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Contents Personnel The Story Of Disintegration The Sessions The Promos The Songs Plainsong Pictures Of You Closedown Lovesong Fascination Street Prayers For Rain The Same Deep Water As You Disintegration Untitled The Bonus Tracks The B-Sides The Tour Disintegration Live Discography Of Selected Bootlegs Mixed Up Remixes The Cure Interview
4 5 15 24 27 27 28 30 31 34 35 36 36 37 38 39 40 42 46 51 52
The Personnel
THE ALBUM Plainsong Pictures Of You Closedown Lovesong Lullaby Fascination Street Prayers For Rain The Same Deep Water As You produced by Robert Smith and David M Allen Disintegration Engineered by David M Allen and Robert Smith! Untitled Recorded at Outside Studios, Berkshire BONUS TRACKS Mixed at RAK Studio Three, London (CD and cassette) Last Dance Assistant Engineer at Outside: Richard Sullivan Homesick Assistant Engineer at RAK: Roy Spong Robert Smith - vocals, guitar, keyboards Simon Gallup - bass, keyboards Boris Williams - drums Porl Thompson - guitars Roger O'Donnell - keyboards Lawrence Tolhurst - other instruments
THE B-SIDES Babble Out Of Mind 2 Late Fear Of Ghosts
The Story Of Disintegration
THE STORY OF DISINTEGRATION When The Cure convened in mid-1988 to begin working on the songs which would, less than a year later, emerge as the band's eighth studio album, it was in the knowledge that the group's commercial standing was at an all-time high. Standing On The Beach, a compilation of past Cure singles, and the double album-length Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me had sold a combined six million worldwide, blasting the Cure out of the cozy cult confines into which, despite regular hit singles and albums, they had tenaciously insisted we still addressed their mail. At a time when "alter native music" was still a media hype waiting to be created, and the mainstream muddied everything that crept close to success, the Cure was a self-sustaining anomaly, a band whose audience still regarded them as the world's best-kept secret; whose detractors regarded every new hit a fluke; whose own record company essentially despaired of them. "They only like us when we're selling records," Robert Smith has laughed, and perhaps that is true. What was different in 1988 was that the Cure were selling records. Their record company must have liked them very much indeed. Almost from the outset of the new album, however, those feelings were cloud ing with concern. The Cure's greatest hits so far had been the ones which, in the hands of any other band, might be called "novelty" records: "The Lovecats," a bouncy swing number whose refrain of "wonderfully wonderfully wonderfully wonderfully pretty" had a teen appeal which horrified fans of the band's earlier material at the same time as send-
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ing them spinning, grinning idiotically, to the record store to buy it. "Why Can't I Be You" was demented dance-pop, a lurid love song made all the more cataclysmic by its accompanying video; and "Hot Hot Hot" was unadulterated jazz pop, fed through the same kind of musical time machine that Sparks, darling doyens of 70s' eccentricity, had developed around the time of "Looks Looks Looks." The Cure's reputation, then, was as unabashed doom mongers, but their greatest hits were the opposite entirely. This new album, however, never threatened to even glance towards the lighter, brighter pastures which the Cure had so frequently strayed into of late. When Robert spoke of it, even during its most embryonic phase, he peppered his conversation with comparisons to an incarnation of the Cure which many of the band's most recent fans had no idea even existed; it had certainly been only fleetingly referenced on the Standing On The Beach compilation. And older fans, too, would have cause to feel concern, as the period in question was also that which climaxed with the Cure's total disintegration. When Robert, too, appeared to be thinking along those lines, most patently with his choice of title for the new record, the alarm bells were set ringing everywhere. The first four years of the Cure's recorded existence tell one of the most tumul tuous tales in modern rock history, that of a band which literally tore itself to shreds for no better reason than there was nothing else it could do. As Robert himself has said since, when you are only selling 50,000 records worldwide, you have to do something to get yourself noticed. The Cure chose to destroy itself. Yet it had all started out so brightly. The first Cure album, released in Britain as Three Imaginary Boys, and in the United States a little later as Boys Don't Cry, is a
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sparkling pop masterpiece, the testament of a group whose closest musical relatives were Mancunian power-poppers the Buzzcocks - indeed, for a time, the Cure were affection ately nicknamed in the British press as "the southern Buzzcocks," and though one could probably count on one hand the number of Cure songs which truly deserved such an appellation, those songs ranked amongst the most weighty in the infant band's repertoire: "Boys Don't Cry" itself, the band's debut single "Killing An Arab," the cynical "Jumping Somebody Else's Train," the throwaway recitation of a shopping list which became "So What?".... It was only when one pried deeper into the lyrical word of the band's undisput ed leader, Robert Smith, that a darker edge became apparent - the cloying claustrophobia of "10.15 Saturday Night," with its vision of the tap incessantly "drip... drip... drip... drip... dripping"; the unstated, understated, menace of "Another Day," and most power ful of all, the fear-tinged nostalgia of "Three Imaginary Boys"; everything which the Cure, already undergoing the seismic shocks of the line-up changes which have since become part and parcel of the band's existence, tired and emotional after too many tours too many, were to become over the next few years was hinted at in those earliest mani festations of Robert Smith's unique song writing. "I've always written things down, ever since I can remember. I've got a really bad temper, but its not physical. I don't throw tantrums or anything like that, so I go off somewhere and rather than smash the room, I write things down. Its a release. I worry that my words aren't going to interest people because they're mainly about me. They're not just about world situations or alternatives."
