We decided not to go back to the UK after the second night and just keep rolling along on our first band holiday. Although we had been together for months at a time, on the road it was work. I sometimes think people don’t really understand that for the band it’s their job. Robert remarked to me recently that one of the reasons things got so crazy with the partying was that people would come see us and afterward we would hang out to talk and drink and party. Our friends could go to sleep the next day and recover, whereas we had to go on to the next town, and the same thing would happen all over again. We really didn’t have a good perspective on our lives and careers, and never knew if we’d ever be able to do the things we were doing again. We often said yes to everything, especially me, and made the most out of every opportunity, even though it led to some extreme behavior.
So we really needed a holiday. We drove a couple of hours down to Le Mourillon by Toulon on the Côte d’Azur. We stayed at a small seaside hotel that served as our retreat from the rigors of the road before we departed for the real work of recording Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.
It was a blissful first night as we checked in at the hotel. I had a room with a balcony overlooking a small courtyard right in front of the Mediterranean, which beckoned invitingly. We had time to relax—Robert even had his own car brought from London so we could drive around.
I awoke the next day to the August sun streaming in through the old wooden French shutters. I ordered up some coffee and a croissant to enjoy on my small balcony overlooking the courtyard. I went over to the shutters and flung them open, dressed only in my boxers, as it was warm and gorgeous outside.
As I opened the shutters I absentmindedly scratched my stomach, and as I glanced down into the courtyard I did a double take. The whole courtyard was full of Cure fans! There were probably fifty of them. They immediately saw me and shouted as one, “Bonjour, Lol!”
A little taken aback, I acted as nonchalantly as one can when caught almost naked in front of an audience of French fans. I waved and smiled, saying “Bonjour,” and slowly backed away into the darkness of my room. We were obviously not going to be alone for our holiday.
We spent the next week in a strange kind of cat-and-mouse existence as we attempted to do all the normal things one wants to do on holiday while being stalked by Cure fans. A walk down the beach took on a surreal quality as we became aware of people following us who miraculously vanished behind a sand dune as we glanced back. Very disconcerting.
A group dinner at a seaside restaurant was very peculiar as more people than were in the restaurant turned up to peer at us through the windows. Robert’s car, a white jeep, was the recipient of many messages of love and loyalty to its owner—some written in black Sharpie on the actual vehicle!
We left after a few days of “holiday” for our next destination on the Riviera: the town of Draguignan, where we were to work at the studio of Jean Costa, a famous French musician who had worked with Johnny Hallyday (the French Elvis), among others. We spent a couple of weeks here refining the songs before heading off to record at Château Miraval.
We took the demos we had made at Boris’s house earlier that year and refined them some more. The days had a rather blissful quality as we worked with good humor. All the local kids who were Cure fans would sit on the pavement outside the small studio in Jean’s house and listen to us record. Every day we would work on our songs with Jean at the controls, and every evening when we finished Jean would declare “Pastis time!” Out would come the bottle of the yellow, anise-flavored aperitif so beloved in that part of France.
Jean’s wife would bring us food to nibble on with our drinks. It was an idyllic time as we reconnected as friends again. It felt like we were back at the Smith house all those years ago when we would rehearse three times a week. I know it’s what Robert has always wanted from The Cure: that beautiful feeling we had that last summer as teenagers when we were looking beyond ourselves into the new world of adulthood and excited by life. It felt as if anything might be possible. It just felt right again.
Sometimes after the pastis we would play a game of kick-about football with the kids who had come to listen to us. It was a welcome break from all the pressures of the music industry and the various forces pulling at the band. It felt almost as if we’d reclaimed some of our lost innocence. We were a successful group and bound for glory, whatever that meant. Our initial contract with Fiction Records was finishing, and now we would be offered much better terms. Record labels were lining up to hand us the keys to the kingdom. However, dark clouds were just around the corner.
I squinted into the sunlight and felt the taste of dirt in my mouth. Gritty and foreign. Turning slightly, I realized that my left side ached a great deal, like I’d been hit by a truck. Looking up, I saw a groove cut into the edge of the vineyard terrace about eight feet above me. I must have fallen down from there, and thus came the realization that this was the cause of my current pain.
Pulling myself up to a sitting position, I could see that I wasn’t far from the little collection of houses and outbuildings that made up most of Château Miraval, the residential studio in the south of France where The Cure had been holed up for several months recording what was to be our next album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.
The sharp pain in my side reminded me where I was and I looked back toward the buildings of Miraval. What time was it? I couldn’t make out if it was late or early in the day, dawn or dusk. I couldn’t recall how I got here. There was a blur of Château Miraval and the rosé wine of the same name. . . . The studio and control room and various instruments and people’s faces. . . . Then running across the meadow at the side of the studio and a dim recollection of my girlfriend, Lydia. I was picking up stuff and hurling it at her. Oh my God, what had I done?
