Fact #157708

25 YEARS OF THE CURE by Johnny Black

It was Sunday July 16, 1978, and Polydor records A&R man Chris Parry was sitting at home leafing through the papers while listening to a demo tape. “I just heard the lyric, ‘Drip drip drip’, and I thought, ‘That’s rather nice’. So I played the tape again.”

The song, 10:15 Saturday Night, had been sent to him by The Cure, a young Crawley band who, despite having already had their fingers burned once courtesy of a short-lived contract with Hansa Records, were coming back for more.

The Hansa deal had floundered because the label wanted the band to record cover versions including, according to legend, It Might As Well Rain Until September. “I was determined that we had to do our own songs,” remembers Robert Smith, with evident distaste.

Fortunately, it was Smith’s songs that attracted Parry. Even more fortunately, Parry was an enviably shrewd A&R man - he had already tried to sign both The Sex Pistols and The Clash to Polydor. Undeterred when both of those were lured elsewhere, he hit paydirt by discovering The Jam, and there’s little doubt that The Cure also being a trio was a significant factor in their favour.

“We met in a pub near Polydor, and he had bird-shit on his shoulder,” laughs Smith. “We liked that because he was the first person we’d met in the music business who didn’t take himself too seriously.”

Parry was so convinced of The Cure’s shining future that, instead of signing them to Polydor, he quit his highly paid job and started his own label, Fiction Records, in order to be able to work on them full-time.

Just a month after releasing their debut single, Killing An Arab, in December 1978, The Cure found themselves on the front cover of influential rock weekly Sounds and never looked back.

Their first album, Three Imaginary Boys, followed early in 1979, signalling the start of a 25-year career which has seen The Cure, despite personnel changes and rock’n’roll dramas that would wipe out lesser bands, surge from strength to strength, selling over 27 million albums worldwide without ever making concessions to the mainstream.

To celebrate The Cure’s first memorable quarter century, Polydor is now set to release a De Luxe edition of Three Imaginary Boys, much to the delight of the label’s product manager Joe Black. “The original album was released in the same week that I started a Saturday job in The Other Record Shop in Stirling,” he recalls fondly. “So I’ve loved this album since my first day in the music business.”

Black’s personal love affair with the album has been intensified by the opportunity to work closely with Robert Smith on its historic re-issue. “The idea of De Luxe editions,” he explains, “is to take classic albums and transform them into historic documents by adding a CD of bonus tracks from the same period, plus memorabilia, previously unseen photographs and detailed sleeve notes. Robert has such an acute understanding of what Cure fans want that his participation has been invaluable.”

The album was re-mastered at Abbey Road by senior mastering engineer Chris Blair who reveals that working with Smith can present its own little problems. “I tend to start work at 6.00am which is, as near as I can make out, just about the time that Robert Smith goes to bed. As a result, this was the first project that I’ve mastered entirely by e-mail.”

The job was further complicated because Blair found himself working from source material that varied from good quality studio masters of original album tracks to what he refers to as “cassettes of dubious quality” of rarities and demos. “Sometimes Robert would transfer rare source tapes onto Pro-Tools, then send those to me on 24 bit DAT, and I’d EQ and doctor them up here.”

Although The Cure were perceived at first as a punk band, it’s obvious in retrospect that the songs on Three Imaginary Boys, were far removed from the studied simplicity of punk, and that The Cure was destined to be much more than part of a passing wave.

By the time of their first hit single, A Forest, the band’s original bassist Michael Dempsey had departed, to be replaced by Simon Gallup who has remained, through numerous line-up changes, The Cure’s most constant member apart from Smith himself.

Their second album, Seventeen Seconds (1980), was a more accomplished and consistent offering, but it took off in Europe before gaining a foothold at home.

George McManus, Polydor’s marketing head at the time, remembers Chris Parry resorting to desperate measures to overcome the difficulty of explaining The Cure to the company’s European executives. “Chris worked very hard on their behalf and I’ll never forget one international marketing conference where he ended up doing a pogo dance in front of all the European representatives to get the idea of punk bands across to them. People forget how new and different it all was.”

Smith too acknowledges the part Parry played, pointing out that, “He got us touring abroad from the very early days, which made me realise that we didn’t have to depend entirely on Britain.” This knowledge proved particularly comforting over the years on several occasions when, baffled by The Cure’s frequent innovations and stylistic-changes, the UK rock press turned against them.

