Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / The Cure Past, Present & Future w/ Author Simon Price [Episode 168]

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The Cure Past, Present & Future w/ Author Simon Price [Episode 168] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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Just this idea that being an adult didn't have to mean obeying the conventional rules
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of society, and that you could be anything and let your imagination run free.
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That aspect of Roberts kind of persona got me before the music did,
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in a lot of ways as much as the music itself. That's what speaks
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to successive generations of Cure fans, just his way of being in the world,
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and that he symbolizes difference. We're totally bombed in rock and roll.
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I mean, I'll leave you. You're reading Little Hands as it's time to
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rock and roll. I totally booked. Welcome to book down Rock, the
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podcast for those about to read in rock online a book down rock dot com.
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Find every episode there, along with links to listening platforms, exclusive videos,
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blogs, and the latest rockbook releases. Simon Price is this episode's guest.
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He's the author of the brand new book Curpedia and a to Z of
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the Cure. This is the complete biography of Robert Smith and the Cure.
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It chronicles the band's forty plus year history with hundreds of entries in a to
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z fashion. So let's get into the book and a great discussion of Cure
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past present, and Future with Simon Price. A playlist of The Cure can
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be found on the show notes page. Simon, Welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you for having me In the forward you write quote, I've fallen in
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love with many, many bands and artists in my life as a music fan,
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but my love for The Cure, unlike some of them, has never
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wavered. Now. I still remember the moment I became a fan of The
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Cure. My college roommate had Disintegration and it was on CD, and it
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was like an out of body experience. I mean, I never heard anything
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like it before, and I was hooked ever since. For you, When
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and how did you get hooked on the Cure? You know, the first
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time I heard them, I didn't really get it. I mean I was
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maybe too young. I was twelve years old, and I remember listening to
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the official UK Top forty countdown in nineteen eighty on the school playing fields on
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a portable radio cassette recorder, and a forest was in the charts, this
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strange, kind of ominous, sinister shuffling thing, and I didn't really know
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what it was about where it was coming from, but it was kind of
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lying in wait for me and the moment I really got it was a few
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years later when I was about fifteen and they appeared on Top of the Pops,
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which is, you know, the main was the main UK TV music
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program, performing the Walk, and just something about his persona, his way
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of being, just the way he looked, the hair and well he actually
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had dark glasses. I was going to say the eye liner, but yeah,
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a pair of ray bands welded to his face at that point that that
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track being a fantastic kind of dark electro dance tune, which is kind of
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not typical of what the Cura about. I think I'd sort of brought into
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the idea of the cure before the music got me. Because there's something I
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mentioned in the book. There's a short lived UK magazine called Flexi Pop which
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used to have flexi discs on the front cover, and it was quite a
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sort of rogue publication. It would have lots of kind of references to things
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that maybe shouldn't be aimed at young teenagers, and it was eventually closed down
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for that reason. But they used to run a feature every month where a
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pop star would just write their diary of a week in the life of what
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they've been up to, and Robert Smith's was so gently odd that it really
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grabbed me. He was doing things like planning a ballet with his partner Mary
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in the garden at one in the morning, or dressing up as his own
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mother to cook the dinner, or going for a walk in a thunderstorm in
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the dark because he wanted to be scared, and things like that, and
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just all these little details really fascinated me. I tore the pages out of
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the magazine, folded them up, put them in my school blazer, and
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carried them around with me, and I used to read them to feel inspired.
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Just this idea that being an adult didn't have to mean obeying the conventional
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rules of society, and that you could be anything and let your imagination run
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free. And that aspect of Robert's kind of persona got me before the music
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did, to be honest, and I think that's kind of stayed with me.
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And I think in a lot of ways, as much as the music
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itself, that's what speaks to successive generations of Cure fans, just his way
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of being in the world, and that he symbolizes difference. The promo for
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the book causes quarter first of its kind of history of the Cure chronicles of
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the band's forty plus year history, organized in easy fashion. Talk about how
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this book has laid out and how did this idea come about. Yeah,
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the idea wasn't mine. The publishers came to me and said, why don't
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we just do a big ater z of the Cure. And first of all,
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I was slightly skeptical. I thought, is that a gimmick? Is
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that just almost a novelty way of tackling their career. But the more I
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thought about it, the more I thought it kind of it freed me up.
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It was liberating because I didn't have to approach it from the point of
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view doing a linear timeline. There have been numerous cure biographies before that have
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done that, but this allowed me to cut across different eras and draw together
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little snippets of things that were thematic. So, for example, all the
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different times that the Cure have been influenced by literature, I've drawn that together
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into one entry, or their relation with things like religion or sex, or
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alcohol, drugs, even sort of seemingly trivial things like hair, makeup,
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shoes, football as in soccer, And some of these things turn out not
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to be so trivial after all, seem to have sort of deep meaning to
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people. As well as having essays on every single every album they ever made,
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every member of the band. I've also got those things, those essays
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that allowed me to kind of really think about the band and what they mean
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across the whole breadth of their career rather than just you know, moment by
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moment. Well, you said it took you down some rabbit holes. What
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are some of the more interesting rabbit holes that you disappeared down? Oh?
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Just things like you know, they wrote a song about an asteroid crashing into
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Jupiter in the nineties, and I had to know, well, you know
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what about that asteroid? What was the significance of that. They recorded a
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video for the Caterpillar in the home of the Duke of Northumberland, so well,
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who's he? What's his deal? They named an instrumental track after an
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obscure beach on the Shetland Islands north of Scotland, and I had to find
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out, well, what's that place like? And to some extent I found
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myself thinking does this have to go in the book? Is that getting too
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far fetched? But I also had this weird feeling that the further I got
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out from the center of the core topic, which is the cure and their
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music, the more interesting it got in a way, and it seemed to
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unlock things, just because they are such a culturally rich band that almost they
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hand you this box with a key, you open it and all this stuff
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comes pouring out. They're one of those bands that are a kind of education.
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They're an alternative education. It's not necessarily the stuff you're going to learn
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at school, but so much sort of poetry and cult films feed into it,
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and other music of course, you know his influences like Jimi Hendrix,
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David Bowie, Sensational Alex Harvey Band and stuff like that. It's all in
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there, and the more you look, the more you see. That's why
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the book is ridiculously long. It's two hundred and thirty thousand words. It's
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half the length of the Bible, one third the length of the works of
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Shakespeare, longer than James Joyce's Ulysses and Game of Thrones. I found out
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about the same length as Middle March, The fountain Head and Gravity's Rainbow.
