After a lot of trial and error, The Head on the Door signaled a shift to being a real band again. Robert has always preferred having a band made up of friends—people he liked and felt comfortable with. It surprised me to discover that some bands are not based on that kind of algorithm. I am certain The Cure would never have worked without the type of emotional commitment and involvement we had from the musicians who were our mainstays. The music would not have sounded true. One reason I feel The Cure’s fans have always been so loyal is that they understand that we are equally committed on the other side of the equation.
We recorded the majority of The Head on the Door at Angel Studios in Islington, London. As I said, my belief is that Simon Gallup was always meant to be the bass player in The Cure. Yes, Michael was the original player and definitely had a very beautiful style, but the bass-playing style of Simon is what people associate with The Cure.
It had been hard for us when Simon left after the Pornography tour. Although we had done quite a lot after Simon’s departure, it left a rather large hole in the sound, and more importantly, there was a certain feeling that Simon’s personality brought to The Cure. It always, always comes down to the chemistry, and that’s something that can’t be manufactured, no matter what anyone says.
While The Cure is most definitely Robert’s band, it’s also mine, as it is Simon’s and maybe even a bit Porl’s. There is a definite dynamic among us that created The Cure. It’s one reason why Robert is not a solo artist. Yes, he writes a lot of the music and lyrics, but the musicians animate the songs with heart and soul. Without Simon, there was a definite emptiness.
That said, it was difficult to face Simon’s simmering resentment when I encountered him in the King’s Head before his reconciliation with Robert. Mostly he was fine, but I could see he was hurt, and Simon is a very emotional man, a true Gemini. If he was feeling okay he might be pleasant, but if it was the other Simon, then watch out! I didn’t really mind, though, as I knew both sides of his personality. It was hard for Robert to always have to sort out band problems, but on the other hand, if it’s your band, that’s what you do. He had a very English reserve when it came to talking about internal conflict, so if it could be ignored or glossed over that was the path he took, which was hardly the way to reach a resolution! I suppose that’s a nice way of saying we lacked the maturity to deal with each other.
That made things difficult when the sessions started. I was not feeling great emotionally, and my drinking was causing more trouble than it alleviated, but I was still unaware of the seriousness of the problem.
I had started, with the best of intentions, to learn how to operate a couple of pieces of new gear. I had recently obtained a Yamaha RX15 drum machine and a new E-mu Emulator II. I had these instruments at my house in London and was working on them, trying to figure stuff out. Unfortunately, alcohol, and now some drugs, had a different idea, and large swaths of time were lost to inebriation and the craziness that goes with it. And it got crazy.
One morning, when I’d been up all night doing stuff that keeps you up all night, the doorbell rang. There on the doorstep were two of London’s finest. I immediately assumed that I was done for and must be guilty of something I couldn’t remember from one of my many blackouts. I’ve always felt guilty of something. It’s a throwback to my Catholic upbringing, all fire and brimstone and all that, and a terrible thing for a blackout drinker like me.
“We are asking local residents if we can use their premises for surveillance for the north London railway rapist. Can we come in?”
I looked around for the cameras, as I was certain this was a setup and that Jeremy Beadle or some other “comedian” was going to pop out of the bushes. I had rehearsed that particular scenario in my paranoid head a few times, I can tell you!
“Oh, okay, I guess so,” I said with a thick, heavy mouth that wasn’t working too well. Funnily enough, neither was the rest of my face, which seemed to be going in many directions at once. A sensation familiar to users of stimulants. I looked nervously at the detectives from the Metropolitan Police and tried to focus on what they were saying.
“Okay, you better come up,” I said, enunciating the syllables very carefully, hoping they wouldn’t notice my gurning features.
I was certain the cuffs were going to come out at any moment, but they seemed relaxed and quite relieved that someone had agreed to their proposal. They told me I was the only person in my street that had actually let them into their house so far. Their plan, it seemed, was to use their binoculars to gather evidence about the rapist, who apparently used to escape after his assaults down the side of the railway tracks that were directly opposite my window. In my somewhat befuddled state I took this all in, and then without further ado agreed to let them camp out in my flat and do their reconnaissance from my place. Normally, I wouldn’t be letting Babylon anywhere near my domain, as I didn’t really have a great deal of trust in the old Bill, but they were actually engaged in an important community project and I felt I should support that.
