I kept myself busy with a couple of projects after I returned to London in 1983. I worked with the band And Also The Trees, producing their first full-length album. The band had supported us on our tour, and we had all liked them very much as both people and musicians. It allowed me to give back a little of what had been given me, and I enjoyed working with the engineer David Motion at the anarchist band Crass’s studios. It was a stress-free experience. I also worked with a French band called Baroque Bordello, producing their three-track EP Today. I had an abortive attempt to record something with my friend Paul Bell from Zerra One, too, while I waited for The Cure to regroup.
I felt certain that Robert would want to carry on, and I knew we still had a strong bond that had just worn a little thin. Although the Pornography tour had been stressful, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the deep recesses of my being that The Cure was still viable. I knew that despite what had occurred, Robert and I were still friends.
I didn’t hear from him for a month or so, which didn’t really surprise me. Often when Robert felt threatened he would retreat into himself and escape with Mary. She was his point of connection with the world, his stability and true love.
Robert and Mary went off to the Lake District for a much-needed break. I didn’t blame him for leaving. I felt the same way, but at that time I didn’t really have anyone outside of The Cure, since my mother had passed away. The Cure members were my family, and the two people I had come to regard as my closest friends were at each other’s throats. I felt like the poor child in the middle of a divorce who couldn’t really escape from either of his parents’ feelings. One was distant and aloof, while the other was just angry.
I admit I tried to avoid the times, if I was visiting my father, when Simon might be in our local pub the King’s Head. I think it took him a while to calm down after the tour, and he wasn’t too happy about what happened next.
Robert called me: “I’m thinking about going to the studio to record something. Do you want to come, Lol?”
“Yes, but it will just be the two of us?” I wasn’t sure how things really stood between him and Simon at this point.
“Yes, Lol. Just me and you.”
The first session as a two-piece was strange, but it felt right. Although I have always felt like a creative musician, I will be the first to tell you that I am not a virtuoso drummer or keyboardist. I have always tried to funnel my musical abilities into what was emotionally appropriate for the song or whatever I was doing. I also loved to write lyrics, and so for this session I came up with a few words but not much else. Robert had a few musical ideas already, and out of that session came what was to be “Ariel.” I contributed a handful of lines inspired by my love for the poetry of Sylvia Plath, who is, to my mind, the greatest American poet.
It wasn’t that satisfactory, and while we went home feeling better than when we’d started the engine room up again, we were a little unsure of the direction of the ship. However, Robert’s next move showed why he was and will always be the captain of The Cure.
The 1980s were a great time for innovation with regard to electronic music. Pop music was starting to incorporate new types of keyboards and drum machines, with new ones coming out every month that helped refine and define the sound of that era.
I was very interested in that side of music. I feel it was probably in my genes, what with growing up with my boffin-type uncles always messing about with radios, tape recorders, and such. Robert and I discussed my involvement in that side of music, and now that we were a two-piece, we thought we should maybe get a different drummer to augment the sound.
I didn’t object, as I’d never felt that I was wedded to just one role in The Cure. In my mind, I was a musical partner, and I would do whatever was necessary to make things happen. If that meant stepping into a new role and learning a totally new instrument, then so be it. I was not afraid of the challenge, and I felt that I had Robert’s support. I therefore embarked upon a quick course in basic synthesis with a teacher recommended by the Musicians’ Union, and started taking keyboard lessons. It was a new beginning for the band in more way than one. Robert told me that Parry had challenged him to see if he could write a pop hit. Although he was dismissive at first—after all, we had a strong hard-core audience—I sensed that something about the challenge—the gauntlet thrown down, so to speak—intrigued and irritated Robert enough to do something about it. On his own terms, of course. So a studio was booked.
Island Records had a studio housed in the old Royal Chiswick Laundry Works. We asked Steve Goulding, who played drums on “Watching the Detectives” by Elvis Costello, to come and put the drum track down for “Let’s Go to Bed.” I admit it felt a little strange to have someone else play the drums on a Cure record, but I acquiesced for the greater good. I had my hands full anyway with a brand-new New England Digital Synclavier. This was a very expensive (some versions were upward of $200,000, an absolute fortune at the time) and cutting-edge precursor to the modern sampler found in every studio today. It’s the sound of lots of famous recordings of the time—Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” for example. In many ways we were ahead of our time in terms of music production, and I like to think that my curiosity about all the new music technology to be found drove some of our better-sounding records. It’s always about the song, of course, but sounds are exciting too. After a few days, a pop single was born. Now we just had to navigate what The Cure was to become.