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So I'm not saying I'm not saying size is everything. Size isn't everything,
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you know, but yeah, you know it just just in case anybody thinks
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this is a sort of superficial ats ed skim through the q's career. It's
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not. I've gone deep. I've gone yeah. Yeah, it's called too
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though is you can go to just if you have a song in mind,
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or a topic in mind, or something anything that you're related, you can
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flip to that page you don't have You don't necessarily have to go from page
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one right until the very end. But it's got a nice little ribbon here
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it does. Maybe that's the UK edition. I'm not sure if that's in
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the American edition. But yeah, I didn't expect people to read it consequence
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so sequentially from start to finish, I expect people to sort of leap around,
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and topics which are referenced elsewhere in the book are highlighted in bold,
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so they almost act as kind of hyperlinks to make people jump back and forth
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between different sections of the book. That's that was the hope. Anyway.
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Robert Smith is fascinating to me because there's mystery surrounding him. There's which I
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love that. I don't know if we have these kind of rock stars anymore
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where it seems like we know everything about these musicians nowadays. But there's a
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little bit of a mystery there to him. He's from Blackpooling and what I
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didn't realize is that he has never returned. Actually, let's start with what
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type of place is Blackpool? And why does Rama say he never return Why
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doesn't he want to go back? Blackpool is in US terms, something between
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Coney Island and Las Vegas, I think, but a very sort of And
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I don't want to criticize Blackpool because I come from a similar place myself called
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Barry in Wales. But it's quite a sort of trashy seaside resorts. It's
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considered sort of tacky but fun, and it's where people go for stag and
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Hen parties or Bucks parties as I guess you'd say, and that sort of
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thing. And it's yeah, it's a seaside resort in the north of England.
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But because it's in the North of England, it's quite often very cold.
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You know, it's got a lovely sandy beach, but you wouldn't necessarily
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want to spend too much time looks uriracing there. But yeah, his family
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moved south to Crawley, which is a suburban commuter town really to the south
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of London. When he was about five years old, when he first went
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to school, he was mocked for having a Northern accent, and in UK
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terms, northern for northern reeds, southern all the kind of associations that come
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with that. It's considered more working class, more blue collar than the South
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and so on. So immediately from being a very small child, he felt
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he didn't fit in where he was. I don't know why he's never gone
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back that, he's never taken the cure there, they never played a gig
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there. In Blackpool. He has said that he has these sort of Halcian
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memories, these idyllic memories of his earliest moments sitting on the beach in Blackpool,
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And maybe that's too perfect to ruin by going back and seeing what it's
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really like. But yeah, I think the kind of place that he did
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actually eventually grow up, which is Crawley, is quite significant because it's quite
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a dull, suburban place, and I think most developed nations in the world
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have places like that. Just that feeling of boredom but also of kind of
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alienation and not fitting in is something that can resonate with people whether they're in
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Mexico or Japan or the US, and I think that that's one reason why
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they're such a universal band. They don't write about specifically British topics. Oh
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yeah, and boy he started in the eighties. He started a fashion trend
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here in the States. In high school you started to see a lot of
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kids dressing like Robert. Yeah, Edward scissar hands was the whole look was
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inspired by Robert, absolutely. Yeah, That's That's something I go into in
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the book, is the references to the cure in film, and yeah,
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Edwards's Hands is the big one. But there's also a film with Sean Penn
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called This Must Be the Place, in which Sean pen plays a sort of
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retired rock star who turns Nazi war criminal hunter. The character basically is Robert
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Smith, you know. And that they're being films called Boys Don't Cry,
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They've been films called Just Like Heaven and so on. So yeah, they've
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had their influence in so many places, and I think it's because they mean
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something. They still and for something. Even just the look of him,
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just his classic look from the eighties with the white face and the red lipstick
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and the heavy eye liner in the big backcombed, messy hair. It says
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something. And he is an iconic. I know the word iconic is done
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to death, but just his appearance it makes a statement. It says I
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don't fit in, and he's there saying to other people in the world who
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feel that, well, I'm there for you. You mentioned afore us.
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The book starts with this song, of course, starts the letter A.
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So that is a forest, the lead single from the band's second album,
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nineteen eighty seventeen Seconds. And you say that in many ways this is the
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definitive cure song. It's been performed live over a thousand times, making it
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the most played song in the repertoire. There's a certain something about this song.
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Why do you feel it maybe the definitive cure song. It's probably the
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first Cure single that had that sense of mystery and foreboding to it. And
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it brings in all the kind of cultural associations that we have with with forests,
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you know. And I've gone into this in the book, talking about
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everything from brothers grim folk tales to Shakespeare's Macbeth. And you've mentioned that the
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sopranos at one point, and horror things like the Evil Dead and so on.
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Forests just just the word unlocks so many associations, and a lot of
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them are to do with fear and running towards your fears, as he does
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in the song. So I think, I think, yeah, it's a
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really really important song. And I did cheat slightly by having it at the
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start of the book because a lot of people say it should be under f
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the Forest, but I decided for my purposes that the indefinite article counts because
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I wanted to start with that song. So yeah, well played. Yeah,
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the Cure sound, it's so unique, that extended atmospheric instrumental opening,
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the hypnotic bass lines, the guitar chors that just ride gently over the beat,
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not necessarily what we're hearing on that first album Boys Don't Cry. How
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does that cure sound develop? Was it Robert's doing, because an old Lowell
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Tallhurst probably plays a role in it. I don't know about. Was it
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a collaborative, organic thing or was that Robert's vision. So the album that
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you're referring to, Boys Don't Cry. In the UK, they had an
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album called Three Imaginary Boys, and that put together with some other tracks formed
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their first American release, Boys Don't Cry, and in that era they were
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still very much inspired by the tail end of punk, so they sounded like
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the Buzzcocks quite a lot, and their songs were sort of quite terse abrupt,
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three minute or even less than three minute songs with sort of you know
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that kind of I don't know snotty teenage spitefulness that people had in those days.
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But they seem to have a rethink they they don't like that first album.