And so it was that for the next week or so two coppers turned up at my door every morning to survey from my window. They carried their equipment in two large plastic bags and shuffled nervously inside when ushered in every morning. I brought them tea and carried on with my day. You might ask whether the presence of police inside my house curtailed my bad behavior.
Not at all! And that is the insanity of it. One might think that with the police about five feet away, I might be a little more circumspect, but I carried on as normal (normal for me) and every so often I popped my head in to say hello. As the day progressed and my intake assumed more monstrous proportions, my behavior must have seemed very strange, but the two good policemen didn’t bat an eyelid. Every evening they bade me farewell until the morning with a cheery wave and not a single recrimination. It was all very strange, but strange was beginning to be the normal state of things in my life.
Down at Angel Studios, we were getting to grips with a lot of new things, including a huge Scalextric train set that went all the way around the studio and regularly featured alcohol-filled cars ablaze in the darkness. A diversion of sorts from the serious business of making The Head on the Door.
The songs were all pretty much ready when we went to record them because of our intensive demoing. Sometimes when we recorded a demo it turned out so good that it would have been wise to just leave the song as it was, but did we do that? No chance.
Recording is a process of constant refinement and polishing things—and, more often than not, undoing and unpolishing stuff that’s too perfect and bland-sounding. I think this is why recording never gets any easier. The more you do it, the more things you can mess up. This is especially true if you’ve had some success, because you tend to want to refine things unreasonably past the point of perfection. What often happened with The Cure was that because we were able to record in more sophisticated studios, with more tracks and gear, the songs would fill up with a lot of layers that didn’t need to be there, and ultimately might never be used.
I always likened it in my head to the making of a sculpture from a large block of stone. We had this large, monolithic slab of sound, and we had to carve the song from it. Even though much of the final song was already worked out by Robert, I had set up a keyboard in one of the recording booths and started to doodle along with the tracks on my headphones. When I found something I thought might work I’d play it to Robert, and if he thought it was cool I’d record it. Sometimes it would stay and sometimes not. For instance, in “Six Different Ways,” there’s a strange vibratoed keyboard sound that I added. It worked, so it stayed.
A lot of the time, however, I was working through whatever booze we had on hand in the studio, which seriously impaired my creativity for this album. I would come in every morning with the best intentions of staying sober that night, but I was finding it harder and harder to hold on and to stay true to my word. My thirst for alcohol was running rampant and destroying all my attempts at control. I would try to restrict myself to a beer or two with dinner, but that was never enough. The cravings I felt for more were too strong to resist and I would find myself drunk by the evening. More nights than not, I was sent home in a taxi, too inebriated to function. Well, I told myself, things will be better on the road.
Before we started on The Head on the Door tour, we did a handful of gigs and festivals, including the largest we had ever done, in Athens, Greece. It was possibly the most dangerous, too.
It was the first time I thought we were in deep trouble as a band. I had been in riots before. Back when I was seventeen, Porl and I had gone to the infamous Notting Hill Carnival; the riot that ensued that day between the Rastafarians and the police, forever enshrined in the photo on the back of The Clash’s first album, was pretty scary for a teen from the suburbs. “Police and Thieves” was not just a Clash version of the Junior Murvin song to me. I had been there when it went down. However, it’s one thing to be present at those historical flashpoints of societal change, and quite another to have it intrude into your everyday existence!
We had been asked to play the Rock in Athens ’85 festival in Greece for European Youth Culture Year and it was a very prestigious and important festival. The Clash, Culture Club, and Depeche Mode were also on the bill. Melina Mercouri, the famous actress turned politician who had helped bring Greece out of the era of the fascist military junta of the 1970s into a more liberal 1980s, was the minister of culture who had made the festival happen, and it was a priority for her personally.
It was apparent to me that it was a very important gig when we arrived at Athens airport and were met by the army and police on the tarmac, who then escorted us to our hotel without any of the normal formalities of entering another country. No passports or visas needed, sir. You are most welcome to Greece!
We got to Athens with a group of friends in tow, as we thought doing a few festivals around Europe might be a kind of holiday for us. The atmosphere was relaxed and festive while we camped out in the Athens Hilton. We had arrived a couple of days before the gig and decided we would like to see Depeche Mode and check out the festival site where they were playing the day before us. The venue was the Panathenaic Stadium, an old and venerable Olympic stadium in the shape of a horseshoe with an opening at one end. This was where they put the stage and erected fences to create another backstage area. The place held about 50,000 concertgoers.