The Story Of Disintegration
That, however, was the reason why people were interested. The late 1970s saw the maniacal sneering energy which had been unleashed by Punk Rock commence its gradual decline into dissipation, a condition which was only exaggerated, on the one hand, by an increasingly desperate drift towards politicizing; on the other by a total absorption in emotional and personal selfishness - an absorption which Robert under stood, but was always able to haul himself away from just as it seemed he must crash. The songs which make up the Cure's most crucial sequence of albums, the trip tych comprised of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography, are never less than intense and intensely personal, but they are universal too; one can identify with the anguish of which Smith sings without ever having to twist one's own psyche into the same distorted misery that was the lot, say, of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, or the convoluted art attacks of Echo and the Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch. The fact that, as the new decade got under way, that was the company with which the Cure would increasingly find them selves sharing a sausage sandwich, was more an indication of the British press' ceaseless quest to create a new "scene" out of so many disparate ingredients, than any conscious effort on the part of the affected bands to join forces. This one, incidentally, was called "Positive Punk." "The songs on Three Imaginary Boys were really embryonic," Robert would later condemn. "They were just put down. There were so many songs on that record only because they were drawn from two years before we recorded it. The songs we always pre ferred were 'Accuracy,' '10.15 Saturday Night and 'Three Imaginary Boys' itself."
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The storm clouds which were gathering around the Cure's public persona, their "anti-image" as several journalists originally tagged their dark-dressed mundanity, were given further impetus when the Cure went out on tour with Siouxsie And The Banshees, the icicle cool band which had erupted out of Punk, but which was now the figurehead around which a whole new musical movement would coalesce, and one into which the Cure would also be drawn. Today, the tag of Gothic Rock still hangs over the Cure, long after Goth itself drifted far past the point where the Cure could reasonably have connect ed with it. The Cure's link with the Banshees was cemented when Robert moved tem porarily into the Banshees following the sudden departure of that band's own guitarist; throughout the fall of 1979, he played full sets with both the Cure and the Banshees, set ting the stage for his eventual full-time recruitment into that band in the early 1980s. It was during this tour, and later, as the Cure overcame the replacement of founder member bassist Michael Dempsey with Simon Gallup and keyboard player Matthieu Hartley, that the seeds of Seventeen Seconds began to germinate in Robert's mind. Dempsey himself admits that his departure had much to do with Robert's plans for the new album. "I wasn't happy with what we were doing at the time. Roberts new songs were more of a personal statement, entirely personal to him, and I couldn't make that statement on his behalf." A dark, somber, record, it did indeed grow out of the songs which Robert, who
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composed them all on a Hammond organ, himself had pinpointed as the most represen tative compositions on Three Imaginary Boys; "I knew what I wanted [it] to sound like, the general mood," he explained. "There's no point in trying to intellectualize about it because its a genuine emotion thats on the LP" - an emotion which Robert was only able to verbalize as the product of what he called "a black period," during which he was unable to shake depression, felt anti-social, found even song writing to be a chore. Written at the end of the Banshees tour, when "there were so many emotional wrecks walking around," Robert described his state of mind as being "like looking down on myself. I was being two separate people... One day I'd wake up wanting to kill some body, the next day I wouldn't even bother getting up. It was awful, I was letting myself slip in order to write songs. I wasn't fighting it, whereas in everyday life you have to con trol those feelings. All the things I went through, it was a really demented two weeks." Reviews of this new, and wholly unexpected, record were tentative. "For any one expecting Seventeen Seconds to be a collection of great pop music," the New Musical Express warned its readers, "the joke is definitely on them. Indeed, Seventeen Seconds is far more oblique in its arrangements and construction than Three Imaginary Boys could ever have been. The sleeve is littered with blurred, out-of-focus shots, while the record itself makes no concessions to alerting the listener to the Cure's current pitch." Even more damning, but in many ways accurate, was Record Mirror's simply observation, "This is a reclusive, disturbed, Cure, sitting in cold, dark, empty rooms, watching clocks." The Cure's workload, of course, did not lighten with the release of this new album, particularly after "A Forest," one of the less doom-laden (but by no means least claustrophobic) songs on the set was culled for a reasonably successful single.