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That's something I found out is that almost consistently throughout their career when they
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asked about their first first album or albums, they're quite disparaging about it.
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They think it's kind of a false start. When it came to seventeen Seconds,
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which was their second UK album that has a forest on it, they
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started thinking about influences like David Bowie's Berlin period, particularly the album Low and
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I think you can hear quite a lot of that in there, and you
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can hear the influence of the drumming on that Bowie album on Loal Tolhurst and
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also what tends to be called as croud rock bands like Can and Noilly,
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German bands on the rhythms of it on Loal Tolhurst. So I think that's
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when the cure really start, is with a forest and with seventeen seconds,
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and then onwards, you know, the next album Faith, which is very
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morose and very downbeat but weirdly soothing, and then there's the album Pornography,
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which is just completely hostile, nihilistic and I don't know if I'm to swear
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on this podcast beleap me out, but they've just described it as the ultimate
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fuck off record or fuck you record. You know. It's an album that
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starts with the words it doesn't matter if we all die on the song one
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hundred years, and has lines about sharing the world with slaughtered pigs and all.
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Its really sort of grotesque imagery. So they've gone from sort of little,
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sort of jangly pop songs like Boys Don't Cry to that in quite a
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short space of time, and that sort of set the tone. But maybe
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they they'd taken that as far as they could and then I mean they drove
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themselves to breaking point. The band essentially broke up after that album, and
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their manager Chris Parry said to them last roll of the Dice, why don't
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you write some pop songs, proper pop songs, so they did, and
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they tried with Let's Go to Bed, which nearly made the UK Top forty,
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and I believe it was quite a big sort of dance tune, particularly
16:56
on the West coast in the States. Then the Walk would the song that
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grabbed me, and then love Cats, which was a top ten hit here,
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and suddenly they became of interest to pop magazines like Smash Hits, you
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know, the Cousin magazine, to Star Hits in the States, and they
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were on top of the pops, and they were reaching out to people like
17:15
myself when I was fifteen year old, and I needed that. And that's
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why I think that they're so valuable. That they weren't one of these precious
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bands who tries to sort of ring fence themselves and keep it very elite.
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They were quite happy to play the pop game to some extent if that's what
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it took to reach the listeners, and I really respect that about them.
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I do want to get into a little bit more of that pop side of
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the cure, but I want to build to faith nineteen eighty one. It
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didn't take long for me to realize there was more than the hits with the
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Cure. There's a serious depth to their catalog, and to see All Cats
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Are Gray in your book, I was so happy. It's one of my
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old time favorite Cure of songs. Maybe my favorite deep track with Tuish Impossible
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Things maybe a close second. Yeah, But I've always wondered if there was
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a story behind All Cats Are Gray. Please tell us what it's about.
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How this song also plays into drug culture, which I didn't know. Look,
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yeah, I'll start with that bit. The first British people supposedly to
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take ecstasy were Soft Cell, Mark Almond, Dave Ball. They were in
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New York. I think they were recording a version of their song Memorabilia with
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a friend of theirs who sort of does vocals on that track called Cindy Ecstasy
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the Clues in her name. Really. They were in her apartment and the
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Faith album was on, and they took ecstasy for the first time, and
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they started coming up to the sound of All Cats Are Gray, which,
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on the one hand, you'd think that's not the sort of record, that's
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not sort of music you'd most closely associate with ecstasy, because usually it's quite
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sort of you know, euphoric music. You think of dance music. You
19:02
think of DM and stuff like that. But this album and this this track
19:06
in particular is quite funereal. It's it's quite It was very very downbeat.
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Robert explained the song as being just a nightmare of being lost or trapped in
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caves, echoes, of the grave and of prison cells and again of growing
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old, and the lyrics are sort of about drifting towards death. Loal Tolhurst,
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who has said that he had some input into the lyrics, has said
19:29
that it was to some extent informed by his mother's death. So yeah,
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the idea that that was the kind of year zero moment for ecstasy culture in
19:41
the UK is really really interesting. But yeah, I single that track out
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because I think there are some cure songs which, even though they're just album
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tracks, they have a status that's above and beyond that. There's a couple
19:53
of other examples in the book A Night Like This and one hundred Years that
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I thought deserved their own chapters. So it's my book. I gave it
20:03
to them. Maybe I'm offine of but I remember listening to U Two's All
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that You Can't Leave Behind is a song called New York in there and I
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feel like the core structure of the synthce on that song is very similar to
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All Cats Are Gray. I highly doubted there. Maybe they are fans.
20:17
Well, actually you too, you do mention in the book. I think
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I think Bono has always wanted to be one of those bands. He's always
20:26
even though you two were arguably are the biggest rock band in the world.
20:32
I don't know how you measure these things these days, but they certainly were
20:36
at one point. I think maybe under something there, Yeah, yeah,
20:44
I think Bono's always secretly wanted to be more of a kind of joy division
20:48
or echo on the bunny Men kind of cult act, or indeed the cure,
20:52
so that that would that would make sense. Okay. Robert has addressed
20:56
death in his lyrics more than once as we know, which leads me to
21:00
nineteen eighty two's Pornography and You're write in the book quote Smith did everything within
21:06
his power to fulfill the prophecy of an early death. The excessive consumption of
21:10
alcohol and drugs during the Pornography sessions is the stuff of legend. How bad
21:15
did things get for Robert in the band, and do you feel that Robert
21:18
was was he suicidal? At that point. I don't know if i'd if
21:21
I'd seriously say that he was suicidal in that I don't think there was any
21:25
sort of intention behind it, but there was certainly just a drive towards oblivion,
21:30
which is something that a lot of young men experienced, but it all
21:34
seemed a bit heightened in the Q's case. So Simon Gallup as well and
21:40
Loal Tolhurst, all three of them drink drugs and just sort of extreme behavior.
21:45
There are a lot of fights, a lot of arguments between band members,
21:48
particularly on the subsequent tour, so it was as if they sensed that
21:53
this cannot go on, and there was almost a sort of bloody mindedness of
21:59
just thinking, what the hell, let's just push ourselves to the extreme of
22:03
kind of sleeplessness and intoxication. And you can hear all that in the album.