It seemed that almost in a blink of an eye things had changed again. The brotherly bond that had held The Cure together had been broken with Simon leaving, and it was a different beast that rolled forward. We were still very young, not yet twenty-five, and yet we had already seen a lot and done even more. We were growing up in public, which I think is always hard, no matter who you are. In the making of the new Cure rising from the ashes of the old, something had tilted a little, and Robert and I were aware that we would have to adapt. We were still those same English boys who found it hard to really communicate our feelings directly. We had more late-night conversations where, after drinking a great deal, our real thoughts and feelings would come out. It was clear that we needed to move forward despite what had happened. It felt almost inevitable that the band would change after the break with Simon. I used to wonder why people in bands seemed to do crazy, mysterious things from time to time, stuff that I couldn’t relate to growing up in suburban south London. Now I was beginning to understand just how fraught and fragile the bonds that bring a band together can be.
The rise of MTV in the 1980s changed a lot of things for bands—for better or worse. We had released a few videos without much success until “Let’s Go to Bed.” We hadn’t found someone we related to and trusted in terms of a visual representation of The Cure.
For instance, one of the previous videos we had done was for “Charlotte Sometimes” with Mike Mansfield. I think Parry suggested him, as he had made a video with Adam and the Ants. I don’t think we really saw the connection, but we also didn’t really know much about the process of making a video either. It was all very new, and the form was still in its infancy.
It was decided to film “Charlotte Sometimes” in Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey. This abandoned mental institution had been built by Victorian philanthropist Thomas Holloway. Holloway had made a vast fortune from patent medicines and decided to give something back to society. He built an institution where the middle-class insane could be treated and reside permanently. How quaint. The institution was the “summit of high Victorian design,” according to art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner. Quite a sight to behold.
When we arrived at the recently shut down sanatorium for the shoot, we were ushered into the grand entrance hall. This hall had very elaborate murals. Looking at them casually, I thought they might be depictions of angels and other heavenly beings. Perhaps the Victorians thought this might be soothing to the agitated mind. On closer inspection it turned out that the murals portrayed some frightening-looking demons, which was surprising to me, to say the least.
Much of video-making is tedious for the performers, as it takes a long time to light the set and get things ready to shoot, so we went exploring the abandoned institution. It was a very interesting place. It had been quite progressive in its approach in its day, rather like Netherne, which we were familiar with from our teen years. For one thing, it had had a large art department for the inmates. There were many paintings and sculptures just lying around on the floor, as if everyone had left the place very quickly without stopping to collect their belongings.
A sign on the wall said, “Visitors: Please do not offer any criticism in any way of the patients’ artwork. Thank you for your cooperation.” The reason why was obvious, I suppose, but still, it felt strange to read this warning. I picked up a small green sculpture, its surface smooth to the touch. At first it looked like a blob of clay. I then realized it was a dog drinking from a bowl. Its strange design, glazed in a lurid green, and slightly twisted features spoke very clearly to me of the tortured, fragile mind that had created it, and I decided to take it home with me. It still sits on my bedside table today.
There were other clues to the building’s previous use. I found an abandoned filing cabinet in one office that was full of old nurses’ ward records from the 1950s. Most of the notes made quite horrific reading. Back then, although there was a progressive train of thought with the art therapy, there was also a regime of heavy medication for patients who became “too agitated.” That’s probably where the ghostly looks on the faces of the inmates that roamed around Horley on Saturdays when we were teens had come from. I involuntarily shuddered at the thought.
The video itself, although filmed beautifully, failed to capture what was really needed with The Cure. We were not a one-dimensional band, which didn’t come across in our early videos. We had yet to find a way to put across our complete and complex personalities. We needed someone who could illustrate both the absurdist side of the band as well as the serious side.
“The Cure are one of the stupidest bands you could ever work with yet they’re the brightest, most intelligent. They’re the noisiest but they can be the quietest—that’s what I love about them.” Enter director Tim Pope.