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The band continued to tour ceaselessly (with its inevitable body-count - com plaining that the band's music was too dark, Matthieu Hartley quit immediately after the band returned home from an Australian tour); Robert, in addition, took on some outside work with the Associates and the juvenile Obtainers (for whom he produced a now very collectible single), and all the while, he continued to wrestle with his personal demons over the keys of his typewriter. "Faith was going to be a very positive record," Robert insisted of the Cure's third album as its early 1981 release date approached. "It turned out to be a very morbid one." A set of demos recorded in late September, 1980, were scrapped when it became apparent that the songs were going nowhere; Lol's mother had fallen terminally ill and Robert's grandmother had died; circumstantially, Faith was already taking control of Robert, long before he realized he needed to take control of it. Raised as a Catholic, Robert now realized that his religion -indeed, any sense of religion - had long since slipped away from his waking mind. Lol Tolhurst, Robert's childhood friend and fellow founder member of the band, reflected, "[He and I] were very heavily immersed in religion up until our teens. Organized religion tells you one thing, then as life unfolds you realize that there's an indi vidual interpretation you can put on events. So there were a lot of personal things that went into that album." In hindsight, everything about the album seemed pre-ordained; seemed, also, to hinge around the spectral sleeve photograph of Bolton Abbey, near Shipworth in Yorkshire. The spectral, skeletal, sound of the band echoes bleakly across just such a landscape, and the fading voice with which the record closes remains long after the disc has finished playing. There is nothing but left faith, but what happens when you have
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none to begin with? And yet all through the period during which this most intense album was being created (or creating itself), Robert would insist, "there was still some humor in what we did, but we never made anything of it. It was always kept well hidden. So we were seen to be very po-faced about everything. But it was quite good fun being like that because we could get away with an intensity which would otherwise have seemed manufactured." At the same time, however, "there were personal reasons which affected every body at the time," personal crises which set everybody on edge, and which Faith, an album of almost unforgiving power, could not help but exacerbate. "We then had to live with [Faith] for a year, in that we toured with it, and it was the one record we shouldn't have done that with because, for one year we lived with this doomy, semi-religious record. We sort of wore it everywhere we went, it was like sack cloth and ashes. It was n't a very enjoyable year really." The state of isolation into which the Cure had crushed themselves was only intensified by their decision to espouse the traditional rock'n'roll practice of touring with a support band, and going out instead with a movie opening for them. Carnage Visors was a 30 minute animated film made by Simon Gallup's brother Richard, and accompa nied by a lengthy instrumental recorded by the Cure themselves, a soundtrack whose sheer moody intensity set the stage for Faith even before the band came out on stage to deliver it. "At their best," the New Musical Express would agree, "their religious devo tional care and slow stately pace takes over with a precision and a discipline that is breathtaking and, yes, religious." Faith is arguably the Cure's purest album, their masterpiece and the consum-
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mation not only of all they had promised in the past, but also all that they have accom plished since then; arguably every subsequent Cure album has simply taken a different nuance from Faith and expanded upon it, drawn it out to its most logical conclusion. It is, too, certainly their darkest, and most atmospheric collection. Little about the record adheres to even the loosest notions of commerciality, and even at a time when groups like Bauhaus were already rallying around the latest convolutions within the Positive Punk/Goth axis, Faith loomed over them, a vast, dark cathedral of sound into which only the remotest glimmers of light could fall. Yet still the Cure continued to spiral; no sooner had the Faith tour concluded than the band was preparing for its fourth album, Pornography. And if, as one reviewer claimed, Faith had taken no prisoners, Pornography would not even recognize its allies. It was going to wipe out everyone. "I'm hard-pressed to find any redeeming features," Melody Maker's reviewer complained, and his condemnation was echoed throughout a music press which had expected the new Cure album to be a lot of things, but had never even dreamed of such rancor or vitriol. Pornography, Melody Maker continues, "plummets like a leaking sub marine into depths unfathomable by man. Frankly, its unhealthy. '100 Years' is the least depressing track; its merely gloomy." Yet, as Cure biographer Jo-Ann Greene would write several years later, "Pornography was afar more positive sounding record than Faith. It was, however, a lot more violent." Robert disagreed, "It wasn't really violent. It was the inability to be violent. It was a realization of shortcomings -the fact that the music couldn't be violent enough to break out of those confines. I'd like to do something that is musically violent."
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Yet there can be few more premonitory openings to an album that the first lines of Pornography: "it doesn't matter if we all die." "The album was about things that have far-reaching effects," Robert tried gallantly to explain. "It was far more considered about... some of the horrors that people go through just in everyday living, I suppose." It was an indication of just how deeply felt those horrors were that the Cure had no alternative but to allow them to impact on the band itself, as though they could not truly describe those horrors unless they experienced them to. It would be some time later before Robert could confess, "I hate the idea that you'd die for your audience, [but] I was rapidly becoming enmeshed in that around the time of Pornography, the idea that Ian Curtis had gone first and I was soon to follow. I wasn't prepared for that to happen." What he was prepared for, however, was the arc which the Cure's career had taken; later, indeed, Robert would admit that in many ways, the direction the band took, and the fate which awaited it at the conclusion of that journey, had been planned before hand. "After Three Imaginary Boys, which I hated straight away, to pull off a three year project like Seventeen Seconds to Pornography I realized we couldn't be seen to do it in a half-hearted way, so we threw ourselves into a whole lifestyle that was a vicious circle. By Pornography we weren't having any fun and it seemed pointless, because by then we were only doing it for other people and it all fell apart." The recording sessions for Pornography, Robert would later admit, were "horri fying, chaotic... but not in a nice way. It was a very vicious, anarchic way. I seriously don't remember making a lot of it. But it turned out to be one of my favorite records." The accompanying tour has gone down in rock'n'roll folklore as one of the most disastrous, in personal terms, any band has ever undertaken. "The tour was like a rerun