I had met Lydia, an American girl, about a year before at a dinner in Los Angeles, where Boris’s wife, Cynde, had introduced us. A few months later she visited London and I started seeing her. My relationship with my French girlfriend, Anne, was not going well, and if I’d been in a better frame of mind I would have perhaps realized that I should take a break from being involved with anyone, and focus on getting right with myself. But as my drinking worsened, I thought I needed someone to help organize my life, as I couldn’t seem to do it on my own anymore.
I had always been able to run my own life ever since I left home. I managed my bills and the other responsibilities of adulthood by myself, but all of that was becoming overwhelming to me as I went deeper into the bottle. I co-opted Lydia to take care of my life, which was more than a little unfair. It was a lot to deal with for her, especially as she didn’t come from a very stable background. The whole foundation of our relationship was rickety from the start.
I staggered to my feet and limped down the grass and dirt to the little roadway that led directly into the band’s accommodations. Everything hurt. I looked at my feet and I only had one shoe on and a muddy sock on the other. I pushed open the door to my house on the site—a two-story French peasant cottage—and looked tentatively inside. Nobody. I wheeled around to see if the police or such might be behind me, which they might be if my terrible memory from the previous evening was true, but I was all alone.
I climbed the stairs, stubbing my muddy foot. I did not call out but bit down on my sleeve. I opened the door of the bedroom and crept over to see Lydia sleeping in the bed. She shifted slightly in the covers. Alive, at least, then. I walked around to her side and saw no blood or anything on her face or head. Maybe I’d imagined it, thank God. Just then her eyes opened wide with the sense we all have that tells us someone else is in the room with us while we’re sleeping. Her expression was halfway between pity and anger.
“You were a complete ass last night. I can’t believe you were throwing stuff at me as we came home.”
“What happened?” I asked meekly.
“You ran out screaming into the night! I wasn’t going to go looking for you out there. Did you just get home?”
It was all too much for me to process and I fell back into the small armchair in the room, pushing the clothes on it to one side as I did so. Slumped in the chair, I felt relief and shame all in the same moment. What the hell was wrong with me? We had only been together for less than a year and already I was trying to run her out of my life.
I suddenly remembered the sharp pain in my side as I tried to turn toward the bed. Wincing, I pulled my shirt up to see two large bruised areas. Must have been the fall I’d had as I went over the side of the vineyard terrace. I also had some scratches and a livid cut. Damn. I had come to Miraval feeling like it would be a good place to recover and reconnect with the rest of the band. Especially Robert, from whom I was feeling more and more estranged. Unfortunately, the pleasant feeling from Draguignan had evaporated with the return of my emotional problems.
I washed off the blood and mud in the tiny shower in the ancient bath in our little house in Miraval. Feeling less than stellar was my normal situation most days. The sick, unsteady feeling endured for a few hours until I could stand no more and had to take my “medicine” to start to feel normal for a while. Then the madness took over once more.
I walked up the small winding path through bushes of Provence lavender, blue in the late morning sun, occasionally tripping on the small rocks and spluttering a little. I could smell the aroma of strong French coffee wafting from the main studio house of Miraval and was glad to sit down at the table and pour a cup of coffee from the silver percolator into my mug and mix it with steaming hot foamy milk. Café au lait, one of France’s gifts to the world. Trembling, I raised it to my lips and drank a large stimulating draft of the strong brew. Looking up, I saw Boris and Porl coming across the grass toward me.
With that ever-mischievous smile, Boris asked me if I was okay. It was moments like this, lost in time and space, that made up my existence more and more. Fleeting moments of clarity surfaced very rarely, and I felt that I couldn’t trust my senses to tell me what was going on. All too brief fragments gave me small glimpses, then blackness.
“I think I’m okay. Whatever that means nowadays.”
We sat and talked at the red-checkered tablecloth under the trees in the soft autumn sunlight and I felt almost human for a moment.
After our late breakfast, Porl and I went over to the small and deserted pool and sat by the side, dangling our legs in the blue water, the air filled with the fragrant smell of the Mediterranean foliage all around, and looked across the water at the long autumnal shadows flitting about on its surface.
“You know, Lol, if you wanted to go get some kind of help, nobody would mind.”
“I would mind,” I struck out defiantly. “I still want to do something here!”
We had been at Miraval for what seemed like forever, but it was only a couple of months. Isolated from the outside world with the band and a small studio staff, we were in a really wonderful place to be creative, and although I had taken an inward, self-destructive turn, I was sure I could pull myself out of it. My bandmates didn’t see things that way.
“I don’t think you’re going to get better by yourself, Lol,” I heard Porl say through my own meandering thoughts.
“I don’t know,” I said noncommittally. “I think when I get home and go to a health farm I might feel better.”
I had been bandying the name of the health farm—what Americans call a health spa—around vainly and weakly, expecting that, as if it were holy water, to be splashed by its name would produce results. By now Porl’s face had set into that half-smile I knew well from the past few years. It meant that he knew he and everybody else was in for another bout of madness with me at the helm. It didn’t help that some of the others in the band were also struggling with their own demons at the same time, but mine were causing the most problems.