Tim understood the conundrum that was at the heart of The Cure, and he was determined to find a way to present that to the world. At long fucking last.
We had a great rapport with Tim. The first video we did with him was for “Let’s Go to Bed,” which was really quite an exercise in absurdist thought. Parry and Robert and I had spent a long night trying to devise ideas for “Let’s Go to Bed.” We threw all the strange abstract ideas we thought of that night at Tim, and remarkably, he was able to make sense of it enough to make the first excellent video of The Cure.
In nearly every video we did with Tim over the next few years, and there were lots of them, he invariably made me do something strange and/or uncomfortable. “Let’s Go to Bed” was no exception—in fact it set the template for the future. He also liked to put little “surprises” in the videos. In “Let’s Go to Bed,” look closely and you might see there’s some obscured nudity in it. I was dancing behind a screen to get a shadow thrown up on the background of the scene in a couple of shots. Well, it was looking a little too much like an amorphous blob, what with the extra-large billowing set of overalls I was wearing. I don’t recall whose idea it was but I have a sneaking suspicion it was Tim’s that I dance naked behind the screen to make a more “angular shadow.” So I disrobed and held on to my modesty among the crew with strategically placed duct tape. I’ve had every sympathy for burlesque dancers since that particular shoot.
The video was really good and clever in a way that let people see both sides of The Cure, the funny and the absurd. Contrary to popular belief, we were not pale-faced Goths who sat in dark rooms with candles and cried all the time. Although we did have some fans like that—two very sweet Japanese girls used to just stand and cry in front of us whenever they managed to come into contact with us. We named them Doom and Gloom. In the nicest way, you understand.
I think that the videos we did with Tim chronicle our growing up.
Although MTV started out in a little place in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, it was growing rapidly, and there weren’t enough videos of bands to fill the programming slots. I believe in the early days there were only six to eight new videos released each week, so that’s pretty much what got played. As we soon found out, some heavy rotation on MTV, together with our rigorous touring, would start to accelerate the rise of the band.
After “Let’s Go to Bed,” we were asked to do The Oxford Road Show, a TV show on the BBC. The only problem was that we didn’t really have a band. So we had to get some stand-ins. That’s when we met Andy Anderson and asked him to drum for us, as I was going to be playing the keys from now on. For the gig we had Derek Thompson from one of our label’s other bands, SPK, to play bass, as we had no bassist at this time either.
The show turned out to be great fun. Watching the video clip, I can see that we were invigorated again, especially Robert. I think that after all the toing and froing with the Banshees and the ceaseless touring, we had found a way forward. Robert was energized by the vitality and viability of The Cure once more.
We made two more singles in what I think of as our pop singles phase. “The Walk” was an experiment that I really enjoyed, despite the interference of my drinking.
We hired Steve Nye to produce the record. It was the first time we had worked with a “proper” producer, as opposed to doing production with an engineer we really liked. We picked Steve because we liked his work on Tin Drum by Japan. He was able to make electronic instruments sound more natural, and that’s what we wanted.
There have been rumors over the years that we copied New Order’s “Blue Monday” with “The Walk,” or that at the very least it was our inspiration. I can put that particular accusation to bed. We recorded “The Walk” before “Blue Monday” was released in March 1983. Without the aid of a time machine we wouldn’t have been able to hear “Blue Monday” before we made “The Walk.” The truth is that both bands were incorporating electronic instruments, synths, drum machines, and sequencers into our arsenals at the same time, and some similarity could only be expected, as we were probably using the same equipment. There wasn’t that much available to use back then.
A few years later, when Yamaha put out the quintessential 1980s synth, the DX7, it was a favorite hobby of ours to listen to records in the Top 10 and spot which preset synth sound from the DX7 had been used on which record. It was that ubiquitous!
The picture of me and Robert on the sleeve of “The Walk” is one of my favorites that Parched Art (Andy Vella and Porl Thompson) ever did. We took the photo one night in the back garden of Jam Studio, and then they went to work in their magical way.
Although we had used Andy Anderson for a gig, he wasn’t a full member yet, and with all of the electronic equipment we used he wasn’t needed for “The Walk.”