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of the worst movie you've ever seen," Robert would flinchingly complain. "We were cracking up, so all the people offstage began to fall apart as well. Twenty-three people reverting to primitive is not a pretty sight." On another occasion, he recalled, "everyone involved in that tour disintegrated somehow, their characters became distended. They seemed to revert back to something horrible inside them, and there was a lot of physical violence. We just took our lives up onto the stage. It was a distressing time and it made me go quite odd for about eighteen months. It all got too intense and depressing, everything was wrong, we were stagnating, me and Simon were fighting and we hadn't got anywhere. I was very proud of Pornography, but no-one else liked it." When Simon Gallup left the band at the conclusion of the tour (he would return to the Cure later in the band's career), Robert did not even bother replacing him. To all intents and purposes, the Cure was no more. This was the scenario to which Robert wished to return. Small wonder indeed that the people around the Cure watched their latest activities with increasing, and barely disguised, wariness. Work on Disintegration commenced in the early fall of 1988, at drummer Boris
THE SESSIONS Williams' Cornwall home. Demoing completed, the group then moved on to the resi dential Outside Studios, a 48 track operation in England's Berkshire countryside. As had become the band's tradition, they would be working with producer Dave M. Allen, with
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assistant engineer Richard Sullivan joining them in the control room. Many observers were surprised that the Cure should be back at work so quickly after their last album, the monumental double Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, with Robert Smith himself acknowledging, "/ thought it was all over after Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, when we had a very long lay-off. It gets to the point where it takes so much effort to get going again." At the same time, however, Smith himself had a lot to write about. His 30th birthday was swiftly approaching, on April 21, 1989, and he admits that the event was weighing heavy on his mind. Many of the songs which would be included on Disintegration started life as possible inclusions on Robert's own, long-mooted, solo album - he had been thinking about such a project for several years now, and following his marriage to long-time girl friend Mary in August, he had retired to the couple's new home on the south coast and started writing for it. At the same time, however, these new songs also harked back to a version of the Cure which many people had thought dead and buried long before. Robert himself described Disintegration as fitting exactly in between Faith and Pornography, the group's third and fourth albums, and discs which once, he had insisted, had little common ground whatsoever. "Apart from my voice, which is quite constant, Faith and Pornography are like two different groups," and objective listening to the two albums bears him out. However, the listener who today takes Faith, Pornography and Disintegration together, places them on the disc changer and hits the shuffle button, could not make the same distinctions. Robert's own assessment of Disintegration's place in the Cure's canon was unerringly accurate. Robert confessed, "I took [the songs] to the rest of the group, knowing that if
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they were resistant to the ideas of going back to the Cure of eight years ago, I would use them myself. I would have been quite happy to make those songs on my own." "This record has the same kind of continuity and theme of our earlier material like Seventeen Seconds and Pornography," Robert continued. "I didn't want any songs that didn't conform to that mood. It will be compared to those records, but I think its bet ter." The difference between the two albums, however, was immense. He admitted that "the things that bother me seem to crystallize rather than go away. The same things still disturb me but I scream in private now, rather than in public. The group is therefor me to scream." He would later claim that the new album's title song was written on that fateful day itself, although the ponderous mechanics of the modern music industry makes it seem increasingly unlikely that a song could be written and recorded, then inserted onto a wait ing album, which itself still needed to be manufactured, in just two weeks. It can be done - back in 1977, an English punk band, Warsaw Pakt, once gained considerable mileage from having slammed an album from studio to shops in a week, while the Who once recorded and released a new single in 24 hours. But it is highly unlikely. The theme of most of the songs, he continued, "is age - what happens with age, and your inability to feel as keenly, and that sense of loss all the time. Which either depresses you or it doesn't. I've always felt the perfect age was 17, and I don't wander about crying about it all the time, but those things do bother me." It was, of course, a theme which had also haunted Seventeen Seconds, written when Robert was just 20 and already realizing "we're not young any longer." To return to past pastures was not unusu al for Robert; to return to them with such a self-confessed vengeance was.
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Regarding the band's long-cherished reputation for writing miserable, or at least moody songs, Robert explained, "/ don't think its in the human nature to write inspiring material about happiness. Its just meant to be enjoyed. You can really wallow in sad ness." That said, Robert remained as open to contributions from his band mates as he had been during the mold-breaking Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me sessions. "The guys had gotten a little lazy, I thought," Robert explained of his decision to relinquish what had hitherto been regarded as an almost totalitarian grip on the band. "It was like 'why bother if he can do it?' So I told them they'd have to be more involved in the next record, or I'd have to humiliate them in public or something." His only condition was that the music had to be targeted in the same direction as his songs. "I had a key song to motivate me,": he explained, "a strong instinct to start with, then an idea of what I wanted, and went to the group so that we could mutate it." He reminded them that the album was called Disintegration, Boris Williams recalled, "so everyone knew the mood it should have, and the framework." Of the songs which the rest of the band presented at the sessions, "the most depressing ones got onto the album" "Everybody's come in with demos, then we all [sit] around, listen to them, play around with them and decide which are best. Those are the ones we used. Its all very enjoyable. We really are a band now." The writing credits for Disintegration would jus tify both Robert's confidence in his bandmates, and their devotion to the cause - all songs were credited to the group as a whole, even though it was common knowledge that Robert continued to write the lyrics. But still he was adamant. "Its very clear. If there aren't any good songs, we won't make an album." From the outset, the group knew that the album would be an hour long, "which
The Sessions
we've never done before," said Robert. But it was important, because a lack of time con straints would allow the band to record 'eight or nine minute songs, long, strong, atmos pheric pieces. 'Tf you've got an idea you should allow it to develop." Back around the time of Faith, Robert had remarked, "I've always tried to make records that are of one piece, that explain a certain kind of atmosphere to the fullest. If you're going to fully explore something you need more than one song to do it. Thats why I've always liked Nick Drake's albums, or Pink Floyd's Ummagumma. I like a lot of music which is built around repetition. Benedictine chants and Indian mantras. These musics are built around slow changes, they allow you to draw things out." Now, he explained further, "if we play something and it sounds a bit rough, but it captures the idea I want, we'll keep it. What we create as a group is far more impor tant than what people think of us as individual players. Having said that, I'd like to add, everyone is good. Boris is a brilliant drummer, who can play everything. Porl is con cerned with his guitar playing and has become quite good. Much better than me. Simon is a much better bass player than he ever was. And by default, I'm a better guitar play er. Our standards for ourselves have gone up with each record. We've become good," and with that improvement, there came the confidence to stretch the group's musical boundaries. "Some of our songs go on because they're exploring the mood," he defended Disintegration against the handful of critics who balked at the extended length of several of Disintegration's tracks. "You need a certain amount of time to express that. You can't just say 'this is sadness,' and play it in one note. We play the kind of music I like to lis ten to. I don't think I need to justify it." Producer Dave Allen continued, "for Disintegration, we were trying to
