After I’d been sober for a year or so, I started to think about making music again. My health was better than it had been in years, and the old feelings were back, the overpowering urge to create, to make music again.
The difference this time was that I had been through the machinations of the music business and I was a little gun-shy about reentering the fray. As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
Although I was no longer with The Cure, I wondered if I was still connected to Chris Parry and Fiction Records in any way. The last thing I wanted to do was to start making music again and have some unforeseen contractual obligation prohibit me from making a new album or going on tour. If I was to be cast out of The Cure, I wanted to be free of everything.
Even though I was sober and had not had a drink or used any mind-altering substances for over a year, and had no desire to do so, I had not really started on the “treatment” of my disease, which is the most important part of recovering from alcoholism. To do so I would have to undergo an intense analysis of the root causes of my problems. My drinking was a symptom of much deeper issues that had spurred me to seek solace in the bottle in the first place. I hadn’t begun the hard work of resolving the issues in my life and removing all the emotional baggage I had been carrying around for so long. In other words, I had a lot of soul-searching to do.
A friend of mine, Chris Youdell, recommended a firm of lawyers to me. In his last band the singer had used their services and found them very useful.
“What I really want to find out,” I asked the lawyer, “is if I am contractually obligated under the terms of my 1979 or 1986 contract to Chris Parry, Fiction Records, or The Cure.”
I was sitting in a stuffy, overheated, smoke-filled office in an anonymous white square in the middle of London.
“Did you know that when your contract was renewed in 1986,” the lawyer’s voice broke through the fog, “you went from being a partner in the band to a contract performer in Smith Music?”
“What was that?” I asked, although I had understood perfectly.
“I think we can send a letter asking that they explain this to us, don’t you feel?”
The lawyer’s voice was probing and insistent. I wasn’t sure what the words meant, but when he implied that I had been wronged, I found what I’d really been after.
I wanted the relief I thought it would bring, and so I set in motion the terrible events of the next few years. As I looked out of the steamed-up windows into the gray overcast sky, revenge slipped slowly into the comfortable fog of the room. Everything from the dull brown tones of the furniture and the crackling fireplace had been designed to impart that paternalistic assurance that they would fix whatever needed to be fixed. Lawyers are the new high priests of certainty in an unreasonable world.
Unfortunately, that fearful attitude that I have come to recognize as the precursor to the worst excesses of the human condition had reared its ugly little head. My warped thinking, while pretending to lead me somewhere good, was actually my undoing. In the recesses of my mind I knew what I was really looking for . . . revenge. Big, stinking, loud, dark revenge. I had been wronged, and now I was coming to get mine, you bastards!
I didn’t know at that point that there are but two major players in music lawsuits in London, and I would have ended up with one or the other representing me. Growing up, I’d heard the phrase “never go to law” repeated over and over again, but the wisdom of those four words would not become salient to me until it was too late. Looking back, I can easily see how I was seduced by their oily assurances, but I don’t excuse my actions. They obviously had their own commercial concerns, whereas I was lashing out at those who’d hurt me. I was unable to see that I was in fact the architect of my own demise.
It took around four years from that first letter to the point where Robert and I both walked into the Royal Courts of Justice. Those four years were a tedious procession of letters crossing London from my lawyer’s office to Robert’s, with bills following soon afterward. Please let us see this document. What about this one? A mountain of paperwork. This paper chase culminated in several weeks of meetings in London to describe and prepare for what would happen if we went to court.
I had not had any contact or communications from Robert, or anyone else involved on the other side, until one night about a month before the court date had been set. The phone rang in my Devon home around dinnertime, which seemed unusual. The phone never rang at dinnertime.
“Hello, Lol, my old friend.”
It was Parry on the line. I asked him what he wanted.
“I wanted to talk to you about the court case. It doesn’t seem necessary. Perhaps we could stop this now and go our own ways and forget about it all?”
I immediately became suspicious. “Oh?” I asked.
“We could all just stop, pay up our own lawyers, and leave it at that,” Parry said.
In retrospect, this seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but at the time it felt like he was asking me to admit defeat, to capitulate just as the final battle was taking shape.
“Well,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I’m not sure I see it that way. You’d have to talk to my lawyers about that.”
I could hear the frustrated sucking in of air at the other end of the phone. Finally the exasperated sound of Parry’s voice returned.
“Well, okay, but I think it’s a very foolish thing you’re doing here, Lol.”
“Yes, Bill, I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
And with that I said goodbye.