By the established standards of early 80s music business logic, their third album, Faith, was an almost suicidal move. Here, from a band perched on the brink of potentially huge mainstream success, was an album of morbid, brooding introspection, where every despair-laden track was clearly designed to scrape hard against the fragile sensitivities of daytime radio airplay programmers like squeaky chalk on a blackboard.

Nevertheless, The Cure’s popularity was not only maintained but increased by Faith because their fans recognised and responded to the passionate intensity of the music. “We got very little airplay in those days,” says Robert, “except from John Peel. Our first Peel session was such a big deal, and when we played at the Reading festival, even though we were very low on the bill, he invited us into his caravan and plied us with drink all day.”

Smith was, however, fast approaching disaster. Mike Hedges, who worked with them first as engineer, then producer, on the first three albums, watched his deterioration at close quarters. “Robert was well brought up,” points out Hedges, “so he was always polite and personable as well as exciting to work with. But people under-estimate how hard he was having to work back then. He was writing the songs and making the decisions. He would record an album then immediately set off on tour. There was never any rest.”

Their work-method in the studio, Hedges says, involved, “drinking until they dropped, but working until they were no longer capable.”

Hedges had moved on by the time they recorded the fourth album, Pornography, but Smith’s account of its making reveals them sinking to even lower depths. “We’d all arrive, laden down with booze, and dump our cans and drugs on the mixing desk, and then we’d each set out own little areas of the studio where we’d work. There was even an extra area set aside for visitors.”

Smith was living the excessive life his music seemed to demand, pumping almost every chemical stimulant known to mankind into his body. His resulting erratic behaviour caused so much friction that, after a post-gig fist fight in Brussels, Simon Gallup briefly left the band.

The darkest hour, traditionally, is just before the dawn, and it was in the midst of this chaotic situation, with Smith and drummer-turned-keyboardist Lol Tolhurst the only remaining members of the band, that things began to turn around. They recorded the song Let’s Go To Bed as a throwaway slice of superficial pop, of which Smith remains surprisingly dismissive, saying, “I had a meeting with Chris Parry where I said, ‘OK, what do you want for the next single? I’ve got Let’s Go To Bed, which is crass and stupid, and I’ve got Just One Kiss which is soft and dreamy.’ And, of course, he wanted Let’s Go To Bed.”

A major new player entered The Cure story at this point. “I had made a very bizarre video for Soft Cell,” says Tim Pope. “In fact, I was probably the only really quirky video director around at the time, which made me ideal for The Cure.”

Let’s Go To Bed was the first of a remarkable run of 21 videos that Pope would ultimately make with The Cure. “Let’s Go To Bed was quite a structured shoot,” he notes. “We had a storyboard and everything, and we stuck to it. As time went by, however, the process became much more spontaneous and fluid, because we developed such a shared understanding of what we were trying to do.”

What emerged from Pope’s Let’s Go To Bed video was a hitherto unexpected aspect of The Cure – surreal humour. Smith and Tolhurst were seen goofing around in an almost cartoon-like bedroom, and the overt sexuality of the title was completely undermined by a closing shot in which the pair jump into separate bunk beds. Was this really the same Robert Smith who had sung of slaughtered pigs, bleeding ground and worms eating his skin on Pornography?

Let’s Go To Bed was also The Cure’s first single to be released in the USA, where it served the function of breaking them in California, but the band’s inherent instability around this time prevented them from capitalising on this potentially lucrative new market.

It wasn’t until 1985, when Simon Gallup returned along with guitarist Porl Thompson and new drummer Boris Williams that The Cure pulled itself back together. That summer’s single, Inbetween Days was by far the most potently commercial thing they’d ever done, and the attendant album, The Head On The Door, charted well in America, confirming that a whole new Transatlantic audience had discovered the band.   

“That album,” says Smith, “was the first time I felt I had a band that could play all the things I was hearing inside my head. I could suggest an idea or a sound to them and they could make it happen.”

Their internal problems, however, were not entirely over. Lol Tolhurst’s increasing drink dependency was making him impossible to work with. Although he remained in the band through the making of the next album, keyboardist Roger O’Donnell was drafted in to play any parts that were beyond Lol’s abilities.   

