Although we had managed to wrest control of the recording process from Parry on Seventeen Seconds, and made the record we wanted to make, we were in a time of turmoil as a band. This wasn’t due to a particular situation within the band but had more to do with outside issues and family matters; Robert’s grandmother suddenly passed away and my mother was terminally ill with cancer.
Robert and I had both been brought up Catholic, and while we had moved on from the beliefs of our early years, we were actively looking for something new, something different to replace what we had been taught as children. It started with a single, the first thing we recorded for the new album: “Primary.”
We wrote a lot of Faith in the studio. We had been on the road constantly, switching between recording an album and touring. It needed to end, but we didn’t know how to get off the roundabout. Our friend Billy Mackenzie came to see us while we were recording. I miss Billy. He was one of the most charismatic people I have ever met, a truly creative soul—unique and wonderfully familiar at the same time. Michael had joined Billy’s band, The Associates, after he left The Cure, and he’d had a very interesting time playing bass for Billy.
Unfortunately, although Billy had many great qualities, he was also just a little too eccentric to last long in the crazy world of rock and roll. This may sound strange from the outside, but rock and roll, like most art forms of the past century, is now controlled by corporations and outside influences that have very little to do with artistic processes. The trick is to be able to surf along the wave of commercial success without destroying that which gave birth to your art.
That’s something Robert has always managed to do well. He’s most definitely an artist, but he is also a pragmatic person when it comes to the business of music—and, believe me, it’s a business. A right old business.
As we went along in our contract with Fiction Records we would have yearly options, which meant that once a year Fiction would pick up the option to our contract and agree to make and market another record. It was an unfair arrangement in some ways, as it kept us on a very short leash with only the next record as a certainty. They dangled the carrot of an advance for each option to help sweeten the deal. Many bands in this situation splurged on items they perceived would make them look like rock stars, that is, flashy cars, expensive clothes, and so on.
But not The Cure. Under Robert’s leadership, we took that advance, put it in the bank, and paid ourselves a wage each month that helped us all have some kind of financial security.
Not so for Billy Mackenzie, who spent his money on a posh flat and a vintage Mercedes despite the fact that he didn’t have a license to drive a car! Michael drove it for him and one night they crashed, so that was the end of that trapping of excess. Billy also liked to hire famous orchestras for recording sessions, so his recording budget was spent pretty quickly.
I always remind young musicians that record labels are like banks. They give you a loan to make your music, then tell you how to use the money, and at the end of the day they want it all back and then some! But Robert, despite his otherworldly side, was always smart enough to not go down that particular road, and for that I’m eternally grateful, as The Cure has provided for me for most of my adult life.
As I’ve said, a lot of Faith was written in the studio, and we were now a three-piece again, consisting of myself, Robert, and Simon. Matty had left at the end of the tour in Australia. The tour had been pretty damn great, really. We sold out the gigs everywhere we went, as Parry had a lot of connections in that part of the world, having grown up in New Zealand. Unfortunately, Matty was one of those people who was not really designed to be in a band that’s on the road for any length of time. Being in a touring band is rather like being married to the people you work with. You live with each other 24/7 for months on end, and the smallest irritant can become a very large dispute if you’re not careful.
On our trip down under, Robert, Simon, and I spent a lot of time together, but Matty went off on his own, both before the gigs and after. We didn’t see much of him, and that destroyed the camaraderie of the band. For instance, we spent about a month on Bondi Beach. We stayed at one hotel and went out to play gigs nearly every night all over Sydney and environs. It was a glorious time, really. We would play the gig to hordes of people, go out to the clubs of Kings Cross until 4 a.m., then sleep a few hours before getting up to jog (yes, jog) along Bondi Beach and go for a swim. That’s how we got ready for the next night’s gig. Everyone, that is, except Matty.