It was strange to be just a duo, having always been used to being in a band, but The Cure was always so much more than just something we did. It was and remains a way of life, a belief system. When we started we had to struggle so much against the preconceived notions people had of what a band, and the music we were making, could be that it began to seep into every pore of our being. It had to. That was the only way we could succeed, or indeed survive.
When we started, we had sprung from a strict Catholic upbringing. For some strange reason, or maybe not so strange, that seems to create artists and musicians of a certain intensity. Over the years I’ve had various conversations about the nature of faith with Robert, and I think we have both found that the music and the process of making art is where we can perhaps get some answers. I know it has taken me on a journey that has allowed me to understand a little better the perennial questions that have kept surfacing and turning around and around in my head since we were teenagers. I think that for Robert, The Cure has always been a way to bring his focus back to those ideas, and in the working out of those ideas comes a sense of fulfillment for him. The fans grasped this, and that’s why they are so loyal. They understood there was an inherent honesty in what we were doing.
I have several fond memories surrounding the making of “The Walk,” of Robert and me enjoying an open communication as artists. I came up with the first part of the vibratoed lead keyboard riff that introduces the vocals. I showed it to Robert and he finished it off. However, those moments of mutual inspiration were getting fewer and further between.
People always want to try and dissect the way bands make music. I certainly understand why that would be, but as The Clash’s Joe Strummer said, “You can’t mess with the chemistry!” In the end it comes down to many factors, not least the personalities that exist within the band. The feeling you create together is where the life of the art comes from.
The making of “The Walk” was a slight lull before the storm. Steve Nye helped us to get the sound we were looking for. Apart from the guitar and Robert’s vocals, everything was programmed into the Oberheim synthesizer system, an OB-8 synth and DSX sequencer. The drums were the relatively new DMX drum machine, which we also fed out into the studio room through a speaker and rerecorded, acoustically “triggering” a regular snare drum.
This was similar to the technique to make the electronic instruments sound natural that Steve Nye had used before. I spent a lot of time trying to work the system with limited success. I could get a few sounds out of it, but it was hard to get what we wanted. Steve turned to me after a fruitless day of knob twiddling and said something that has always stuck with me.
“Lol, you know what that needs?”
“No?”
“RFM, mate.”
I asked him what RFM meant and he replied, “Read the fuckin’ manual!”
We eventually got it firing on all cylinders, except for one thing. On the very first note at the beginning of the song, we couldn’t get the sequencer to turn off before starting the drums, so we just incorporated it into the song! You would be surprised how many happy accidents make it onto records. Robert used to call me “the X factor,” as he was never quite sure what I might come up with—sometimes it was good, sometimes it was terrible.
My other memory of that session is twofold: one, the view from the upstairs room of the studio looking out over London in the early morning, just as the sun was rising and the mist was still enveloping the treetops. Magical! The other was the strange look on Steve Nye’s face as I drunkenly kicked champagne bottles across the control room of the studio. Shit was getting real.
When we were making the video for “The Walk,” we were in a studio not far from RAK, where we knew Phil Thornalley still worked, so we looked him up during a break from filming and I asked if he wanted to come play with us at the Elephant Fayre, a festival in Cornwall on Lord Elliot’s estate. We needed a bass player and drummer to play the songs live.
The Cure finally felt like a real band again. We did some warm-up gigs for the festival in Bournemouth and Bath. In Bath we played at Moles, a really small club. There wasn’t a stage, so we played on the floor, just like back at Laker’s Hotel. Robert told me he had to close his eyes while he sang, because there was a bloke about six inches in front of the mic singing along with him, which was a little off-putting. After the gig we were visited in our dressing room by none other than Lady Helen Windsor, a minor royal and great-granddaughter of King George V. Seems she was a mad Cure fan, too! Truth is stranger than fiction, truly.
The Elephant Fayre was a really wonderful festival in lots of ways. We stayed at a seaside hotel nearby, and I recall the high spirits the night after the gig as I celebrated with my girlfriend. We had Lisa, the artist who did the famous fish guitar sculpture of one of Robert’s Jazzmaster guitars, staying with us in our suite, and I’m sure we freaked her out by laughing like loons at all sorts of things until the wee hours.
During the gig a symbolic act occurred, one that was to foreshadow events to come. As I was walking off the stage, the lead of one of Robert’s favorite guitars, his Vox Teardrop, got caught in my feet, and unbeknownst to me, I accidentally pulled it over and the neck snapped. We got it repaired and all was forgiven . . . for the moment.
