For a lot of people, and in popular culture, in particular, Los Angeles is the place where people go to be either discovered or destroyed. For me it has been neither. I’ve found a vitality and strength that I don’t think I could have mustered if I’d stayed in jolly old England. The English are far too mean and unforgiving for my sensitive nature. I recognize that that’s a valid reason for staying there, to be forged in the fire of English antipathy, but it’s not for me. I’ve had enough of that in my life, I think.
I moved here not just for a change of scenery but to change my entire outlook. That’s why I came to California and I think that I did it in a very profound way.
After the “Reflections” tour, there was a long period of personal reflection for me. It had been wonderful to be out on the road with The Cure again and it felt absolutely marvelous to be onstage playing the old songs. I felt that I had renewed my friendships with Robert, Simon, and Roger. I had also got to know Jason for the first time. I had repaired the damage that had been done to my relationships with everybody, but now it was time to move on with my life.
Looking at my transgressions over the past few years, I have come to realize that much can be learned by acknowledging your sins and then rectifying your wrongs. It’s a truism that you end up much repaired by the process. It enabled me to move forward, and in doing so go back and do something that I loved. More than the experience, I was grateful for the self-knowledge and peace that it brought.
While I had suggested to Robert that we do something to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Faith in 2011, it was his idea to do all three albums—Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, and Faith—together. Together we had made it happen, just like the old days.
Returning home, I realized that a fuse had been lit and I needed to do something creative again. It was not enough for me to ride off into the sunset. I felt a kind of restlessness that needed to be addressed. Whatever happens after this life, our time here is limited. There had been several deaths of people involved with The Cure—Malcolm Ross, our tour manager; Mick Kluczynski, our production manager; and Billy Mackenzie—but the hardest one to take for me was the death of Gary Biddles, our friend from Horley who had moved to California around the same time as I did. When he worked for the band he was the sort of person who kept everyone’s spirits up on the road. He could be a charming, lovable man, but that still didn’t stop the end from coming for him too soon.
Gary had been struggling with alcohol for as long as I could remember. He’d just finished the longest stretch of sobriety he’d had in a decade—almost six months—when he fell off the wagon again. With alcoholics it’s like that sometimes. I think that his newly clean body couldn’t take the strain of all the alcohol he put into his system and it shut down for good.
His long, painful journey was over, though everyone who knew him wished it hadn’t turned out quite like this.
“Bloody hell, Gary,” I had told him years before. “I don’t want to go to your funeral!”
Yet there I was. I wrote a eulogy for him, a tribute to his better moments, for despite all the pain and sorrow, we had had some great times together over the years.
As I stood in the chapel full of people that knew and loved him, a tear fell down my cheek as I bade him farewell. In my Californian exile, he was a link to where I’d come from and where I’d been, my touchstone to the past, and a sad reminder of where I might have gone but for the grace of the universe.
The day after Gary’s funeral was a beautiful warm spring desert day, the type that has always filled me with hope and joy since I’d experienced it for the first time back in 1980. It seemed like a positive sign. Without my friend, without all the trappings of success, but with a newfound love of life and a determination to accept the circumstances no matter how they presented themselves, I was hopeful for a better day.
After the sadness of Gary’s passing, I searched for something good to come out of it. I tried to figure out exactly what it was, but I didn’t know what form it would take. I had already done another album as Levinhurst, this time with the addition of another Imaginary Boy, Michael Dempsey.
It had been a great experience to work together again as older men and find that we still enjoyed the same things and could come together to create again. But there was still a void, something lacking, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
My son, now grown up, had moved to San Francisco to study and continue his life. In the preceding years, his mother, Lydia, had fallen prey to her own drinking problems and, just before her fiftieth birthday, her liver shut down. My son was like me: motherless at a young age. Of course, he still had his stepmom, Cindy, who loved him very much, as he did her, but it was a sign that he would have to grow up fairly quickly as life moved along apace.
My friend Rob Steen called me from New York and asked me if I wanted to meet a friend who was coming to Los Angeles, a book publisher.
I discussed it with Cindy that night. “It seems like divine timing,” she said. “You’ve always wanted to write a book.”
I thought it over and then I thought some more and I finally realized that it was a way forward, a new path for me to follow. I knew there was something I needed to write, not just a story of the band, but a story of redemption.