22:08
It's an interesting thing that LSD was a drug of choice for them and
22:15
particularly for Robert at that time, because in terms of acid and its effect
22:19
on rock culture, one initially thinks of the sixties and sort of summer of
22:26
love, flower power and all that kind of blissful utopianism, but the eighties
22:30
were a very different time. There was the shadow of the atomic bomb hanging
22:34
over us all. It really felt as if it wasn't just a question of
22:40
if we were all going to die in a nuclear armageddon, it was when
22:45
it was definitely going to happen as far as we were concerned. When you
22:48
add that mindset to LSD, Well, you end up with an album like
22:55
Pornography. To be honest, you end up with a much darker, more
23:00
twisted alternate reality to the one that the sixties generation conjured. You do point
23:06
out the Pornography it was to become the band's most revered tatismanic release, but
23:10
it took a while. And that was the same for me. It took
23:12
me years to really connect with the album, kind of fell flat for a
23:17
while, and then all of a sudden years later, I go back to
23:18
it, and now I can listen to it from beginning to end, and
23:22
I'm fascinated by it. But what is it about this album It makes it
23:25
such a slow burn? We know there are no pop songs on it,
23:27
but that aside, what is it that you think has caught on with people
23:33
over the years. Well, you're right that it was a slow burn.
23:36
For one thing, it didn't have universally good reviews at the time, that's
23:41
for sure. I think even fiction the record company and Polydor thought it was
23:47
commercial suicide. I can imagine yeah, yeah, yeah, where is the
23:51
single? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean the one single is the
23:55
Hanging Garden. But that's not exactly poptastic, is it. You know,
24:00
it's not very radio friendly. Yeah, I mean I can remember when the
24:03
Cure really broke through and the Great Hits album standing on a Beach as it's
24:08
known in the UK and staring at the sea. I think in the US
24:11
came out, you do that thing of Okay, the Hits are on here,
24:15
it's got in between days, it's got close to me, it's got
24:18
boys Don't Cry. But then there are these other songs that from earlier on
24:22
in their career, like the Hanging Garden, and it's quite impenetrable, quite
24:26
difficult to break into, and you know, it sounds dense and claustrophobic and
24:30
aggressive, and you think, what's going on with them at that point,
24:34
and then you go back and you investigate. So I would imagine that a
24:40
lot of people in my generation weren't hearing the Pornography album until about eighty six
24:45
when you sort of go back and check out the earlier stuff. So that's
24:48
one reason why it took a while to catch on, and I think one
24:52
reason it is so revered is because it has that kind of consistency of mood
24:59
all the way through. It's it's very much a mood record. You put
25:03
that on and it just relentlessly and remorselessly delivers that desperation and hostility and hate.
25:12
Really in a way, it's similar to Disintegration, which of course was
25:18
that the big album. But even Disintegration has got Lullaby on it, which
25:22
is kind of a quirky little pop song, so love song. Yeah,
25:26
yeah, yeah, indeed, But Pornography didn't have anything like that. It's
25:30
unremitting that there is no light in that album, but sometimes that's what you
25:33
want. Simon Price is the author of Curpedia and a to Z of the
25:37
Cure, which is out now now. For me, the magical period is
25:41
from eighty five's The Head on the Door right through ninety two's Wish, So
25:45
you have nineteen eighty five The Head on the Door, in nineteen eighty seven
25:47
kiss Me, kiss Me, kiss Me, and then eighty nine's Disintegration followed
25:51
by ninety two's Wish, a balance of pop brilliance with the elegant doom and
25:56
gloom in between days. Just like Kevin Friday, I'm in Love. They
26:00
have that magic to them and just like Kevin, to me is perfection.
26:03
I mean, there's nothing that you can change with that song. And even
26:07
Robert says the same. It's a quote that you have in your book.
26:10
Could you talk about the inspiration behind just like Kevin, Robert, here's a
26:14
song on the radio, right, and then he makes some chord changes.
26:18
Yeah, he has been honest enough to admit that a song by the English
26:23
new wave band The Only Ones called Another Girl, Another Planet. I'm not
26:29
sure how well that how well known that song is to us listeners, but
26:33
it's very well loved over here, and it has that same kind of gizzy,
26:40
romantic swirl to it, the same kind of propulsion to it that just
26:44
like Heaven has. And I always thought that those songs were kind of similar,
26:48
and it was quite pleasing for Robert to acknowledge that. And you're right,
26:52
it's just a wonderful song. I think it's certainly their best single,
26:56
the q's best single, and maybe their best song overall. Maybe equal with
27:02
one hundred years so for very different reasons. But yeah, the cover version
27:06
by Dinosaur Junior. Have you heard that. No, I've never heard the
27:10
card. I don't think so. No, that was what early nineties they
27:12
did that. It was eighty nine, so it was very soon after.
27:15
In fact, it was goodness me. It was the same year that Oh
27:19
No Sorry, Disintegration was eighty nine, so it was two years after the
27:23
single came out. Do they stay true to the Cure version or yes and
27:27
no they It's got the same kind of lovely, wayward kind of I don't
27:34
know, This giddiness to it is the word I keep coming back to.
27:37
But j Mascis has added these kind of death metal vocal growls into it.
27:45
So you know the bit in the Cure's version Rare sings you with Jay Mascus's
27:49
yeah and love it. And it also the song ends really abruptly, so
27:57
if you're a DJ and you're playing it, you look like an idiot it.
28:00
But Robert has said that that's his favorite cover of a Cure song ever.
28:03
You know, never mind Adele singing love song and probably making more money
28:07
for the Cure than any of their own recordings made yeah, well three eleven
28:11
also did what a three eleven cover love song? Oh well, that's probably
28:18
love song, cha, but that that is one of their most covered songs
28:22
because because love song is maybe the closest they get to a traditional love song,
28:27
they don't often write standards the cure, if you know what I mean.
28:30
They don't write songs that could be sung by anyone. Even though I
28:34
was saying this is kind of universe universality to the cure. The lyrics are
28:38
often quite cryptic and quite twisted in a way that not anyone can interpret them.