Not too long afterward we did a short tour of the USA with Andy and Phil, and that’s where a further change took place.
People always ask me if there was point when I realized that The Cure was going to be as big as we became. I’ve generally answered in the negative, but one pivotal moment should have really given me a clue. We were in Los Angeles to play some gigs in August 1983. That’s when we went from being some English guys playing songs to becoming a part of the popular culture of the time.
After the gig, we were taken to a club in Hollywood. When we were ushered in, somebody told us there was some equipment from a previous band onstage that we could use if we wanted to play something. We played “The Walk” or “Let’s Go to Bed,” I don’t recall which, but what really sticks in my mind is what happened when we walked out onstage. We were accustomed to being greeted by rows of earnest young men. Perhaps a few would have their girlfriends in tow as well, but our audience was decidedly male. That night at the club was a different story. The place exploded with girls screaming at us like we were The Beatles! It was amazing. I looked over to Robert and he simply smiled. I remember it was just so overwhelmingly beautifully brilliant, how we could feel the change in the air right there.
Just after that we all flew to Paris to record “The Love Cats,” the last of our trio of pop singles. It was recorded at Studio Des Dames in Paris, which was owned by the record label Polygram. We had a great time making that record. It felt like we were firing on all cylinders once more. I felt creative in a way I hadn’t in a while and even managed to start writing some lyrics again. I also added another instrument to my list of ones I can’t play, the vibes.
It was silly and irreverent and tremendous fun—apart from the night our hotel caught fire. We arrived back from the studio one night to see burning mattresses being thrown out of the fifth-floor window into the street. We never did figure out quite what was going on, but even that couldn’t dampen the feeling that The Cure was back as we were always meant to be.
Back from Paris, we filmed “The Love Cats” video with Tim Pope back at the helm at an empty house in north London over the course of a rather deranged night. There were cat wranglers and all sorts. We had several different scenes that Tim wanted to film. One of them involved dressing me in a full-size catsuit and having me prowl up and down the predawn street in this getup, hiding behind mailboxes and street signs pretending to be a cat, albeit a six-foot cat. It was all a little surreal, to say the least. I actually terrified an old Rastafarian who was walking along the street at about 6 a.m. He was minding his own business, and suddenly out of nowhere I appeared dressed as a very large cat. He must have thought he was hallucinating, poor fellow.
This was Mark 2 of The Cure. This version was more expansive and less stripped down than the previous iteration, the Pornography Cure, as it were. I think that in order to break away from what we had been, it was necessary for us, and Robert in particular, to do something quite different.
I think it shocked some people, but I always knew that there was that side to Robert. You only had to listen to his personal tape collection, which always came out late at night in his room on tour, to know that he valued the odd heartfelt pop tune as much as the next person. Perhaps more so. I recently asked him which he liked doing more, singing or playing guitar, and he told me, “singing, because you can really put yourself into its expression.” All the songs in his collection had that quality.
There was also a psychedelic side to Robert that he explored in depth on The Top, which to all intents and purpose is a psychedelic album, albeit a couple of decades after the original psychedelic era.
We decided to work at Martin Rushent’s Genetic Studios in Streatley. It was wintertime, so it seemed like a pretty good place to record in the English countryside to the west of London. That’s where we first met Dave Allen. He had been the engineer of the Rushent-produced Human League album Dare. We liked him immediately. He was witty and sharp and very knowledgeable about recording both electronic sounds and conventional instruments. Right up our alley. We decided we would stay in the John Barleycorn pub down the street, which perhaps was not the sanest idea.
It was just me and Robert for the sessions mostly. Andy came to do the drums, which he had played on the demos that we did in Eden Studios. We also really liked the way he played his leather trousers with his hands. Yes, that’s what you hear on “The Caterpillar” that sounds like butterfly wings beating: Mr. A.’s leather trousers.
We had all the rooms at the pub to stay in, three to be precise: me in one room, Robert in another, and Andy—and occasionally Porl when he came to the studio—in the last room. Most importantly, we had the key to the pub, because we often worked through the night and would arrive back about seven or eight in the morning. The landlord, being fairly used to bands and musicians, knew that we might want a couple of drinks after recording.
