brood, Evil Dead, Helicopter Spies and Inferno.

Steve Severin : We'd get back to my flat about 6am sometimes, then we'd maybe watch a video before going to sleep. The next day, of course, when we went in to record the film would still be in our minds.For instance, one of the songs on the album, Sex-Eye-Makeup, is derived half from Bad Timing (a tortuous love affair) and half from a letter that Robert has. It was written by a madman to the Queen.

Robert Smith : For four weeks we lived a cultivated madness because we wanted to disorientate ourselves in order to make a good record.

Steve Severin : The idea that The Glove could get away with anything vanished very quickly because it became a real responsibility to get it to sound not indulgent.

Robert Smith : We didn’t want it to sound like a self-indulgent album made by two ageing hippies.

Steve Severin : I'd never really had the chance to play keyboards or drums before. We thought that if we just played the instruments we'd played before we'd have sounded up like a cross between The Cure and the Banshees. As it is, we experimented and came up with a new sound.

Robert Smith : Blue Sunshine was very much a summer album which was why we called it that. All those instruments, like kotos and dulcimers, are all very summery in feel and, yes, I suppose Blue Sunshine will remain as some sort of souvenir of that long, hot summer.

Although we had a great time making it, it was completely debilitating and aged me about ten years. I think it was due to us bringing out the worst in each other - the most excessive ideas.

Of course, it was very indulgent, which is why so few people here bought it but, overall, it sold quite well round the world, in some of the oddest places.
(Source : not known)