Matty also had a different view of music. He wanted, like Porl before him, to play much more complicated versions of the songs than we felt was necessary. The beauty of The Cure has always been “less is more.” That is especially true with the songs from Seventeen Seconds. They rely on simplicity. Their ultimate strength is their minimalism. Some of that minimalism came from a conscious wish, and in my case some of it came from a limited ability. That wasn’t exciting enough for Matty. Occasionally he would sneak in a little frilly embellishment to his part on a song and I would see Robert grimace. While it’s true that we were pretty democratic in the way the band was run (we each received an equal share of the tour income and a portion of the music royalties) and everyone had a say, if the majority of the band wanted something done a particular way, then that’s the way it was done. Either Matty never reconciled that part or The Cure wasn’t meant to be his band.
At the end of the tour in Perth, we had about a week to wait before we got on a plane home to the UK. It was pretty obvious to all that after the tour Matty wouldn’t be in the band anymore. To his credit, when we got home he called up Robert and said he didn’t think it was going to work anymore. So it was an amicable ending between Matty and Robert and a relief for the rest of us.
Robert and I had spent a lot of time talking about death on that tour—not as a morbid preoccupation, but how it is something totally abstract until someone you love or know dies. As I’ve said, my mother was very ill and his grandmother had passed away, so it was on our minds a lot. There was a period during the recording of Faith where we were swapping studios and it was just going on and on. We were redoing everything, nothing was getting finished, and we were all rather exasperated about it.
Our frustration reached its zenith when we recorded in Abbey Road’s new room—the penthouse, I think it was called. They had some new equipment in there and we were getting used to it when Billy Mackenzie came to visit. Just his presence had an uplifting effect on us, and the next few days we got quite a lot more done than we had previously. I recorded the fast tom fills on “Doubt” in that room at the top of Abbey Road, and then Robert came in and really nailed the vocals. Things were finally coming together, but I was about to learn the truth of the phrase “Art imitates life.”
“I am not afraid to die,” my mother said in an airless whisper. She was certainly dying. She had a large black mass in her chest that had been diagnosed as terminal cancer. It had grown, undetected, for some years now. It was too big to operate on, so they tried chemotherapy and radiation treatments. It was a hard thought for me to process when she informed me she had been told by her doctors that she had just three months to live. She didn’t want to lose her dignity and become a drooling, incontinent mess at the end, so she told me she would go as soon as she’d said goodbye to everyone she wanted to say goodbye to.
“I know where I’m going after this world and I’m just going to say goodbye to everyone and go.”
With slow, painful movements, she showed me the newly pricked blue-black target tattoo on her skin where the technician would aim the deadly beam in the hopes of destroying the tumor, while leaving the healthy cells untouched. Her hair was falling out in clumps because of the treatment, leaving a gray wisp across her once full head of hair.
I was twenty-two years old. Everything told me this was the end for her, but I didn’t want her to die. Not now, with all the good things that were just starting to happen for me.
The Cure was about to go on a month-long tour of Europe that would end in Holland with our unique circus-tent show. We had finished the Faith album sessions, and before the tour started I went to visit my mother in my sister’s house on the south coast of England in the very English town of Poole. My father was a full-blown alcoholic by this time and had elected to stay home and ignore the terrible future by clinging to his oblivion, unaware of anything but his own wants and needs, selfish bastard that he was.
My sisters despised him for this, especially the youngest, but I had no feelings one way or the other. It was just what he always did. I knew no different. I didn’t expect him to change his behavior. My father, a Second World War veteran, had never really figured in my life, mostly by his own volition. He had returned to England in 1945 after fifteen years’ service in His Majesty’s Royal Navy to find a country locked in postwar austerity, and the thrill of world travel and battle became a diluted and fading memory.
He came home to a young wife he didn’t really know with a four-year-old son to take care of, a four-year-old that he doubted was his in the first place. There have always been dark mumblings in my family about Canadian soldiers stationed near our wartime home and my Canadian “uncle’s” valiant efforts one dark blackout night to save my twenty-one-year-old mother’s virtue from marauding drunken squaddies. And darker still, the hint of a thankful reward from Mother that may have been the reason for my father’s frown and my elder brother’s certainty that “Dad never loved me.” Either way, my father retreated into introspection and drink upon his return and this never changed. People are still amazed when I tell them that I cannot recall a single pleasant talk, hug, or kiss from my father the whole time I grew up with him. Nowadays we might subscribe to the theory he had posttraumatic stress disorder, as, truth be told, he had seen and experienced some horrific events in the China Seas, but back then all he was to me was a grumpy recluse that I tried my best to avoid.