“Please help yourself to any drinks from the bar. Just write down what you have on the notepad and we can add it to your bill.”
Consequently, we came home every night in the early hours when the pub was shut and opened it back up again. Every country pub in England has regulars—usually old men who are there every day at opening time because it’s their whole social life—and the John Barleycorn was no different. I think we completely amazed some of the regulars because when the pub doors opened we were still sitting there quaffing pints of best bitter with deranged looks on our faces. We tried to make the scenario a little normal by eating breakfast and then going straight to bed for seven or eight hours. The pub was owned by one of the members of the band Ten Years After, so they tolerated such behavior.
It got more surreal as the album progressed. Some people think that The Top is more or less a Robert solo album. Yes and no. There are a couple of songs that I contributed to and am credited for, but for the most part it was Robert’s album. I think after the stuff with Simon leaving and the fight in Strasbourg, he wanted to try something on his own, which led him down a slightly more psychedelic path. It seemed weird, but where else could we go after Pornography?
A great part of the reason for Robert announcing that this would be the last album or tour, as he has often done in our career, was that he was trying to invigorate himself and the rest of The Cure into making the best record possible. I’ve always admired that desire in him, although I didn’t really like working through the night, because I find it depresses me after weeks of not seeing daylight. However, I was happy to go along with that plan as a way to reinvent the band. During the recording of The Top, what was being reborn was a different understanding of the group. I couldn’t really complain that the creative responsibilities were becoming more one-sided, because I didn’t feel well enough to take on more, yet I was confident that a better version of the band was emerging. At the end of the day, Robert was my friend, and I enjoyed collaborating with him even though it seemed like things were veering into that crazed area again.
One wintery day at Genetic Studios I was helping to carry out the newly repaired Vox Teardrop guitar when I slid on the ice and the Teardrop broke again on the hard ground. I felt awful, as I knew how much Robert liked that instrument. I think it was a sign that marked the beginning of the worst time for our friendship.
We had to have a slightly bigger band for the next tour because there were more keyboards and guitars than a four-piece band could play live, so Robert and I asked Porl to come and play with us again. That probably implies more of a plan than what actually happened. He was coming to the studio to show us the artwork for The Top when we asked him to play the sax on “Give Me It.” At that point, it seemed inevitable that he would rejoin the band. He was able to fill in the bits that neither Robert nor I could do onstage with guitar and keys and add his own brilliance to it. To my mind, Porl was always the most versatile musician in The Cure.
I wasn’t the only one in the band who had problems. At some point, everyone has done something to hinder The Cure, but that’s what happens when you put extreme young men together. All kinds of dysfunction pops up.
Andy was the next casualty. We were in Nice on tour and staying at a very nice hotel, which meant security people roaming the corridors. Andy had been out and returned late at night. The fashion then was to carry your music with you in the form of a boom box on your shoulder, and Andy subscribed to that fashion wholeheartedly. He walked into the hotel in his army fatigues with a boom box playing. The security guard thought Andy was an intruder.
“Are you staying here, sir?”
“Yes, I am, actually,” Andy replied, at which point the security guard maced him in the eyes, which was mighty unfriendly. Not unreasonably, Andy chased the guard down the corridor of the hotel. He mistakenly thought he saw the guard disappear behind a door, and with his eyes streaming tears, he started kicking the door, swearing blue murder. Unfortunately, the daughter of the mayor of Nice was staying at the hotel, behind the very same door that Andy was trying to demolish. Police were called, and Andy was hauled off to jail.
I awoke the next day knowing nothing of this until our tour manager called me.
“You hear about Andy?”
“No, I’ve not heard anything, why?”
“Well, he’s in jail.” And the whole sorry story spilled out.
Andy and I were friends. Still are. So I elected to go with Parry to get him out of jail. I spent several hours talking with Andy on the beach, trying to dissuade him from putting a palm tree through the windows of the hotel. I sympathized with his point of view. He had been unfairly targeted. But we had a gig to play, and we couldn’t afford to leave him here to answer any charges. After a brief talk with the mayor’s aides, a solution was reached.
“If Mr. Anderson leaves town today, no charges will be pressed.”