May 1986 saw the release of The Cure’s first compilation, Standing On A Beach, which delivered their first US Top 50 album placing, paving the way for the next release, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, to become their most successful album internationally, going platinum in the US and providing a bumper crop of hit singles, including Just Like Heaven, which Smith calls, “The best pop song The Cure has ever done. All the sounds meshed, it was one take, and it was perfect.”

This was the point at which the ears of every intelligent young American music fan were turning towards The Cure. “Hearing Robert Smith play a guitar solo for eight minutes to open up Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me,” says Marilyn Manson, “it was so arrogant, in some way, that it was beautiful and I was hooked from then on.”

As Manson’s stage image proves, apart from the music, Smith’s trademark look of teased-out black hair framing a heavily made-up pale face gashed open by bright red lips, was fast becoming a youth cult style all its own, with countless clones walking around in his image all over the world. Even though, as he himself frequently points out, his hair has often been cropped short, and he is often seen without make-up, that image remains the quintessential badge of Curedom.

Smith took the unhappy decision to excise Tolhurst from The Cure in February 1989, just before the release of Disintegration. An artistic triumph, and one of Smith’s proudest achievements, it was also their bleakest album since Pornography so, understandably, Polydor released it with some trepidation.   

To the delight of all parties, on release in May 1989, Disintegration delivered The Cure’s highest album placings yet, soaring to No3 in the UK and propelling them into the American Top 20 for the first time, where it earned another platinum certification. Now, with a stable band at the peak of its live power, they easily translated their performances onto the stages of the most massive US stadia, and watched as the album’s second single, Lovesong, soared to No2 in the Billboard chart.

Although the band maintained a relatively low profile as the 90s got underway, 1991 brought a BRIT Award as Best British Group and in May 1992, the Wish album made its debut at No1 in the UK and No2 in the US.

Regrettably, much of Smith’s time and energy was now unavoidably being channelled into a long-dreaded lawsuit brought by the embittered Lol Tolhurst who was claiming, among other things, ownership of the band’s name. When the London High Court ruled against Tolhurst on all counts in September 1994, it was finally possible to get back to work in earnest.   

By May 1996, when the next album, Wild Mood Swings, was released, a new Cure line-up had evolved, which remains to this day. Joining Smith, Gallup and O’Donnell were the band’s former roadie Perry Bamonte on guitar, and Jason Cooper on drums.

Despite Smith’s conviction that he was now fronting, “the best Cure line-up ever”, Wild Mood Swings suffered a lukewarm critical reaction in the UK, but nevertheless went Top Ten around the globe, enabling The Cure to mount their biggest tour ever, performing over 100 concerts to ecstatic crowds in some of the world’s most prestigious venues.

Creating the next album, the epic Bloodflowers, took up the bulk of 1999. Released in February 2000, and nominated for a Grammy, it’s an uncompromising piece of work that Smith remains justifiably enamoured of - the third chapter of the Dark Trilogy, along with Pornography and Disintegration.

The end of an era came in 2001 with the dissolution of the band’s career-spanning relationship with Fiction Records and Chris Parry.

These first years of the new millennium also saw Smith exploring the potential of several genre-spanning side-projects. He collaborated with Blink 182, vocalist Saffron from Republica, not one but two of David Bowies guitarists (Earl Slick and Reeves Gabrels), Junior Jack and Junkie XL, to name but a few, while the 1983 hit The Lovecats re-surfaced as a hip DJ bootleg, spliced with Missy Elliott, and as a cover version on the latest Tricky album.

Throughout his career, Smith had frequently declared that the next Cure album would be the last, and that a solo album was imminent. The press had begun to take such claims with a pinch of salt, but this lengthy period of external collaborations did seem to suggest that, finally, The Cure might be a thing of the past.

Then, while in Switzerland for the Festival Nyon, on July 25, 2002, Smith met up with legendary nu-metal producer and lifelong Cure fan Ross Robinson. “I knew after that first day of sitting talking to him that I wanted to work with him,” says Smith. “He re-awakened all the old passion for The Cure that was dormant in me; he reminded me why people love what we do so much...”    
Come the spring of 2004, when Robinson and The Cure were working together in London’s Olympic studios, another major project was unveiled. Tying up virtually all of the loose ends from the Fiction/Polydor years, The Cure released a lovingly compiled compendium of hard to find B-sides, rarities and re-mixes, in the fascinating 4-CD box set, Join the Dots.