I suppose this explains why, at the end of his life, I cut him a little more slack, but my sisters never forgave him. One of my last memories of my dad is from a cold, wet winter afternoon at his home when he played another ramshackle sea shanty on the piano to drunkenly accompany his rasping vocals. I don’t think he ever knew what I did, or what any of his children did in the world, really. He was on his own course into the setting sun, and damn and blast anyone else. He was the epitome of slow, simmering resentment. I had long ago decided that I would become the polar opposite of my father, whatever it took.
We sat silently for a few moments in my mother’s stuffy, overheated room. I couldn’t catch my breath. The clock on the wall ticked the only sound in the room besides my mother’s labored breathing. “I guess you’re off to see that girl now,” she said, except she used a more canine term, which shocked me a little. I suppose she realized she’d reached the end, and such desperation, although unseemly, was only to be expected. I was, after all, her youngest son, and she was right: I was going to leave and meet my girlfriend, Vivienne, before I left for foreign shores. I kissed her goodbye, and I would never see my mother alive again.
I started our Dutch tour with the knowledge that I would be one parent less when I returned.
It was a strange convoy for a rock band; the semitrailers with lights and equipment, the band and crew buses, and then the trucks and caravans from the circus. Rock-and-roll gypsies indeed. The Cure circus tour of the Netherlands.
Sometimes we set up in a park, sometimes in a car park, playing each night to a couple of thousand ardent Dutch fans. This was the first place outside of the UK where we’d started to get a proper following. Normally it would be a very joyous occasion, but my mother’s impending end weighed heavily on me and tainted the tour with a sullen, insistent throb, like a bad toothache that robs you of calmness and equanimity and permeates every facet of your existence.
I told the tour manager that if he heard from my brother about my mother’s condition, not to tell me until the gig was over. I felt I owed that much to the fans who had saved up their hard-earned money to see us. My problems were not their concern, and besides, I felt my mother would approve of that. She was always a champion of our endeavors as a band.
The circus tent was arranged by our Dutch promoter, Fred Zylstra, a slightly older counterculture type, as were many promoters of The Cure in the early days. I think he loved our youthful spirit and was determined to help us realize some of our more outlandish ambitions. By this time we had played in many of the clubs of Holland and we were looking for a different venue, one that wasn’t so rock and roll, to perform in. We felt it would differentiate us from the rest of our peers to do something like this, and we were right. I can’t recall if it was us or Fred who thought of the circus tent idea, but it was a great one. Every day, thirty or forty circus people hoisted this huge blue-and-white striped canvas tent up into the air and prepared it for a most unlikely stage show: The Cure Circus! There were no other performers besides us, and at first I was concerned it might be too ambitious, but we sold out each gig, and every night the tent fabric was sodden with sweat from the new religion we were bringing.
There were lighter moments amid the dark, impending doom. Fred would reply to every request we made with a curt, “Is possible.”
For example, “Can we get some beer, Fred?” would be met with, “Is possible.”
“How about more ice, Fred?”
“Is possible.”
We expected and received this reply no matter what we asked for. Fred’s stoic demeanor, probably born of many, many tours with drunken English hooligans masquerading as musical artists, never changed. This both intrigued us and piqued our imagination. Perhaps Fred was not as docile and calm as he seemed; maybe under that relaxed, cool facade lurked a darker heart. . . . We needed to know.
One day Simon asked, “So, Fred, are you a murderer?”
Fred looked him straight in the eye and deadpanned, “Is possible!”
We all liked Fred. He was our champion for Holland.