The cheek of it! What about us pressing charges? In the end, we had to act pragmatically, and Andy was smuggled out on the crew bus to the next town. However, it was a foreshadowing of the future. Later on in the tour, in Tokyo, Andy had another run-in at a hotel. The details are sketchy, but we had all been out to a club the previous night. When Andy got back, some kind of altercation took place, and once again the police were called.
Robert and I had a short meeting in Parry’s room and we decided that we couldn’t really carry on with the situation like this. It was probably best that he leave the tour and go back home to London.
Robert stepped up to the plate and said, “Okay, well, I better go tell him, I suppose.”
Robert generally loathed confrontations, but when push came to shove, he knew it had to come from him. Otherwise Andy might not take it seriously enough. Off Robert went and told Andy he was out of the band and that he would be given a ticket back to London.
There was only one problem. We still had a three-week tour to do in America with no drummer! For a moment we wondered if I could play by making some adjustments to the set list. Perhaps we could play as a four-piece. In the end we opted to get a friend of Phil Thornalley’s in to drum for us: Vince Ely, who was the original drummer for The Psychedelic Furs.
We rehearsed for a couple of days, and we augmented the drum setup by adding a couple of floor toms on the riser, so I could add some extra drum sounds along with Vince. Not quite The Glitter Band, but it sounded strong. Vince could only help us out for a while, as he had other commitments, so once again it was Phil to the rescue. Phil had been working with The Thompson Twins, and their drummer, Boris Bransby-Williams, was on holiday in Los Angeles with his soon-to-be wife, Cynde. It was perfect timing. Boris came on board, and once again we had the extra tom set up to bolster the drum sound. It became apparent that Boris was the right drummer for The Cure, and so when the tour was over we asked him if he’d stay in touch with us and not go back to The Thompson Twins. It was a happy accident meeting him in the first place, but he fit right in. But what does that mean exactly?
I would say that to play in The Cure you have to have the same sense of humor. I think that’s probably true of most bands. You spend so much time together that it helps to have similar views and feelings. You have to be able to laugh at the same things; otherwise it can get very uncomfortable on those long journeys on the tour bus. I would say 99 percent of band bust-ups are because of an inflexible position being held to the extreme by one party or another, and usually over the most ridiculous things. The movie Spinal Tap is funny precisely because it’s so accurate.
Even though we had a secure setup with me, Robert, Phil, Porl, and Boris, we went through another change, one that would essentially bring the band to its old self but keep the expanded line-up.
We finished the tour in New York at the Beacon Theater. We now had a really strong international following. Suddenly many things were possible as long as we didn’t bring the whole house of cards down on our heads.
We thought that Phil would want to continue with The Cure. We enjoyed playing with him, and he was a little different from us in that he was reasonably sober most of the time, which added a different dynamic to the band. While it might be true that we were hedonistic in our behavior, at this point we were still interested in the world that Phil helped stimulate with his more sober outlook. He also had a burgeoning solo career, and I think it was a hard decision for him when I asked him if he would like to continue as the permanent bass player of The Cure.
He declined, and I don’t really blame him as he had a lot on his plate. I think if he hadn’t had the extra pressure of his own record deal to contend with he might have stayed, but that’s just speculation on my part.
Back in Horley, Simon had a band with Gary Biddles, who had worked for The Cure as a roadie for a while and was also friends with all of us. Gary called Robert around Christmastime and asked him to come for a drink with him and Simon. I think things had gone on for too long, and both Robert and Simon regretted not talking to each other. In my mind Simon has always been The Cure’s bassist, with due deference to the others who have filled that position. He’s a good foil onstage for Robert’s persona, and he has an absolute rock-solid rhythmic musical feel.
When Robert met him again after all that time apart, he realized he had to get Simon back in The Cure, but knew he had to go about it slowly. Simon had his own band, and Robert wanted him to know that he valued what he was doing, but wondered whether he might like playing with us again too.
It took a while, but after the first meeting at the pub they started to warm up to each other. We were doing some demos for the album that became The Head on the Door at a studio called F2 on Tottenham Court Road in London. We invited Simon to come and play on the demos, and that was the first time the new Cure played together: Robert, Simon, Boris, Porl, and me.
It wasn’t long before we had all the songs demoed and ready for the next phase of The Cure.