It didn’t take me very long after that to firm up in my mind what had to happen next. Although I had spent a lot of time with Parry, especially when he was going through a tough time with his marriage and subsequent divorce, I felt that he had edged me out of the discussions about the future of The Cure and our new contracts. Although in hindsight I can see that at the time of those discussions I had been rapidly becoming a liability both to the band and to his label, back then I couldn’t see the role my behavior had played in the fiasco. Selfish and self-centered in the extreme, I viewed the world through my own myopic lens. I had been wronged, and I would set things right—at all costs.
I still had time to stop the process. I so wish that I had.
A couple of days after I talked to Parry, my friend Chris Mason called me. He tried to convince me that not only had I made a disastrous decision, but it would be like a knife through the heart of the bond Robert and I shared. He was more concerned about that, about my friendship with Robert. He was right, of course.
“Forget about all the stupid shit, Lol. It’s about you and Robert and your bond. Don’t break that.”
That’s when I pressed the self-destruct button.
The Royal Courts have presided over the Strand since the 1870s. Built in the Victorian Gothic style, they reminded me of Gormenghast, the irony of which was not lost on me.
I walked there from my barrister’s rooms in the Temple Inn not far from the court. You have to have a barrister to represent you in the high court. Your lawyer can’t stand up and present your case. I think it was originally designed so that any man, rich or poor, would have good representation in court. Of course, the expense is still built in, and although you don’t directly pay counsel, you pay your lawyers to pay them! The antiquated bureaucracy of England never fails to amaze me.
I met my barrister on a typical gray London day at his “rooms,” as they are called in the Inner Temple. It was a very Dickensian scene, with young men running around with sheaves of papers on small trolleys for all the cases going to court that day. The streets were all cobblestone, adding to the antiquated effect, and beetle-like men in flamboyant coats policed the area.
On the door of the building before me, my barrister’s name had been written in flamboyant cursive script on the inside of the door. When they were working in their offices, the door opened outward so one could see the names. It was all very secretive and strange. Upstairs in my barrister’s rooms, Mr. Garnet was waiting for me. He was a very soft-spoken, well-cultured, middle-aged man, and I liked him immediately. I had a lot of trepidation about how the whole affair might turn out, but the English legal system was designed to lull you, in soporific fashion, into believing that even if the odds were against you, you’d receive a fair trial.
Although there are jury trials for criminal cases in the UK, it is rare for a jury to be appointed for a civil trial, which is what my case was. I was to be heard by a lone judge. Trials involving judges and pop stars are enshrined in English popular history. This has been true ever since the famous Rolling Stones drugs trial, at which the judge declared that the charges should not be too harsh, “lest we break a butterfly upon a wheel,” a poetic way of saying he was going to give Jagger a break.
Since then it has become de rigueur for trial judges to make jokes about the circumstances of the musicians’ lives upon which they sit in judgment, to indicate that they are not completely out of the loop. My judge was no exception, and he made a few witty remarks during trial.
All this obfuscated what was really going on: making money for the legal system. I had been given all kinds of percentages and figures about the likelihood of victory for my cause, but in the end I came to the conclusion that the odds were really fifty-fifty. However, it wasn’t up to me. It was up the judge, and based on what the judge decided, one party would win and one would lose.
I arrived dressed in a new suit. I had brought two for the trial, thinking, in a rather old-fashioned way, that you should get dressed up when appearing at the high court. I think it was probably just another indication of my rather sad state of mind at the time.
Although I had been to rehab at the Priory and I was clean and sober, I had not done the hard work of bringing about a complete change in the way I thought about the world, which, in turn, would bring peace and serenity and long-term recovery to my life. Instead I was still pointing fingers and laying the blame at the feet of others. I was primed to take as much destructive action as possible by taking my friends and “band family” to court.
For three weeks we sat in the court. I spent three days on the witness stand, which was the saddest part of the entire process. Robert and I had been friends since childhood, yet there we were facing off in court. It didn’t seem right to me, but I had spent so much time getting to this stage that I was on autopilot. The legal process is set up to roll along until it becomes an unstoppable juggernaut destroying everything in its path before it finally comes to a stop.
It felt completely horrid sitting a few feet away from my best friends and having to avoid them in the corridor or the lift. Our gaze never met once during those three weeks. I was running on resentment straight down a hole of my own making.
Eventually, the awful days of the trial ended, and the judge decided that he would reserve judgment. This meant we would have to wait for the final verdict. I didn’t really need to know. I had already reached a verdict in my heart. I wished I’d never started this terrible process.
It was an interminable wait for the judge’s verdict, and when it came in the autumn of 1994, it was not really a surprise to me that I had lost. My lawyers wanted to know if I wanted to appeal, but in my heart I knew that I had gone about things the wrong way. I had looked outward for a solution and struck at those I felt had wronged me, when I should have looked inward.