After the disaster of the Pornography tour I did what I always did. I ran away. It’s not hard to see why the tour turned out that way. We had been cooped up together for an awful long time on the road and in the studio the previous three years. We had played 377 gigs, approximately one every three days for over a thousand days. Although 1982 had been kinder in terms of the number of gigs we did, we were just plain exhausted.
I had met a French girl, and so it wasn’t really a big leap to just up sticks and go live in France for a while. I usually crashed at my dad’s house when I did come back to England, which was pretty depressing. He had not improved since Mother’s passing, and now spent most of his time either asleep or drunk. It seemed to me a life destroyed. I would see him in passing and talk to him when I came home, but ours was not a loving relationship. I suspected his behavior had put Mother in the ground before her time, so there was some resentment on my part.
I tried to be the dutiful son when I returned. I took him out to eat and got him a new TV when the one he was watching resembled an amorphous shifting colored fishbowl, but I could not pretend we had any kind of bond. I was adrift, so I decided to shift my base to la belle France.
Before I knew it, I was living in Rue Cadet in Paris’s 9th arrondissement. It was a market street busy with people buying food from the local shops. I stayed in Paris for a few weeks with the girl I was seeing, and from there we traveled across the whole of France down to Montpellier on the south coast, a beautiful city full of students and young people. The journey down on the train was quite an event, as we elected to take my girlfriend’s cat with us to stay at a friend’s house. We didn’t have a suitable carrier, so we had to take the cat on a leash all the way from Paris. It spent the whole journey hissing at everybody from the safety of the luggage rack above our heads while we made apologetic faces at our fellow passengers.
It wasn’t the first time I luxuriated in being a stranger in a strange land. It felt very cleansing after all those days being with exactly the same people day in and day out. I felt like I could use the space to just clean out the accumulated stress and psychic tension of that last tour.
I spent many a day on the sandy beach at Palavas-les-Flots just outside the city, or at a café in the Place de la Comédie, clearing out the emotional flotsam that had built up from being on such a rigorous schedule. It was a liberating journey in a way that I’ve always found wonderful. I think I was always meant to travel the globe like my father and brothers before me. I had a kind of restlessness when I was a young man. I always found it stimulating to be around new ideas and new sensations. I lived for the new and unique. In it I found a kind of hopefulness to combat my inherently depressive side that was exaggerated by alcohol. Strange as it might seem, that year when I lived mostly in France I didn’t drink like I did when I was with the band. I didn’t intend to rid myself of that particular albatross—it just happened. Perhaps I was able to be the person I was supposed to be in France. I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t analyze it. I just felt a little freer.
That summer, I went on a spiritual journey of sorts, as The Cure had effectively ceased. I needed to clear out the damage that had been done to my psyche. I hadn’t heard from Robert, and I knew Simon wasn’t going to play in the band anymore, so I felt I should look for something else to do. I wasn’t sure exactly what, so I went on a pilgrimage. It felt like the right thing to do.
We packed up our things in Montpellier, my French girl and I, left the cat with her parents who lived nearby, and headed for the Salvador Dalí Museum in Figueres, Spain. We stopped on the way at Perpignan to visit the train station, because Dalí had declared in 1963 that he “always got his best ideas in the waiting room at the station so it must be the center of the universe.” We figured it was worth a shot. We got a taxi to the border, walked across, picked up another cab on the other side in Catalonia, and headed to Figueres. Then we stayed in town and visited the Dalí Museum, which was housed in the old municipal theater. There, Dalí had stored all of his fantastic objects and paintings under an enormous geodesic dome designed by Emilio Pérez Piñero. It was, to say the least, a mind-blowing experience for me. I was finally starting to feel better.
The next day we traveled to Roses, a beautiful fishing town on the Costa Brava. We took a crazy drive on tiny roads over the grassy, rocky hills to the Hotel Rocamar in Cadaqués. The manager of the hotel was very affable. He presumed that we spoke multiple languages like Dalí himself. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and though we struggled to communicate, we eventually managed to be understood in a combination of French and English (Franglais?). We stayed in this beautiful seaside fishing village with its white buildings topped with red tile roofs. Many artists have passed through or stayed in Cadaqués, including Dalí, who had a house nearby in Port Lligat. Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp all spent time there at some point in their lives.
It was easy to see why. The air—and the light, especially—had a wonderful quality, and the warm Mediterranean sunshine on the golden rocks made it a unique and beautiful place beside the sea. Looking at the scenery, I found it very easy to believe that we had stepped into a Dalí painting. I found the whole journey soul-renewing.
When I returned to England I found a flat in north London, near Abbey Road, and moved in. I figured I should change something, because I felt like it was the end of the line for The Cure.