The Sessions
knit it into one long entity so its obsessively non-diverse." Disintegration was intended to prove a difficult album, too, to those fans who had maybe picked up on the Cure as a result of their recent pop successes with the singles from Head On The Door and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. "I want people to like the Cure for the right reasons," Robert explained, "because its different to everything else, and not really accessible. Its a bit of a crass generalization, but people whose favorite Cure albums are Pornography and Disintegration are generally more alert, and have thought about things." The songs had all been written over the previous year, "when I was feeling com pletely awful. I was very aware that I was reaching my 30th birthday, I realized that I didn't want to go on juggling my different personalities. I didn't want to keep on worry ing about the difference between the public me and the private me." He was also adamant that Disintegration marked "the last time I'll write about internal disintegration because there's nothing left to say about it now. I was writing about the things that troubled me for the last time. They're all gone now." One of the key moments in the gestation of Disintegration came when Robert sat down one evening and listened to Faith. It was the first time he had absorbed himself in that album in some years, and he confessed, "it disturbed me. I realized I hadn't resolved anything. I reached the point a long time ago where I don't have any kind of spiritual faith and so I have to find something else, some form of release otherwise everything would become unbearable." The sessions were not painless. Tensions between Robert and fellow founder member Lol Tolhurst were high; Boris Williams and Simon Gallup were fighting with keyboard player Roger O'Donnell; and in October, with the group barely ensconced at the beginning of the four month session, a fire in one of the bedrooms destroyed almost
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everything Robert owned. "A heater shorted," Robert mourned. "Because we were here for four months, I'd bought all my worldly goods with me. We saved my lyrics, crawling along the floor with wet towels around our heads. We had to make a chain and hold hands and because I was the only one who knew where they were, I was the last in the chain." He admitted ruefully, "we got really told off by the firemen, it was like being back at school. They were saying 'your life is more important than your words,' and I was like, 'what do you know?' They were the only thing that was irreplaceable, I thought." Perhaps fittingly for a record whose chief concern was the passing of time, the sessions were over quickly. Dave Allen remarked, "all the things [Robert] says about lik ing passionate music are true, and you can't be like that 124 hours a day, so we end up really only doing something for four or five hours a day, and waiting around for the right moment for the rest of the time. Its weird, there's a lot of work ethic there, and there's a lot of non-work ethic. They do a fair bit of drinking, it must be said." Robert was especially enthused by the way things were going, noting that on occasion, the band would play through the night, something they hadn't done since they were making Pornography. "Things got very intense. We put songs like 'Disintegration' into a key I can't sing, so it hurt me. It sounds really good from a physical point of view." By the end of the year, the Cure were hosting a listening party at London's RAK Studios, armed with a rough mix of the album. The band had moved into the complex's Studio Three to begin mixing the new music just a few weeks earlier. There, the album's premiere was overshadowed by a major confrontation between Robert and Lol Tolhurst, his fellow surviving founder member. "He slagged off everything to do with the album, the group and me, and just got
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drunker and drunker," Robert complained afterwards; two months later, Lol was dis missed from the group, although in reality, he appears to have dropped out of view some years beforehand. According to Robert, Lol didn't play on either Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me or Disintegration; indeed, the band had all but admitted that Lol's keyboard playing talents were less than they required by the addition of ex-Psychedelic Fur Roger O'Donnell to the line-up back in October, 1987. Lol would counter, "its funny, because on Disintegration I actually played on more things than I had for the last couple of albums. But it did get to the point with me where I didn't feel excited enough by things to feel I wanted to contribute." "It was about halfway through Disintegration that things weren't working out too great," Lol revealed. "/ wasn't feeling that well in myself and I guess the Cure psy chosis struck again. Big time! I thought the whole ethos of the Cure had become slight ly warped as far as I was concerned. It became very undemocratic and a lot of people around the band, like the record company, found it better that way because they only had to deal with one person, and that was a bit upsetting as over the years I'd put a lot of my life into it." Lol would go on to form his own band, Presence, whose debut album Inside, many observers felt, actually sounded more like the Cure than the Cure sometimes did and deserved a lot more attention that it ultimately received. The new-look Cure finally emerged from its public isolation at the end of April, just days after Robert's birthday, when they appeared on the British BBC's weekly music show, Top Of The Pops, to promote the album's first single, the haunting "Lullaby." It was a controversial appearance. The band's make-up, based upon that worn in the accompanying video, was deemed "too frightening" for the show's younger view-
The Sessions
ers, prompting a tense stand-off between the show's director and the band. For a time, it seemed that the band would walk out of the session; finally, however, they agreed to remove the make-up. "Its a real shock to come to Top Of The Pops thinking that I'm going to be fac ing people again," Robert mused. "I wonder why I'm doing it. Horrible. I genuinely feel like that. I find it quite frustrating that Tm sometimes so easy-going about this group, and that I sometimes let it slip. But at least I let it slip upwards." The pain of the appearance was, of course, worthwhile: "Lullaby" became the Cure's biggest hit yet, making #5 in the UK in April, 1989. The following month, as the Cure set out on the Prayer tour, Disintegration itself rocketed to #3, another all-time best. It was in the United States, however, that the true measure of the Cure's popu larity could be taken. Even before the band's tour reached American shores, Disintegration had smashed into the album chart at #12, provoking an outbreak of Cure mania which saw their faces adorn seemingly every even vaguely music-oriented maga zine throughout that summer. (The single of "Fascination Street," meanwhile, made #46.) Even more spectacularly, the single of "Love Song," which peaked at a meager #18 in Britain in September, effortlessly duplicated the efforts of its parent - it came to rest at #2, aided no doubt by MTV's apparently furious love affair with the accompany ing video. Suddenly there could be no doubt of the Cure's stature. 1989, the dawning of what future historians will doubtless call the age of Alternative Rock, had held a lot of musical surprises in store. But none could be so great as the sudden elevation of a band for whom the term "Cult Heroes" might well have been invented, revisiting the scene of a crime which had driven them to the brink of self-destruction less than a decade before.