Then the dreaded call came. My brother informed me that my mother had taken a turn for the worse and I should come home at once. I talked with Robert and Simon and we agreed that I should leave immediately. They graciously offered to cut the tour short, but I insisted I would be back as soon as possible to play the few remaining gigs. It’s what Mother would have wanted, and I felt I needed to have some normality in my life at that time. And normal was playing in a circus tent.
Our roadie Gary Biddles and I were chauffeured in a car to Amsterdam to wait for a plane to Gatwick. We checked into a hotel, but sleep didn’t come very easily. Eventually, I drifted off in the wee hours. The alarm came too soon, and after a brief shower we got on the plane home from Schiphol. In a strange twist of fate, Gary had to appear in court in the UK on the very day I had to run home, so he was at least able to be company for my horribly screaming head.
Dead. She’s dead. I know, it said.
I’m not sure if this is the point where I pushed off into unknown territories with no lifeline, or if it was simply the very small start of my real adult life. Up until this point Robert, Simon, and I had existed in a kind of bubble of pre-adult life. We were granted the freedoms of maturity but with few of the real responsibilities. Rock and roll is like that: it makes children of you all if you’re not careful.
We actively fought against being babied too much, mainly because we at least realized that we were ripe for being taken advantage of. We considered ourselves reasonably intelligent, but a sixth sense warned us that we might be fair game for the sharks of the music machine. So we cloaked our uncertainty in an adolescent bravado bolstered by the punk manifesto we subscribed to—along with a fair amount of Tennent’s Lager (the one with the pictures of lovely Scottish ladies on the cans).
I was met at the airport by my brother Roger in his VW Beetle. He hugged me as I came through the gate.
“Lol, you’re too late, I’m afraid. She died last night.”
The words stabbed like knives into my heart. Of course I expected this, but you’re never really ready when the moment comes. I’ve since had other dealings with death, and each time it’s as if the world is simultaneously both too fast and too slow. You want time to pass quickly so the pain will subside, like you do with a badly stubbed toe or a bit tongue, but you also wish the moment to be frozen by some magic so that its horrible power will be diminished or destroyed. Impossible, really.
Gary and I said goodbye and he departed to the courthouse.
“See you tonight to fly back?” he asked.
I nodded in the affirmative. I recalled that the first time my mother had met Gary, he’d been face down, spread-eagled on our front lawn, hopelessly drunk on Christmas Eve. Classic. No more of that, I supposed.
We got in my brother’s car, my eyes moist with tears, and drove to the funeral home to “see” Mother one last time. Along the way he filled me in on the grisly details, and at some point I noticed we weren’t driving on the motorway anymore but had pulled into a turnout.
“Where do you think Mum is now, Lol?”
“I’m not even thinking about that yet, Rog,” I said, somewhat surprised. “My head can’t even get around the dead part yet, even though I knew it was coming.”
“Well, Lol. I think . . . ” and then I realized he was giving me the pitch. My brother Roger was a recent convert of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. God bless him. I was not in the mood right then for his latest religious theory and I told him so.
“You need to stop with the sales stuff here, Rog.”
Because he was my brother and loved me, he did, for the moment.
We pulled up in front of the mortuary in Crawley. I hadn’t been to Crawley for a while, but it still had that dark drizzle of despair soaking everything and holding everyone down. As we were parking I idly wondered how Mother’s soul would manage to escape this sodden earthly prison.
Inside the fake oak doors of the funeral home my sisters appeared. We were going to see our freshly embalmed mother together as a family. I thought it was funny how it took death to get the Tolhursts together. We awkwardly shuffled into the room where nobody ever really wanted to be. The room of death, where we must all end up. Shit, I hated being there.
There was a curtain of red velvet that the funeral director beckoned us over to, and then pushed aside so we could go in and see Mother lying in her coffin. The smell of formaldehyde and dead flowers that is familiar to anyone who has ever entered one of these places lingered in the air.