That first night we went down to the site, the mood felt tense and there were a lot of police about. It turned out someone had counterfeited tickets, and now there were several thousand very angry fans unable to get into the stadium. We watched Depeche Mode from the side of the stage and they put on a great show. Depeche Mode and The Cure had a lot in common: we both originated in “new towns,” us in Crawley and them in Basildon, and both bands still have a large US following, which can’t be said for some of our peers, like Echo and the Bunnymen, for instance. We have also over the years shared several crew members, including the infamous Bamonte brothers Daryl and Perry, who both had stints playing with the bands they worked for—Perry with The Cure and Daryl with Depeche Mode. Little did we know that we were going to get even better acquainted that night.
I don’t remember quite when the first rock came sailing into the backstage area, but I certainly recall how scary it was. A brick-sized lump of pavement hurtled over the thin and flimsy corrugated sheeting that walled off the backstage area where there was the usual selection of small trailers and Porta-Potties. We got a small ladder and peeked very carefully over the parapet.
“Bloody hell, Lol,” Simon said to me. “Why are they so mad, do you think?”
“Can’t get in,” I said, and at that point we saw our first casualty: a policeman with a large cut on his forehead was being carried bodily above several people’s heads like in a newsreel shot from a war zone, which the stadium was rapidly now beginning to resemble. I looked farther out across the street and could see people ripping out chunks of pavement to hurl at the police and security people from the festival. It didn’t look good at all. Just then I saw the water cannon, a huge structure mounted on top of a heavy truck. The deluge of water was aimed squarely at the rock-throwers, who slid back along the road very violently.
I felt a tug on my trouser leg. It was Mick Kluczynski, our Scottish/Polish production manager.
“Lol, we’re all getting out of here. It’s getting too fuckin’ wild!”
Just then a rock whizzed past my head, and it was a sign, if ever there was one needed from the universe, that yes indeed it was time to get the hell out of there. I jumped down from the ladder, and Mick shepherded us all to the ramp of a semitrailer that was waiting at the backstage entrance. We all went up the ramp and into the cavernous space. The guys from Depeche Mode came in right behind us, fresh off the stage, with towels draped around their shoulders. We all knew each other, but it was rather surreal for both bands to be sitting together in this empty, dimly lit trailer. Ah, the glamour of rock and roll!
Mick appeared as the ramp was reinserted. “Good luck!” he winked as he closed the doors on us.
And with that the two bands pulled out into the teeth of a riot going on at the back of the stadium. It sounded a little like clapping, but it was the sound of many hands banging the side of the truck. The furious crowd had seen the large gates open with what was to all intents and purposes an enemy transport coming onto the scene. Images of embassy sieges flashed in my mind, but most of all I thought of the Trojan Horse. A few bumps as we drove over the curb, and we all exchanged nervous glances. It was one of those moments when you wonder if this is where it all ends. A few more loud bangs on the side—rocks, perhaps? Finally we started picking up speed and putting the scene behind us. We took a circuitous route back to the hotel, which was only half a mile away. There were no windows in the trailer, so it was only the sounds of the boiling, dusty city outside that gave any clues as to our possible fate.
A few minutes after we departed, we pulled over, and after what seemed like an eternity the long doors of the trailer opened. Adjusting our eyes to the light, we saw Mick. He had run back through the rioting crowd and down the street strewn with rocks and was there to welcome us back to the Hilton personally! I never saw anyone intimidate Mick. Ye cannae mess with the Scots, man!
We descended the hastily lowered ramp at the back of the trailer. It was possibly the strangest entrance the Athens Hilton has ever seen before or since. Somewhat relieved at our narrow escape, we repaired to the bar, where much later, Nina Hagen would regale me loudly with Jimi Hendrix songs sung in German. I shook her wolf’s head codpiece by way of greeting and ended up breakdancing on the bar floor well into the early hours. All this and we hadn’t even played the gig yet! But we had survived.
The next day Melinda Mercouri herself turned up to say, “Athens trembles,” after looking out at the scene of devastation that followed the riot. The new version of The Clash played before us. The day before Boy George sang behind a Perspex shield, as certain morons decided to throw stones at the Culture Club singer. I wore my blue silk wizard shirt all through the show with a Batman sticker on the back that, unbeknownst to me, Robert had slapped on as we mounted the steps to the stage.