The Cure was nothing if not a lesson in group psychology—at its best and its worst. As the different tensions arose and pulled at us, something or someone had to break, and this time it was going to be me.
It was 4 a.m. and studio time was coming to an end.
“Doesn’t Alain de Cadenet live up on the top of the valley?” Robert mused as we left the large studio control room.
“I think he does,” said Patrice, the assistant, “not quite sure where, exactly.”
“Well let’s go and find him and see if he wants to race us!”
So off we went—Boris, Robert, Simon, and myself—in the white Russian jeep that Robert had brought down from London. We were all very drunk and tired as we climbed into the vehicle. The dark deep Provence night had but a few stars flitting across the cloudy sky. Maybe they were meteors. That would have been more fitting, considering the destructive arc my life had taken.
The headlights barely illuminated the grassy track between the steps of the vineyard. It felt a little like driving down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland with foliage on all sides, a green curtain across the hard rock walls of the vineyard steps. Then it happened as we spun around a corner of the dark green tube. We were lurching to the left and then I felt a sudden pain in my head as we stopped short. We had crashed into something and were now on top of it.
At that moment the atmosphere inside the vehicle changed dramatically. A second before all was jollity, laughter, and lurching velocity, and now in an instant there was silence. I had bounced into the roof of the vehicle, which was what caused the sharp pain in my head and neck. Looking around me, I could see that Boris was rubbing his head where he had collided with the roof, too.
The car was still running, and Robert was trying without much success to get us off the rock we had inadvertently jumped onto from the grassy track. I could hear the sound of the engine revving higher and higher as he pushed the engine to its limits, and then I smelled the thick black acrid smoke from the clutch burning out.
“I suppose we better get out,” Robert said and started to open the door. At that moment, the jeep lurched to the left, and looking out of the window into the darkness, I saw nothing and instantly realized that we were on the crest of one of the vineyard’s terraces! There was a drop of about eight feet to the left of us, as I well knew, having taken a tumble off of one during my most recent blackout. The reason we couldn’t get off the terrace was that two of the jeep’s wheels were dangling in space with zero traction. I imagine it occurred to us all in very quick succession that a delicate balancing act was required if we were not to be killed here on a precipice in a vineyard in the dead of night. Shifting very slowly to the right, we opened the doors and fell out of the car onto the dirt and grass path. It was completely dark and quiet, but we were alive.
The next day we asked Mick if he would go and see what the area looked like where we crashed. I think we were all probably a little scared of what we might find up there! About an hour later he reported back in his Scottish brogue.
“Well lads, the car’s fucked. I’ll have to get a garage to come and pull it off the ledge with chains. You burned the clutch out and it probably won’t be able to be driven again by the looks of it. You were very lucky not to die, I reckon!”
Gallows humor was Mick’s specialty. He’d seen lots of rock-star shenanigans in his time.
And so, yet again, we escaped death by a slim margin. God saves babies and drunks, right?
The autumn of 1986 saw a sea change in the way The Cure operated as a band. In the beginning, Robert, Michael, and I were partners in the band and the band’s affairs. When Michael left it was just Robert and myself. Over the years, as people came and went, different side deals were struck, and we were always willing to be generous and inclusive.
In 1986, the original contract that we’d signed with Fiction all those years ago had run its course, and because we had made a rather big success of the band, various labels we were connected to around the world were all anxious to see the relationship maintained.
There was a little bit of bargaining and such, but in the end we stuck with the devil we knew: Chris Parry. But there was a major change in the way the labels dealt with us. They now saw the band as just Robert, a view Parry encouraged, as I don’t think he relished band meetings with both Robert and me at the table. It was much simpler for him to have to deal with one person.
I went from being a partner in The Cure to being an employee. In essence, I was being demoted. It’s something I have had many years to think about, and the honest truth is that it really couldn’t have gone any other way. I can’t really blame Robert for wanting to free himself from a business partner who wasn’t performing as he had in the past, but at the time I saw things very differently. I conveniently ignored my worsening health and increasing recklessness, to say nothing of my lessening creative input, and laid the blame at everyone else’s feet except those I walked about on.
One morning at Miraval Studios a letter arrived from Fiction’s offices that needed to be signed. As far as I can recall, it was to help facilitate the new arrangements. I was not really surprised, but it still rankled, and I simmered in hot resentment. Of course that meant I decided to keep on drinking and numbing myself. This, rather than trying to think things through and work out how to actually resolve the main problem in my life, which stared at me from the mirror every morning.
Amid this inner turmoil, the album sessions for our by now double album rolled on amid the beautiful hills of Provence. If I had been in a better state of mind I would have enjoyed it immensely. Instead, every day was a battle of wills to maintain my sanity and equilibrium. I was losing badly but unwilling to concede defeat.
The autumn days grew shorter and the hills surrounding us glowed with a sad feeling of finality in the wan sun. There was nothing left for me but a sense of impending doom. I left the studio and went back to England to fume over my misfortune and wallow in self-pity.