Then I saw her: my mother, Daphne. I had often thought I would want to place a last kiss upon my mother’s face to bid her farewell, but when this moment came the grotesquely twisted mask her face now resembled was nothing like the mother I had known and loved. I gasped a little. The lipstick was just a little too bright and too red, and her face was set at a strange and unnatural angle. I also felt very strongly that my mother’s spirit was no longer present. This was nothing more than an empty glove without a hand in it. Wherever she was, she wasn’t there. Whatever remained in this wooden box was not the mother I had known for twenty-two years, but just an empty shell. So I did not, could not, touch her. My lips did not kiss hers one last time.
I stood to the side, holding my oldest sister Vicki’s hand, and then it started, the comments, a whisper from one of my sisters about the hideously presented mannequin. Then gradually we started to laugh, and eventually we doubled up in screaming guffaws at what we saw before us. It was a terribly human reaction to a horrible surprise. We were in a state of shock, I later surmised.
Slowly I released my grip on Vicki’s hand as we realized that this was how it was going to be now—the parent we loved was gone, and the one we didn’t love would need to be looked after. That little realization came fast in the cold, sterile little red-curtained room, and as we walked out together we knew our family would never be the same again.
Outside I discussed the grim but necessary details with my brother. Father was too drunk to comprehend much, so we had to organize what was needed. The funeral was arranged for the day after the last tour date in seven days. We adjourned for a very somber lunch.
I met Gary at Gatwick at 5 p.m., and we boarded the plane back to Holland just as the dying sun was disappearing into the black night. I looked out of the small window of the plane and saw at the side of the runway the silver birch trees so familiar to anyone who ever lived in southern England. They looked like silver arms thrust up into the sky, pleading for something from the angry gods, and I knew everything had changed.
We landed in Schiphol, walked through the airport entrance, and saw a man with a crudely handwritten sign saying “Tokhuurst.” I took that as a Dutch version of my last name and approached the driver. “Yes, that’s me,” I said, and we walked to the car just a few yards away from Schiphol’s main exit. I climbed in, Gary plonked down in the other seat, and the driver said, “I’ll take you to the show, okay?” I said yes, and off we went to the circus tent. Within an hour we had arrived, and I was ushered into the little blue and white caravan we were using as a dressing room. I could hear the noise of the soundcheck. Gary went off to investigate. A few minutes later, Robert and Simon came into the caravan. They both came over and hugged me. We didn’t say anything, just sat there in the gloom for a couple of minutes.
“I want to play tonight,” I finally said. “Daphne would’ve liked that.”
“You know if you don’t feel like doing the rest of the tour we can go home,” Robert offered.
“No, I think this is the only thing that’s going to keep me sane. I’d rather we did the gigs.”
Both Robert and Simon nodded in agreement, and so we did the remaining circus tour. That first night back is burned into my mind forever. I was playing the songs with a ferocious intensity, madly slashing and berating the God who would let this happen to me when I was so young. I felt cast out of heaven and thrown down to earth like a damaged archangel.
After the gig we all sat in our trailer with nobody else, just us, The Cure. We meditated on the finality of death, which, strangely enough, helped lift my spirits to a place where I could carry on. Sometime later in the hotel bar, Ted Page, our sound guy, proffered a cassette tape to me.
“Tonight’s show, Lol. Thought you might like it.”
I took it from Ted, thanked him, and slumped back into my seat in the dark and smoky bar. It had been the longest day of my short life, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep without copious amounts of alcohol and drugs, so I started with a large glug from my bottle. Sometime later, I imagine, I passed out.
Coming to in my cold hotel room, I prepared for the day, and suddenly it hit me again. Brown bread, dead. Mother’s dead. Time passed in a stupor of sadness. Several days later we went up to Groningen in the north. I looked at the map on the bus and saw something strange. We had to pass over a long causeway on the A7 motorway—the Afsluitdijk dam—on the way to Friesland and Groningen. The sea was on one side and a huge lake of fresh water on the other made by damming up the Zuiderzee. In the process, the truncated Zuiderzee had miraculously turned from salt water to fresh, becoming the IJsselmeer, the largest manmade freshwater lake in Western Europe. It served as a symbol to me of the metamorphosis I must now undergo, even though in my grief I was unaware of what those changes might be.