28:44
You almost you almost have to be Robert or somebody of Robert's mindset to
28:48
put it over convincingly. But yeah, love love song is much more that
28:52
the sort of thing that pretty much any anyone could could take on. The
28:56
book done. Rock podcasts will be back after this. What interests me about
29:03
Robbertes I don't know if any artist who's been able to pull off what he
29:06
does, to be able to go back and forth from the upbeat, happy
29:08
pop to the dark gothic and make it work so well. Doesn't the pop
29:12
stuff doesn't sound contrived, that doesn't sound out of character? Has he talked
29:17
a lot about his songwriting process. Does he collaborate at all or is it
29:21
primarily him that comes in with the music and the band follows. It's interesting
29:25
how that changes from album to albums, so that there are some albums where
29:29
it's very much him recording the demos and working up the tracks until they're pretty
29:33
much done and then bringing the band in at the last minute. There are
29:36
other albums, and I believe Disintegration is one of these where they all meet
29:41
up. In this case, it was in Boris Williams, the drummer's house
29:45
in the Devon countryside, and they all bring songs with them. They all
29:48
bring demos and bring ideas in and work it up from that, so that
29:53
varies over time. But obviously he is the only consistent member of the Cure.
30:00
It's very much his band, but it wouldn't be the Cure without the
30:04
other contributors. And the sort of shifting lineups are very much, you know,
30:10
sort of moving parallel with the shifting sound of the band. And some
30:14
of those things are to do with people quitting. Sometimes they're to do with
30:18
people being kicked out, and that's kind of happenstance and that that can kind
30:22
of affect the way the next record will sound. But I think Robert's always
30:26
had this idea of who to work with to get to get the sound that
30:30
he wants at any given time. And I think that that period you're talking
30:33
about eighty five to ninety two ninety three, I suppose is when they were
30:38
strongest as a musical unit. And it's no coincidence that their biggest record sales
30:45
are that that time. It's yeah, it's the head on the Door,
30:48
It's kiss Me, kissing Me, kiss Me is disintegration. I think the
30:51
middle one of those, particularly kiss Me, kiss Me, kiss Me,
30:53
is the album I would recommend to anybody as a kind of way in to
30:59
the cure because it has all the different extremes of their music. It has
31:04
just like Heaven and you know, other big, bright, catchy pop songs
31:08
like why Can't I Be You? And Hot Hot Hot, and catch but
31:14
it's also got these sort of mangled, frazzled psychedelic excursions like the Kiss or
31:21
the Snake Pit and things like that, and it's got sort of dark,
31:25
mysterious moments like if only tonight we could sleep and so on. So yeah,
31:29
that's the album that and it's a double as well, so it really
31:33
encompasses the kind of sprawl, if you like, of what the Cure are
31:36
about. Did you know the connection of Rocky two with ketch Have you ever
31:41
heard this? Oh my goodness, you're gonna tell me something. I'm going
31:45
to regret that if you could have put it in the book under r for
31:48
Racky. There's a scene in Rocky two where stallone is Adrian is in the
31:53
hospital. She almost loses her life because after trying to have a child,
31:59
there's complications. So he's waiting for her to come out of the coma and
32:02
he's he's reading a poem to her. He's reading what would become the lyrics
32:07
to Catch. Robert saw the scene and that's what inspired the lyrics I am
32:14
completely broken and crestfall. I'm throwing this out of the window. Here we
32:19
go there, But the revised edition is already in the words seriously, thank
32:22
you, and I will create I will I will credit you for pointing this
32:27
out to me when, if, and when there's a revised edition. Yeah,
32:30
but this is what you've just done. There is a perfect example of
32:34
the sort of thing I've done in the book. I've I've tried to follow
32:37
these threads and you know, see where things come from. And I thought
32:39
I'd done it, but no, no, I didn't know about Tell me
32:45
about Robert's obsession with age. I mean, what are your thoughts on this?
32:47
Because turning thirty really shuck him up. You say that the prospect of
32:51
aging troubled them deeply, and that's that leads to disintegration and the themes of
32:55
the songs. But even back as far as in between days he's talking about
33:00
getting old. He was like, what twenty five years old? I mean,
33:02
as you look back at laugh But you know, in doing your research
33:05
for the book, did you find Robert talked about it a lot in interviews?
33:08
Did he try to explain like why aging trouble him so deeply? Yeah?
33:13
He did seem to have this more bid fascination with these All they are
33:16
is numerical landmarks. Really, even turning twenty, like leaving their teens.
33:22
I think there was a sense then on what it's all over really certainly,
33:25
Yeah, turning thirty it was something that was overshadowing his thinking when when it
33:31
came to writing disintegration, And yeah, it seems absolutely ridiculous, doesn't it
33:37
When when you look back and think, I mean, I don't know how
33:42
old you are, but I'm significantly older than thirty let me tell you that.
33:45
Yeah, same here, and you think thirty is like you're a kid
33:47
still, you know, during that MTV era, of course, I mean
33:51
he still looks young. He looks long enough to be on these videos.
33:54
It wasn't like there was any concern there. It just a lot of it
33:59
was in his mind. Although I do remember turning thirty and that was kind
34:00
of a freaky time, like, oh boy, wow, the time has
34:04
flown. But there's something with him though, because it's it's in his lyrics
34:07
quite often. But I suppose in a way that fits with the rest of
34:12
his personality in that he over I don't know if overthinks is the right word,
34:15
but he feels things too deeply. And most of us might just sort
34:21
of be slightly sad about leading our twenties and sort of shrug it off.
34:25
But for Robert, it's this giant existential crisis and he had it again ten
34:31
years later, and the album Blood Flowers comes out of that. Really,
34:36
so thirty nine. There's a song called thirty nine on them. Yeah,
34:39
yeah, yeah. It is strange because of all the professions you could go
34:45
into, being a rock star does allow you this kind of if not immortality,
34:50
then a certain sort of Peter Pan quality that you stay young or young
34:54
presenting for as long as long as you feel that you want to. Yeah,
35:00
there was an interesting point in the book, and I can't remember which
35:01
song it was, but there was one song where for the first time he
35:06
refers to himself as a man, not a boy, because he did sort
35:10
of sing about himself as as a boy quite late on, you know,
35:14
into his thirties. So there was that thing of wanting to remain youthful and
35:19
to be this kind of young, youthful creature in the world. So the
35:23
harsh reality of the calendar telling you that you're not that maybe hurt, maybe
35:29
stung a little bit. So many songs from Disintegration I could ask you about.
35:31
I'll just pick one Pictures of you you do right quote, as is
35:36
soul Off in the case with the Cure. There are a competing narrators regarding
35:39
this song's origin, some candid, some mischievous, made up by Robert because
35:43
he gets bored in interviews. What are the stories he's told? Then?