Much of the second half of 1985 was spent preparing for, and performing with, The Head on the Door tour that went around much of Europe and North America. We played at Sylvia Plath’s alma mater, Smith College, a private independent liberal arts women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was an exceptional gig, as I recall, and I was pleased to be at a place where one of my heroes had been a student.
We played at Radio City Music Hall within a week, which was another iconic landmark venue I had heard about, and now we were there. A magical place in New York lore, complete with the story of the lion that roams the theater at night to deter intruders.
When we finished the final leg of the tour in Europe in December, we were now playing at a huge arena in each city—the Enormodome, as Spinal Tap has it.
We finished off the year in Paris playing first the modern arena of Bercy to a sold-out crowd of over 20,000 Parisians, and later that night to a more exclusive audience of the hotel staff at our Paris hotel. We made a typically pragmatic offer after learning that the staff holiday party was in progress in the hotel ballroom.
“We’ll play three songs for the staff, and in return free champagne for us!”
It must have seemed like a bargain for the hotel at the time, but like many promoters of our early concerts, at the end of the night they probably wished that they hadn’t made what turned out to be such a generous offer to us. And so we ended the year on a piece of our past.
Christmas came and went, and before I knew it we were back on the road again. Somewhere during that time I had moved from my rather compact flat in north London to a larger house up the street within staggering distance of my friend’s bar.
The first gig that year was at the Albert Hall, another iconic venue. This concert was a benefit in aid of Greenpeace, and as we played I wistfully thought how Mother would have liked to have been there, in her grand box, proudly watching us.
Later that year we played the Nürburgring Festival in Germany. We nearly didn’t make it in time, as our airport was about three hours’ drive from the festival and we were scheduled to play just three hours after landing. In a couple of very fast Mercedes we literally drove up to the stage steps for our set. People probably thought we were being divas turning up at the last moment, but in fact it was just bad planning on our part.
Later that summer we played the Glastonbury Festival. We pulled up to the festival site in a large tour bus during a downpour. As I looked out the window I was met by the sight of about two hundred “mud people”—festivalgoers covered from head to toe in brown mud. Quite impressive, I have to say, but it sharpened my resolve not to go out into the festival site proper and to stay in the drier and less swamp-like enclave backstage. However, we didn’t even make it that far.
Our set was delayed somewhat by the fact that it was a World Cup year and we were all watching a TV on our tour bus. A particularly important quarter-final match was taking place that day, Brazil vs. France, which went into extra time with a dramatic penalty shootout at the end. So my apologies to The Cure fans present for our late arrival that day. I am reminded of the famous quote attributed to Liverpool manager Bill Shankly: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I’m very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it’s much, much more important than that!”
The Glastonbury Festival is actually much, much more important than that to many people, and The Cure ended up playing a couple more times, but I imagine that the 1986 performance is the one a lot of fans remember. It was a great set, and despite our late start we did three encores, which is a lot for a festival. The rainstorm ceased the moment we walked onstage, which allowed the lightshow to sparkle in the night sky with eerie, greenish-tinged water drops. Magical!
Later that year we had the beach party tour, and we played at Jones Beach in New York. When we arrived, I was nursing a huge hangover, and I decided the best treatment for this was to go swimming at the beach. As I was idly floating about in the water I noticed several members from our opening act, 10,000 Maniacs, waving to me from the shore. Wanting to promote entente cordiale with our American compatriots, I gamely waved back. It finally dawned on me that they weren’t waving but furiously motioning to me to come ashore quickly. Apparently they had information about a large jellyfish infestation in the waters around Jones Beach that I did not. It was kill or cure for my pounding hangover headache. I soon realized I was better off out of the water when Perry Bamonte proudly showed me a live jellyfish in a bucket that he had fished out of the water off the edge of the backstage area.
We played on that summer as I barely managed to keep my drinking under control, although I was determined to play as well as I possibly could every night. By that time we were completely professional in our approach as a band, which meant that every night we could rise up to a certain level no matter the circumstances. Even if we were ill or suffering from sheer exhaustion, we put those feelings aside to make the gig the best we could. I think that tour included some of the most magical gigs we had ever done.