As we were driving and approached the dam, I realized that the causeway was just the width of the road. I could see water on both sides at many points. It was remarkably beautiful, both inspiring and calming in its gray-blue bleakness. I was staring at nothing in particular out of the window when it occurred to me that there were mute swans swimming on both sides of the causeway in both the lake and the sea. Very curious. I had never seen that before. But these were strange days, and soon they would become much, much stranger.
A week after Mother’s death, the Dutch tour came to a close. These were sad, bleak days. In the cold, damp afternoons I wandered around the town square, or wherever we were that night while the tent was being put up, and watched the Dutch people go about their business. They were stolid northern Europeans used to travelers and such, and paid me little heed in my grief, and really, why should they? They had their own lives. It was not until I entered my own small world of the traveling circus tour that people acknowledged my loss. Or, as was normal with the English, they politely avoided much talk of it and instead were solicitously overkind to me, going out of their way to be helpful. I understood, but when I turned my head I caught the looks of pity and confusion on the faces of the tour personnel. Surely a rock tour was not meant to be this way? Truth be told, it wasn’t usually like this, but this was The Cure and nothing was the same as before.
On the day of my mother’s funeral, both Robert and Simon were there to help me say goodbye. Michael, too, had come to say farewell, having already got on a plane to see me in Holland when he heard of her passing. He thought I might be in need of his company, and he was right. It is one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.
My first drum.
Already dreaming about making my escape.
Me at eight with my sister.
Dad in Syria in 1944.
My parents at the beach with my cousin.
First ever Cure gig poster, except we were called Malice back then.
After the Malice gig we had to change our name!
1978 flyer—we handed these out personally at the door of the Marquee. Punk self sufficiency!
1981 at Hammersmith Odeon. Notice the convenient screens!
Printemps de Bourges Festival, France, 1982.
Robert and me outside the Hammersmith Odeon, London, 1985.
Printemps de Bourges Festival, France, 1982.
In the pub opposite Fiction’s office, London, 1985.
Athens, 1985.
France, 1982.
On keyboards, Switzerland, 1985.
Canterbury Odeon, England, 1981.
Me and John Hurt, London, 1987—“I look like a man whose soul has been zapped.”
Me and my soulmate Cindy.
Robert and Mary’s wedding, 1988: a wonderfully happy day.
“Reflections” at The Royal Albert Hall, London, 2011. Standing on the stage, staring at Simon’s arse!
“Reflections” at The Pantages Theater, Los Angeles, 2011. Gray, me, and Robert on Gray’s twentieth Birthday.
Open Air Theater, June 1, 2000. Robert and me reconciling.
When the funeral was finished, we all went to the graveside. There, on a chilly wet afternoon, The Cure played our melancholy songs for my mother as she was lowered into the earth, Robert and Simon with a couple of acoustic guitars and me with bongos. I threw the cassette tape Ted gave me of the show into the dark black hole where her remains at last rested. I pulled my leather jacket tighter around me and again cursed the God who would do this to me.
After the funeral we adjourned to my parents’ house for a small and joyless wake. The house when my mother was alive had never been a place of much hospitality. Now it was overflowing with people, teacups in hand, or something stronger in my case. You should realize that it was not my mother who had shunned company, but my sullen father, sitting glowering at the priest, or “sky pilot” as he would call him, slumped in my mother’s now empty chair at the table in the sitting room. People offered their condolences to my father and he grunted something back at them. I suppose they took this as him being overcome by pain and sadness, but my sisters and I knew it was really the only way he communicated with the world. It was the most he ever said to us unless he was in his cups, and then it would be totally the opposite, a torrent of expletive-laced invective. We had learned to avoid him at such moments.
I wandered out into the garden of my childhood. The hedges and bushes and shrubs were so much smaller than I recalled from my boy’s perspective. They now looked as tiny and shriveled as my father did.