35:46
Do we know what it's really now, well, I'm gonna find that entry.
35:52
But I would say that, yeah, if you've interviewed rock band's over
36:00
the years, as I have, you often become aware of this that,
36:04
particularly if they're on some kind of junket where they're sat in a hotel room
36:07
for eight hours and journalists get shoved in the room and shoved out again.
36:13
It just gets so boring answering the same questions and they end up telling lies.
36:19
And also, I think a lot of bands like to maintain a certain
36:22
amount of mystery about themselves, and they like to be playful with it,
36:25
and there can even be a case where the older artist misremembers what the younger
36:34
artist meant by something. First of all, Robert believes it's an overlooked song.
36:38
He says, it's one of the very best songs that we've ever done.
36:42
It's very understated, which I would agree with. From the album,
36:45
it is overshadowed by love Song and by Lullaby, maybe even Fascination Street really,
36:52
which was a single in the US, But it seems that it had
36:54
a sort of personal significance for him. He set and this is in in
37:00
Cure News. Cure News was a sort of official fanzine that was sent out
37:04
to fans in nineteen ninety eight. He claimed that it was loosely based on
37:08
an essay by Myra Polio entitled The Dark Power of Ritual Pictures, and that
37:15
he read this essay and he destroyed all his old personal photos and most of
37:21
his home sinny and video collection to try and wipe away the past, but
37:27
then felt this huge regret of having done so. I am very skeptical about
37:31
this story because, first of all, there is no essay of that name
37:36
that I could find anywhere. And also, Myra Polio is an anagram of
37:40
Mary Pool, his wife. Oh wow, yes, his high school sweetheart.
37:45
Yeah yeah, So there we go. And there was a version he
37:49
told Rolling Stone as well, and this is a bit more well documented.
37:52
So there does seem to be some truth in this. That during the disintegration
37:57
sessions in the studios of residential studio in an old sort of manor house in
38:01
England, there was a fire in Robert's room and it destroyed supposedly a lot
38:08
of his possessions, including photos, And when he sifted through the wreckage,
38:13
he found a wallet which had photos of Mary in it, and this sent
38:17
his mind spinning into this nostalgic reverie which you hear in the lyrics, so
38:23
you know, who knows what's true? But I think, yeah, maybe
38:27
of those two stories, I buy the fire story a little bit more.
38:30
The nineties is an interesting period for The Cure because I remember hearing Mint Car
38:35
in eighteen eighty six on the radio. I thought, yeah, here we
38:37
go again, another hit song, another hit album from The Cure. But
38:39
it was the lowest selling album in twelve years. Why do you think that
38:44
was? Because there are some great songs on there. You mentioned Jupiter Crash,
38:47
you alluded to that. I love that song. This is a lie
38:50
strange attraction mint Car. I have my thoughts on it because I think the
38:54
first single was the thirteenth from Wild Mood Swings. The first single, well,
39:00
at least Wikipedia, if we can believe it, the thirteenth was the
39:06
first single, which is an odd choice for it did that because the thirteenth
39:09
didn't do so well. That was I don't know, how would you describe
39:13
that song, But it's not to me a pop single. But then they
39:15
followed with Mint Carr, which I thought they should have led with, but
39:19
maybe it was too late by that time people lost interest. What are your
39:22
thoughts on on that idea of I don't want to say the failure of the
39:27
album. It still did well, but obviously the lowest selling album twelve years
39:30
not good. Why do you think that was? I think you're right that
39:34
Mint Carr is a more obvious pop song, but I think there are a
39:37
number of factors at play here. The band was starting to fall apart somewhat,
39:44
and the album was recorded with several different drummers. This was one of
39:47
the albums where it often was just Robert and the producer and whoever they could
39:52
get in to play the parts on the day, so it's not a cohesive
39:58
piece. We could say that, but I think the world had changed as
40:01
well. I think, okay, this is sometimes a little bit overstated,
40:07
but in the UK there was the effect of britpop, that alternative rock had
40:13
moved on from the last time The Cure were relevant, which I guess we'd
40:16
say was ninety two ninety three, that the Wish campaign. Three years in
40:21
pop is a long time, and yeah, they they've been away, they've
40:24
been absent, and in the meantime, bands like Blur and Oasis and Swayed
40:30
and Pulp were the ones taking everyone's attention, and the Cure hadn't yet reached
40:37
their sort of status as legends. They were just seen as kind of yesterday's
40:44
thing. And in the US, I suppose grunge would have been the equivalent
40:49
of that that, Yeah, alternative rock meant something different. Now, yeah,
40:54
they were in that period, maybe that waiting period to become legends.
40:57
Did you get to that point too, Yeah, well you become now called
41:00
the Legacy Act. But I remember that late nineties, early two thousand,
41:02
Suddenly all these young artists were just saluting the Cure and even MTV I think
41:07
had the word icons. They had what was the show called icons or something,
41:13
and they are a tribute to Robert who was at the show, and
41:16
yeah, I see what you said. Alan Manson presented that, didn't they
41:20
And there were all sorts of people like I think Nine Inch Nails Trent Resner
41:23
acknowledging the Cure's influence, and Robert had spoken about this that there was this
41:29
period in the early two thousands where he started to realize that there were bands
41:36
coming through who didn't care that The Cure had been uncool for a while because
41:42
they had maybe grown up on kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me disintegration.