The year rolled on, and eventually we arrived in France at the city of Orange in Provence. We played at the Theatre Antique, an ancient Roman amphitheater. We had decided that as we were playing to such a high level, we should document the gig, especially in such a wonderfully evocative place. We asked Tim Pope to film it, as we felt comfortable with him and knew that he could capture the essence of The Cure live. I think he did an admirable job and the whole film (because it was a real film, meant to be shown in cinemas) works on many levels to express that.
We filmed it in two days: the first day was the concert proper with an audience, and the second day we performed again to an empty place to get all the close-up shots and other interesting angles that aren’t possible to get in a live gig situation. Before the gig on the first night, we filmed above the stage quite high in the air where a statue is ensconced in an alcove. We found out that the only way to stand directly next to the statue was via some very dodgy-looking wooden planks. This probably accounts for our slightly terrified expressions at the beginning of the film as we wave hello from the precarious perch. I think it was another one of Tim’s tricks to make me feel as uncomfortable as possible and capture it on film. I bet there was a real floor that he had them take up before we got there just to get the right “cinematic effect.”
The gig started with a surprise, as Robert had decided to cut off his trademarked spiky hairdo, and so for the whole concert he had a very striking crew cut. Fans probably remember the start of the concert with us walking onstage and Robert wearing a wig that Simon removed with a thespian flourish. It took a moment for the rapturous audience to realize that this strange short-haired man wearing makeup was Robert. It was a sublime piece of showmanship that added to the overall hallucinatory feel of the film. It reminds me of Live at Pompeii, but a little to the left of the Floyd.
The filming went well, and the audience was very wild and appreciative—perhaps being aware that the gig was being filmed for posterity helped. After the gig everything was left as it was for the filming of the close-ups the next day, and we retired to our hotel on the Mediterranean a little over an hour away. I went for a walk along the side of a small seawall. In the darkness I could see the ocean, as the wall was only about three feet high. I was full of joy and excited about the film and grateful for being in such a beautiful and historic place. I was practically skipping along the ocean walk. I jumped up onto the wall and, believing it was the same distance on the other side, jumped off it. In the darkness I didn’t realize that it was a steep drop to the beach, maybe another three feet more, so I fell about six feet onto the sand. Surprised and slightly winded, I attempted to get up. That’s when I felt the sharp pain in my ankle where I had twisted it violently. I managed to scramble up to the beach path and limp back to our hotel. I went up to my room to lie on the bed and massaged my ankle, which was rapidly swelling. This was ominous. We had to film the cutaways and close-ups for the gig the next day, and it looked like my ankle might not be up for that. I called our promoter, Jules Frutos, a lovely man who had promoted many of The Cure’s gigs in France.
“Hi, Jules, I had a small accident walking out by the beach and I think I’ve hurt my ankle badly.”
I heard Jules’s sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line somewhere else in the hotel.
“Okay, Lol, I’m going to get a doctor to come look at you.”
“Yes, please. I think I may need him!”
About forty minutes passed before Jules and the attendant doctor arrived. I let them into my room and hobbled back to bed, where I lay wincing in pain from the now bulbous ankle. I hoped that he could fix me. I didn’t want to be in a cast or crutches for our film.
The doctor examined my foot and pressed it in a few places, presumably to check if my bones were broken. With my schoolboy French I understood that he wanted me to flex my foot, and from there Jules translated the rest of his diagnosis.
“Okay, Lol, he says you’re lucky it’s not broken.”
I heaved a sigh of relief.
“But it is badly sprained.”
Some rapid-fire French between Jules and the doctor ensued that was hard for me to follow. Jules told the doctor I had to perform again on film the next day and needed to be able to walk. The doctor wanted me to rest for a few days to let the ankle heal, but that was impossible. In the end, he decided to give me a special shot and some cream to rub on my ankle that would make it easier to stand without too much pain.
The doctor prepared the shot and I removed my trousers so he could inject my leg. I felt the sudden pinch of the needle and then a warm flood of painkilling medicine. He next produced the tube of cream from his bag and gave it to Jules.
“The doctor says once every four hours with the cream on the ankle and don’t walk for about eight hours, and the swelling should go down enough to do the gig tomorrow.”
The doctor wrapped a white bandage around my foot a few times, pulled it tightly, and fixed it in place. I rested that night, and the next day I found I could indeed put pressure on my foot and stand at the keys for the second night of filming. If you look closely at The Cure in Orange film, you might just see my ankle expand and contract and turn from black to the color of the crepe bandage.