Given Robinson’s track record with bands including Korn, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot, Smith saw an opportunity to make the most mind-bending all-out Cure sonic assault ever committed to disc, and that’s how it turned out, but not in quite the way he envisaged it. He acknowledges that, “I assumed, the same as everyone else, that Ross’s interest lay in our darker, bigger songs, but as work started I was surprised to discover that he was equally enthused by the pop side of the band  and what he really loves is the stuff that has the combination of intense emotion and melody.”

The resulting sessions were not easy. This was the first time ever that Smith had let go of the producer’s reins, and made an album where his role, like that of the other members, was simply as a performing musician. In the early stages of the relationship, as Robinson pushed them to achieve increasingly intense performances, there were tears and threats of violence but, as the sessions forged ahead, it was realised that Robinson’s obsessive quest for heightened emotion was resulting in the best album they’d made for years.   

“Ross made a very firm stipulation that I must sing live while the band played,” explains Robert, “because the response I get from the band playing live is different from what happens if we record the parts separately. The moment I start singing for real, everyone steps up. I’d never really noticed it like that before, but it’s the main reason why the performances on this album are different from anything we’ve recorded in the past. This is how I’d always imagined making records could be. Nothing comes close to what I felt while we were making this album.”

Released on June 29, 2004, under a new global three album deal with Geffen/Universal, the album was received as manna from heaven by fans and media alike. Not only did it restore The Cure’s status as an all-time great band, it lifted the flagging spirits of all those who despaired of a music industry that seemed headed relentlessly down the path of manufactured emotion-free pop.

With acclaim for the album still ringing in their ears, the Cure set off on another ambitious venture – the Curiosa travelling festival. “When we played the KROQ festival in Los Angeles in September of 2003,” says Smith, “Interpol and The Rapture were on the bill, which was the first time I’d seen either of them, and I was really taken with them. They were both very different but both really passionate and intense, and it started me thinking.”

His train of thought was that if he could find enough bands who shared The Cure’s spirit, or who had been directly influenced by the band, he could put together a festival that could transform the grind of touring into something that was enjoyable not just for the fans as a spectacle, but for the musicians as a shared experience.

Early indications were that US ticket sales for the summer were low. Artists were re-locating to smaller venues and, most dramatically, the Lollapalooza tour was cancelled for lack of interest. Even so, Smith persisted, and Curiosa went ahead, as a travelling caravan of eleven like-minded artists – The Cure, Muse, Mogwai, Interpol, Thursday, Cursive, Auf Der Mar, Scarling, Cooper Temple Clause, Head Automatica and The Rapture.

Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai thoroughly enjoyed the experience. “The first gig I ever went to was The Cure at the SEC in Glasgow on the Disintegration tour. Ever since, I’ve been fascinated by the diversity of the music they make, from very poppy to utterly morbid, so it was great to be able hang out with them and get to know them properly, at a time when they seem to have more enthusiasm for what they’re doing than ever before.”

Against the trend, Curiosa was the surprise hit of the summer, after which The Cure returned to the UK to be honoured with an MTV Icon Show, presented by Marilyn Manson, and featuring Blink 182, the Deftones, AFI and Razorlight all performing their favourite Cure songs.

An exhilarating show, it presented Smith as a complex and committed artist with an endearingly wide streak of self-deprecation – a bona fide English eccentric, seemingly bemused by his own success.

And yet, there’s another Robert Smith. Throughout their existence, Smith has guided The Cure, employing the skills and wielding the power more usually associated with biz-hardened rock managers. He controls not only their music but also their image, through album and poster art work, frequently created within the confines of the band. (Cure guitarist, Porl Thompson, created many covers over the years, and the new album features artwork drawn by several of Smith’s nieces and nephews.)

Smith’s imaginative imprint can be easily seen in their eccentric and atmospheric videos as well as in their stage shows. It is Smith too who has always shouldered responsibility for who to hire and fire for the ultimate good of The Cure as an entity, sometimes finding himself hated by former close friends as a result.

Loveably eccentric visionary or canny businessman? To survive and thrive in a notoriously unforgiving industry, Robert Smith has to be both, and nobody does it better.