41:47
So you get bands like Interpol and the Yaya Yeahs, and probably emo
41:52
bands as well my Chemical Romance fall Out Boy, who are really obviously to
41:59
me and sometimes openly acknowledged being Cure influenced. So yeah, I think a
42:05
lot of bands find that you just got to wait your time, and your
42:07
time will come back round again. Yeah. The thirteenth. By the way,
42:10
I'm looking here at a quote from Robert that said fans have a love
42:15
hate relationship with that song, which has that Latin feel to it. I
42:20
have to say I'm on the hate side of it, and I don't like
42:22
I don't enjoy saying that. I just it's felt flat for me. Did
42:25
you like that song? Do you like that song? I like the fact
42:30
that they were brave enough to experiment with Latin music, but it probably wasn't
42:37
the right thing at the right time. If they've done that in don't know
42:42
eighty seven, they might have got away with it. It might have been
42:45
a big hit. Well. I always say, like, whether I like
42:47
a song or not, even if I hate it, I always say every
42:51
artist should just do what they feel they want to do. Yeah, I
42:53
always respect that. And the thing is, I think every artist feels that
43:00
their new album is the best thing they've ever done. You very rarely will
43:04
get anyone saying, well, it's not quite up to our earlier standards,
43:07
but it's all right. You won't get that. Robert has often spoken about
43:12
this and said, well, we could bring out the best Cure album in
43:17
just almost objective musical terms that there has ever been, but it cannot have
43:22
the same power because the Cure, that moment of being culturally central has kind
43:30
of gone and it's never coming back. They're always there that they're sort of
43:35
there on the edge of things. It's almost a kind of a sun sending
43:39
light or darkness towards new generations of musicians and fans. But they can never
43:46
be at the middle of things anymore. And he knows that. And it
43:51
must be frustrating for musicians to bring out what they think is a good piece
43:54
of work and for the world just to sort of shrug its shoulders. I
43:59
don't think that would happen. And this time, though, I think their
44:01
legendary status is now such that if and when they do bring out a new
44:07
album, it will be well received and it will be much listened to,
44:12
but there were definitely two or three albums where people are like the Cure or
44:16
whatever, the book down Rock Podcast will be back after this. Blood Flowers
44:23
did very well, I know in college radio, and it did well with
44:28
the hardcore fans, but there a lot of people didn't even know it was
44:31
out. But it's such a brilliant album. Two thousands Blood Flowers. This
44:35
is interesting because you do talk about the inspiration coming from short stories and poems
44:39
and art exposition, talk about that Blood Flowers coming from First World War poetry,
44:46
and I delved into this a little bit to try and ascertain which First
44:51
World War poem it was, but it is a kind of long running trope
44:55
of war poetry, the idea of flowers with blood dripping from them, this,
45:00
you know, something beautiful and something horrific and juxtaposed like that on a
45:06
battlefield. So that plays into it. And yeah, just more broadly,
45:12
the influence of poets like Dylan Thomas on Robert Smith is immense, and that's
45:17
something that I really cherish about them, that you do end up thinking,
45:23
Okay, well, Robert Smith is interested in this, I'm going to go
45:25
and find out about it. It's the same way that bands like the Smiths
45:31
operated. So if I knew at the time that Morrissey was a fan of
45:36
Oscar Wilde, I would read the entire works of Oscar wild I found out
45:39
he's a fan of James Dean, I'd watched well the three films that James
45:43
Dean made and find out about his life. And even if they they had
45:46
Truman Capoti on a record cover, well who's he? And I think that
45:52
that's a really valuable thing that bands can do. So yeah, Blood Flowers
45:57
was one of those It's one of those records where Robert was drawing on pre
46:01
existing art but also stuff that was going on in the world at the time,
46:07
terrorism and the backlash to terrorism, and just kind of religious extremism in
46:13
general. You know that that there are lyrics about that on there, and
46:17
he was really really proud of that record. And because of that factor that
46:22
I was talking about that bands of a certain vintage will never have their new
46:29
record listen to much, he had to resort to tactics like touring it in
46:37
a trilogy format with two earlier and maybe better regarded albums, So, you
46:43
know, pornography and disintegration to make the point that Blood Flowers is of that
46:49
caliber and in that kind of tradition. Now, the other thing I should
46:53
mention too before we wind down, they join the darts. Bark set is
46:58
one of the best Bark seats ever forgotten that came out in two thousand and
47:00
four. There's some gems on there. It does have. It includes Burn
47:05
from the Crow soundtrack, which I can't leave out. That's such a great
47:08
song. But it maybe realize how much more there was to the Wish sessions,
47:15
which Robert said he wanted it to be a double album. One side
47:17
all the happy upbeat, the other side all the downbeat, but the record
47:22
label said no to it. And if you listen to the songs from those
47:24
sessions, she's like, wow, this could have been easily put on the
47:29
record in a single. Yeah, that was a greater. But then we
47:31
had four the self titled album four thirteen Dream two thousand and eight. Before
47:37
I ask you about the Cure today, the new album that's due out.
47:40
But as we know, with Robert, will believe it when we see it
47:45
because he always promises it. He's promised a solo album for many years.
47:49
I want to ask you the many lineup changes in the Cure, which you
47:52
did mention quickly. Simon Gallup has been with Robert the most. My fellow
47:55
Gemini, the bassist Simon Gallup wrapped out for a few years in the early
48:00
eighties, but he's been there pretty much throughout. A quick search on lines
48:05
as a total of thirteen members including Robert over the years close to twenty five
48:08
different lineups. But interesting to see some of these members end up coming back.
48:14
So is he hard to work with? Has anything ever been talked about
48:16
regarding that? Is? Is it something that I don't know? Is it
48:22
off limits? As far as in interviews, Lol Tolhurst says he's good friends
48:25
with Robert these days. I guess they had. They had a falling out
48:29
right that was more substance abuse issues when he was out of the band in
48:31
eighty nine. Yeah, I think Robert has reached a stage in his life
48:37
where he feels that it's not worth holding grudges. And I've heard stories from
48:44
people who would definitely know that he has built bridges with people with whom he
48:51
may have had foolings out and Lol is one of those. But Yeah,
48:53
certainly, I think I think Loll by his own amission was difficult to be
48:58
around eighty seven to eighty nine, and that's why he ends up getting edged
49:00
out of the band. And Simon Gallup has said that in eighty two he
49:07
was pretty nasty to be around, and so were all of them. They
49:10
were all goading and antagonizing each other, and there was to some extent a
49:15
culture of bullying in the band in the late eighties, with Loll being the
49:21
main victim of that. And I've talked about that in the book, so
49:22
that there were some kind of unpleasant periods where you think maybe being in the
49:27
Cure wasn't a lot of fun for certain people. But yeah, I actually
49:31
counted I think it was fifteen and members of the band fifteen, I think
49:37
so, And now we can add a sixteenth because Mike Lord is standing in
49:43
on keyboards for Roger O'Donnell, who's not well at the moment. Best wishes
49:46
to Roger. Yeah, I've just been there for a while. Here's one
49:50
that was that left and came back. I believe he is, Yeah,
49:52
a couple of times, and he is the third longest serving member when you
49:58
piece it all together, so very import member of the band. I became
50:01
very interested in Paul Thompson, now known as Pearl Thompson, Imagine mentioned him.