The Promos
THE PROMOS Whenever a new release is imminent, the Cure's status as one of the world's most collectible bands is greatly enhanced by the release of a plethora of promotional albums and singles, several of which will immediately take their place in the band's own Top 100 rarities catalog.Disintegration was no exception. Several weeks before the May 5, 1989, release of Disintegration, Fiction released the Disintegration CD Sampler, a five track CD highlighting the album, and the proposed singles which would be culled from it (Fiction DISIN 1): the title track, "Disintegration," was joined by the remixed single version of "Lullaby," "Pictures Of You," "Lovesong," and "Plainsong." The sampler was released on CD only. "Lullaby" itself was released as a single in April, 1989, with UK 12-inch pro mos appearing shortly beforehand (Fiction FICSXDJ 29). These are readily distinguish able from stock copies by virtue of a shocking pink label design. Another 12-inch promo of note was that issued in Brazil (Polygram 2801 340), a major market for the Cure. Released in a unique custom sleeve, this "Disco Promocional Mix" was, in fact, the reg ular 7-inch single remix, backed by the extended 12-inch version. "Fascination Street" replaced "Lullaby" on US and Canadian release sheets that same month ("Lullaby" would become the third North American single, after "Love Song" and before "Pictures Of You.") The promo CD (Elektra 66702-2) was released fea-
The
Promos
2S
turing all four tracks available on the regular 7-inch and 12-inch pressings: "Fascination Street" (remix edit)/"Fascination Street" (remix extended)/"Babble" and "Out Of Mind." "Lovesong," the second - and most successful - of the singles to be taken from Disintegration followed in August, 1989. 12-inch promos from a variety of countries are common; Fiction UK, however, also produced a video, Lovesong: A Decade Of The Cure, packaged in a custom sleeve similar to the album jacket, and featuring six classic Cure videos: "Boys Don't Cry," "A Forest," "Let's Go To Bed," "Close To Me," "Why Can't I Be You?" and two showings of "Love Song," at the beginning and end of the tape. The third single from the album, "Pictures Of You," was released in March, 1990, close to a year after Disintegration first appeared. Four live tracks, recorded in July, 1989, at London's Wembley Arena, during the band's recent "Prayer" tour, were included, spread across the multitude of formats in which the single was released, but gathered together on the b-side of the UK promotional 12-inch (Fiction CURE 1): "Last Dance'V'Prayers For Rain'7'Fascination Street" and "Disintegration." The US CD promo (Elektra 966639-2) featured this same b-side, and should not be confused with the regular one track promo CD (PR 8165-2). Finally, a German promo paired "Pictures Of You" with "Love Song," for rea sons known only to the Germans themselves. In addition to these standard promotional releases, a number of exclusive limit ed editions were also made available to the band's British public. The first of these, avail able on the day of release only, was a specially autographed copy of the album, available only from branches of Britain's HMV records chain on May 5, 1989. Each shop is esti-
36
The
Promos
mated to have received no more than four copies of the album, to be sold on a first-come first-served basis. Promoted only via an ad campaign in the New Musical Express of that week, this version of the album offered the first sign that founder member/keyboard play er Lol Tolhurst was no longer a member of the Cure - he was the only band member whose autograph was missing. A Disintegration vinyl picture disc was also issued, a year after the original album release. In August, Lovebox appeared, to help promote the newly released "Lovesong" single (FICSG 030). A limited edition of 10,000 individually numbered packages, Lovebox featured the regular 7-inch single, plus a linen print of the single's distinctive cover art. Integration (Elektra 966633-2) was a limited edition US release, appearing in CD longbox format, with a tinted detail from the regular album cover as its jacket. A sticker on the front advertised the box as featuring "17 rare Cure tracks" - in fact, the box merely brought together the four regular US singles, plus a none-too-impressive poster. The most controversial limited edition was the live album, Entreat. Featuring live versions of six songs from Disintegration, recorded in July, 1989, at London's Wembley Arena, Entreat was originally available only in France (Fiction FIXF 14), a free gift for customers purchasing three or more back catalog Cure albums. With a change in jacket color, from pink to yellow, and the addition of two fur ther tracks, the album was then released in the UK as part of a similar giveaway organized by the HMV records chain; this time, two purchases were necessary, from a twelve album "A Complete Cure" offer. An additional promo release from this particular campaign was the Thirteen Doses: An Incomplete Video Cure video sampler, which replicated
The
Songs
-
Plainsong
2T
the Entreat jacket photograph in black and white. Tracks included were: "10.15 Saturday Night"/ "Play For Today"/ "Primary"/ "Hanging Garden"/ "The Walk"/ "The Lovecats"/ "The Caterpillar"/ "In Between Days"/ "A Night Like This"/ "Why Can't I Be You?"/ "Just Like Heaven" /"Lullaby"/ "Pictures Of You." The earlier releases of Entreat should not be confused with the regular commer cial release (Fiction FIX 17), released on vinyl, cassette and CD in March, 1991, in a blue sleeve.