I climbed up high into the sycamore tree at the end of the garden just as I had done as a small child. The boyish sense of excitement may have faded just a little, but I still got that frisson of fear and joy clambering about the shiny black and green limbs. All at once, I slipped drunkenly on a branch and tumbled down about ten feet. I grabbed at the air wildly and my fall stopped abruptly, knocking the wind out of me.
It occurred to me in that breathless minute. This is it, Lol, your youth is over. A new life calls.
Damn.
All hindsight is 20/20, but after the exhausting year that had been Faith, we had been around the world for the first time and, as Robert had noted, it seemed “a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be.”
We now knew the bad and the good of the music world and we had seen many places. In a way it was heartening, because we had found people just like us wherever we went. In other ways it was soul-destroying, as we found there were also the kind of people we had tried to leave behind. This last observation came to a head during the one and only time we played in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
Growing up in suburban England in the 1970s had meant that there was a complete absence of any decent music on the radio. There had been only one station that had played pop music, for want of a better phrase, that being Radio 1. The one exception was Radio Luxembourg, broadcast from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which I remembered listening to under the covers with an earpiece plugged into my little transistor radio. The DJs had exotic names like Emperor Rosko (actually an American relocated to Europe). It was so far removed from my experience as a teen growing up in Britain, with only one state radio station that was very drab and very British. Along with Radio Caroline, which was broadcast from a ship outside British territorial waters, Radio Luxembourg seemed exotic and a little anarchistic, too. They didn’t play just Top 40, either.
So when we got the chance to play in Luxembourg I imagined that it would be a radical place, something like Denmark’s Freetown Christiania, an autonomous, anarchistic neighborhood in Copenhagen, something that both Robert and I would enjoy. Luxembourg was nothing of the sort. Surrounded by France, Germany, and Belgium, it was conspicuously bland.
We were exhausted from playing so many gigs that year, and a certain aggressive sheen had come into our psyche. This was to set the scene for the making of Pornography. Despite it being autumn, an unpleasant, sullen humidity hung over everything. The club was small, dark, and damp. An utterly inhospitable dump with scant comforts.
We set up our gear and played our normal set for the 118th time that year, a year that had seen us change from a fairly loose four-piece to a very compact three-piece unit. There wasn’t a tour manager for this trip, just us and a bare-bones road crew.
We felt the absurdity of our situation, but as always, Robert was determined to give the best show possible to our smallish audience. That’s something that’s never changed. Robert doesn’t play halfheartedly; when he plays his songs he has to inhabit them for them to work. I remember some tours where he would literally collapse after the gig and lie on the floor for thirty minutes to recover from the effort he’d put out. It’s always been a cathartic experience for him.
In a three-piece, everyone must play to the best of their abilities. There is no room for mistakes. It tends to make you very accurate and tight as musicians, but it also means that each gig has some tense moments. Each member has to literally carry the show at certain points in the set, because any bum notes or miscues will be very obvious in the skeletal structure imposed by the three-piece format.
When the gig ended we were physically exhausted and just plain tired of being on the road. We convened in the pitiful dressing room and waited for the local promoter or whoever had organized the concert to come see us and pay the agreed fee. Martin Hopewell was acting as our agent, and as professionals we expected to be treated that way. Apparently that was a bit of an assumption, as the local promoter had little intention of paying us, and Robert wasn’t very happy about it. I looked around the room for something to drink, and the next thing I knew Robert and the promoter were locked in a struggle and went tumbling down the stairs next to the dressing room, with Robert shouting to me and Simon to come and help as he rolled out the door of the club.
Simon and I rushed down to assist Robert as he shrugged off the promoter, who now saw that further fighting would be an unwise proposition. An uneasy peace ensued. We asked Robert what had happened, and he told us that we weren’t getting paid for the gig. We decided to leave it up to our agent to get some recompense, but this was a stinging slap in the face (literally and figuratively). Infuriated by this turn of events, we shoved off into the night toward the British Isles, where a week later in Newcastle we would have to chase that large, oafish man out of the hall who wanted to fight us. It felt like the storm clouds were gathering for a downpour, and out of that tempest would emerge the most intense album of our career.