50:08
Yeah, he's a guitarist during those those big years there, phenomenal guitarist
50:13
who was actually too good for The Cure to begin with, and that's why
50:16
he wasn't in the initial lineup of The Cure. He'd been with them in
50:22
a sort of pre Cure band, Easy Cure, but they found his style
50:27
at that time to be too ornate and too florid, and they wanted something
50:30
more pared down and minimal and post punk. So he went off to art
50:35
school. But then around the time of the Top album, which is quite
50:40
sort of psychedelic and it had more more room for the music to spread out,
50:46
they lude him back in. They he'd already started doing the artwork.
50:51
In fact, the single Primary was was the first which has some Paul Thompson
50:55
artwork on it. They got him into play a bit of sax because he's
50:59
a multi instrumentalist, and then lured him in to actually join the band on
51:04
the live tour and then the next album, the Head on Door, he's
51:07
a full member again. And yeah, I think few people would argue that
51:13
he is their most talented guitarist, and he left and rejoined a couple of
51:19
times. He's now well, he's quit the band. He said, he'll
51:23
never say never, because by his own admission, he's left and rejoined the
51:29
Cure enough times, but he's more or less left music behind. And to
51:32
draw a line under that, he's changed his name to Pearl Thompson and concentrated
51:36
on art. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just one of
51:40
the most fascinating members of the band because he had just even visually, a
51:45
very different look to the rest of them. You know that there was a
51:49
certain Cure look that they all had in the late eighties, with a kind
51:52
of backcomed spiky hair and all that. But he had this sort of tumbling
51:55
pre Raphaelite curls, and he looked more like a s of eighteenth century romantic
52:01
figure rather than a post punk musician. And I just remember finding something really
52:07
strange about him in a very appealing way at the time. And I just
52:10
remember thinking that, and I've said this in the book, that if you're
52:14
in a band where the lead singer and frontman is Robert Smith and yet you
52:19
somehow quietly look like the strange one, you're doing something very right. You
52:23
know, so yeah, yeah, I became very engrossed in finding out about
52:30
him and what makes him tick. And he did work with another famous Robert
52:36
Plant and Jimmy Page. He's on that Page and Plant tour or album or
52:39
both. I can't recac it's the live album not it was in no quarter
52:43
the live album by Page and Plant. So yeah, to be drafted into
52:47
what is essentially led Zeppelin, you've got to be pretty good. And they
52:52
had such respect for him that they started performing Lullaby by the Cure in their
52:57
life set. So did they really? Yeah, Oh that's all. That's
53:00
I'm hoping that's on YouTube. I got a check from that. Yeah,
53:04
go and find that. Yeah. Well, in speaking of YouTube, I
53:07
did catch the new songs that Robert and the band has performed and very much
53:12
looking forward to the next album. If it's from what we've heard so far,
53:15
the songs are very very Cure like, with the big grand opening and
53:21
Robert contemplating his place in the world and lyrically, who makes up the current
53:25
lineup and what's the latest with this new Cure album. I mean we've been
53:30
promised Halloween of twenty twenty three, right, that's we've come in and went,
53:35
yeah, yeah. He did say before this tour was announced that he
53:42
would not tour unless there was a new album. Well he did, he
53:46
toured, and there's no new album, but there kind of is. From
53:50
what I'm hearing, it's pretty much finished, and it's been in an almost
53:54
finished state since about twenty nineteen, and there's just sort of endless kind of
54:00
tinkering with it and alterations since then. And that is something that that's happened
54:07
historically, certainly in this century with the Cure. And I've got a whole
54:13
chapter about the fourteenth album because there's this whole saga of what is that album?
54:19
That there are whole albums that were abandoned without ever being released, and
54:24
fans are hoping that that won't happen to this one, that this one will
54:29
finally see the light of day. They've got a very strong line up at
54:31
the moment. They started the Lost World tour with a six piece lineup of
54:37
Jason Cooper, Simon Gallup, Robert Smith, Reeves Gaberel's, Perry Beamonte drawn
54:44
back in and I've forgotten someone Roger O'Donnell of course. Yeah, so yeah,
54:49
so a six piece band and a moment. Roger's absent, but he'll
54:52
be back. Mike Lord's stepping in. So the fact that they needed to
54:57
bring Perry back into the band tells you something. I think that this isn't
55:01
going to be a minimal record. It's going to be big, expansive music.
55:05
I think maybe in the style of things like playing song from Disintegration that
55:10
kind of big, grandiose, magnificent music, and from the live versions that
55:15
we've all seen on YouTube, that would seem to be the case. And
55:20
I should say to it wasn't Halloween of twenty twenty three, because going back
55:22
to twenty nineteen when they got into the Ragnar Hall of Fame, Robert said,
55:28
coming up in Halloween Halloween, I've been a fair long enough to say,
55:32
Okay, Rabrol, when we see it, i'll believe it, but
55:36
I'll hear it. Yeah, but yeah, it's I'm really looking for.
55:39
Have you had a chance to see them on this tour. No. Actually,
55:44
I was so up against the deadline to finish the book that I had
55:47
to just sit at home and not go up to London to see them.
55:52
But I've been keeping a close eye on the set lists and on live footage
55:55
of it, definitely, and I think they'll be more shows next year.
56:00
The fact that Roger said I'll be back next year tells you that there are
56:04
going to be some more dates. Yeah, i'd like to go see them
56:07
too. I think last time I saw them's two thousand and four, which
56:12
for me, yeah, it's pre COVID. Yeah, I've not seen them
56:15
since since you know, Lockdown. I first saw them in the late eighties
56:21
and I've seen them many times in various incarnations since then. But yeah,
56:25
I've got the hunger to see them again. So yeah, it's hoping.
56:29
Kurpedia and adz of the curates out now through d Street Books and you can
56:31
find it wherever books are sold and where can people find you online? So
56:37
I am Simon Underscore price zero one on Instagram, Twitter, most other social
56:43
media, So yeah, follow me. Why not put the links in the
56:45
show notes page. Simon, thank you very much. Always loved talking the
56:49
Cure, really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. That's it. It's
56:59
in the books.