PLAINSONG "Plain Song" was one of four tracks from Disintegration to be included on the eponymous CD sampler (Fiction DISIN 1) which preceded the album's UK release. It was initially planned as a single, but the idea was subsequently scrapped, perhaps sensibly. No song whose coda is the impassioned sigh "like I'm living at the end of the world" is really a contender for chart fame and fortune! A deceptively lightweight song, "Plainsong" is initially most notable for its inclusion of a refrain from "A Thousand Hours," a track on the Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me album!
The Songs - Pictures Of You
PICTURES OF YOU Edited down from its original 7.24 minute length, "Pictures Of You" was one of four tracks from Disintegration to be included on the eponymous CD sampler (Fiction DISIN 1) which preceded the album's UK release. The third and final European single from the album (it was the fourth in America) was written after the fire which struck the studio, and destroyed so many of Robert's possessions. After it, Robert confessed, "I genuinely felt happy about the fire, I didn't feel upset, I felt relief in a very banal way." The song was about shrugging off past burdens -"/ realized that I'm clutching old pictures of things, even taken before my birth, to give me a sense that things went on." Remixed by Smith, Fiction chief Chris Parry and Mark Saunders, "Pictures Of You" would prove one of the most controversial singles in the Cure's entire catalog, as Fiction released it in a total of twelve different formats, outrageously milking the band's long-established coterie of die-hard collectors. The twelve different formats were as follows: Fiction FICA 34 - green sleeve/seven inch c/w "Last Dance" live Fiction FICPA 34 - green sleeve/green vinyl 7-inch c/w "Last Dance" live Fiction FICCA 34 - green sleeve/cassette c/w "Last Dance" live Fiction FICXA 34 - green sleeve/12-inch extended mix c/w "Last Dance "/"Fascination Street" live Fiction FIXPA 34 - green sleeve/green vinyl 12-inch c/w "Last Dance'V'Fascination Street" live Fiction FICDA 34 - green sleeve/CD c/w "Last Dance'V'Fascination Street" live
The Songs - Pictures Of You
Fiction FICB 34 - purple sleeve/seven inch c/w "Prayers For Rain" (live) Fiction FICPB 34 - purple sleeve/purple vinyl seven inch c/w "Prayers For Rain" (live) Fiction FICCB 34 purple sleeve/cassette c/w "Prayers For Rain"(live) Fiction FICXB 34 purple sleeve/different extended mix c/w "Prayers For Rain"/ "Disintegration" (live) Fiction FICXB 34 purple sleeve/purple vinyl different extended mix c/w "Prayers For Rain'V'Disintegration" (live) Fiction FICDB 34 purple sleeve/CD c/w "Prayers For Rain"/ "Disintegration" (live) The purple sleeved 12-inch remix, incidentally, was a different version, prepared by Brian "Chuck" New. It was this version which would be included on the Mixed Up album the following year. This remix would also appear on the Mixed Up Box, a French limited edition 5CD collection featuring ten of the regular album's eleven tracks (France Polydor 867529). Such crass commercialism was not rewarded either - "Pictures Of You" peaked no higher than #24 on the UK chart, while the British Phonographic Institute ensured that further such shenanigans would not be repeated by announcing that henceforth only four formats of a specific single could be counted towards its chart placing - ideally, 7inch and 12-inch vinyl, cassette and one CD. Robert has since admitted, "we were sort of misled, because I was probably tired at the time, and we got sucked into the idea that it would be good to do twelve different versions. It was pretty dumb, but not really." "Pictures Of You" was also hamstrung, at least in the UK, by its accompanying video. According to Robert, it is one of the best the Cure have ever done, but Simon Gallup adds, it wasn't shown as often as it deserved because at least one TV show, The
The Songs - Closedown
Chart Show, determined, "the video wasn't up to a 'professional standard,' because it was shot on Super 8. No-one ever looks at the entertainment value." The US release of "Pictures Of You" was considerably more restrained, at least in terms of variations. A CD single (US Elektra 966639)was released, featuring the 7-inch mix plus the four live cuts featured on the UK b-sides - these tracks would, of course, also appear on the Entreat album. A live version of "Pictures Of You," recorded at London's Wembley Stadium at the conclusion of the Prayer tour, would also be featured on the French and UK editions of the Entreat album. This same version would also resurface in 1992 on the Five Live mini-album, issued in Australia only, as a limited edition alongside the Wish album. As its name suggests, Five Live comprises five live tracks, culled from the Concert and Entreat albums: "Primary," "A Forest," "Fascination Street" and "10.15 Saturday Night" completed the album. A second live rendition, recorded at London's Wembley Arena on 19 January, 1991, was included on the 1991 Play Out video. And the song reappeared, in yet anoth er live incarnation, on the Show album and video, recorded in 1992. CLOSEDOWN One of the Disintegration album's most poignant songs, shot through with a sense of yearning loss, mourning the death of emotions which once seemed so tangible. A live version of "Closedown," recorded at London's Wembley Stadium on the final night of the Prayer tour, would be featured on the French and UK editions of the Entreat album.
The
Songs
-
Lovesong
3*
LOVESONG Robert wrote "Lovesong" as a wedding present for his long time girlfriend Mary - they were wed at Worth Abbey, in Surrey, on 13 August, 1988, after a 16 year romance. The entire band were invited to attend. "The main reason we got married was to have a day we got married on," Robert explained. "But actually, it was the best day we ever had. It was brilliant to have all the family there. It would have been wrong if we hadn't done it. It means quite a bit, but we both still think of each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. In fact, thats what we still call each other." "Lovesong" was one of four tracks from Disintegration to be included on the eponymous CD sampler (Fiction DISBSf 1) which preceded the album's UK release. A 3.24 minute remix was then prepared for release as the second single from Disintegration, in August 1989 (UK Fiction FICS 30). A limited edition of this version was also released (UK Fiction FICSG 30), packaged in a custom box with a linen print of the distinctive sleeve art. This version of "Lovesong" was released as a cassette single (UK Fiction FICCS 30), with an extended remix (6.18 minutes) being added to both the 12-inch (UK Fiction FICSX 30) and CD single (UK Fiction FICCD 30, US Elektra 66687). The remixes were made by Smith, Fiction chief Chris Parry and Mark Saunders. "Lovesong" has also featured on two unusual US singles, the first within Elektra's Spun Gold vinyl 7-inch series, where it was backed with "Fascination Street" (US Elektra 65936), the other a Spun Gold cassette, backed with the previous album's "Just Like Heaven" (US Elektra). In 1992, it would also be included on the rare Canadian promo collection, Pure Cure (Canada Elektra CURE 1), alongside "Open," "High
The Songs - Lullaby
(Higher Mix)," "A Letter To Elise," "From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea," "Just Like Heaven," "Why Can't I Be You," "Never Enough (Big Mix)," "Fascination Street," "In Between Days," "The Lovecats," "Boys Don't Cry," "Close To Me (Closer Mix)," and "Hello I Love You." In 1990, the extended remix of "Lovesong" would be one of four tracks from Disintegration selected for inclusion on the Cure's Mixed Up dance mix retrospective. This remix would also appear on the Mixed Up Box, a French limited edition 5CD col lection featuring ten of the regular album's eleven tracks (France Polydor 867529). A live version of "Lovesong" appeared on the Paris album, recorded in October, 1992, and was also included on a scarce US promo single, coupled with the execrable "Friday I'm In Love" (US Elektra PRCD 8891). The Tim Pope directed "Lovesong" remains a staple on cable video channels, although - Robert aside - the Cure themselves have never been happy with it. Featuring the group gathered together in a hand-made cave, with a heavily made-up Robert the focus of all attention, the video, says Simon Gallup, "was a bloody travesty. We all looked like we don't look like." LULLABY The first single to be taken from Disintegration in Britain was also amongst the most dis tinctive, and creepy, songs in the Cure catalog, a corollary to the joyous likes of "Love Cats" and "Caterpillar," the story of being eaten alive by spiders. This theme, naturally, became the focus of the accompanying video, with director Tim Pope saying of the storyboard which he and Robert devised, "you can't fuck that up. The basic structure of the idea is in the song even if you could go off in two million different directions."
The Songs - Lullaby
"Lullaby" remains the Cure's most popular, and most successful, video, scoop ing a prestigious British Phonographic Institute BRIT award for Best Video in 1990, although Robert shrugged, "it was a kind of a throw aw ay video." "Lullaby" was remixed for release as a single (UK Fiction FICS 29, US Elektra 69249), a 4.07 minute version which was debuted on the Disintegration promo CD sam pler (Fiction DISIN 1). An extended, 7.41 minute, version was also prepared for the 12-inch single (UK Fiction FICSX 29, US Elektra 066664); both this and the 7-inch versions were included on the 3-inch CD single (UK Fiction FICSCD 29) and 5-inch CD single (US Elektra 966664). The remixes were made by Smith, Fiction chief Chris Parry and Mark Saunders. In addition, the 7-inch version was also released across two limited edition sin gles: UK Fiction FICSG 29, which featured a gatefold sleeve with the lyrics to "Lullaby," and UK Fiction FICSP 29, which was pressed on clear vinyl. A limited edition 12-inch, UK Fiction FICVX 29, was pressed on pink vinyl. Each of these limited editions was individually numbered. Finally, a cassette single (US Elektra 9469249), replicating the 7-inch version, was also released. In 1990, the extended remix of "Lullaby" would become one of four tracks from Disintegration selected for inclusion on the Cure's Mixed Up dance mix retrospective. A slightly edited version of this remix would also appear on the Mixed Up Box, a French limited edition 5CD collection featuring ten of the regular album's eleven tracks (France Polydor 867529). The following year, a live rendition, recorded at London's Wembley Arena on 19
The Songs - Fascination Street
January, 1991, was included on the Play Out video. And the song reappeared, in yet another live incarnation, on the Show album and video, recorded in 1992. FASCINATION STREET When Disintegration was released, many reviewers remarked that "Fascination Street," the first single from the album in the United States, did not fit into the overall the matic shape of the record. Robert Smith agreed. "Yeah, its the only one that doesn't real ly fit.But I like all twelve songs on the record, and told the [American] label they could have any one of them for the single. But in fact, it would have been my choice as well." "Fascination Street" was a wise choice as single, for which a 7-inch remix (edit ed down from 5.16 to 4.17 minutes) and an extended version (8.48 minutes) were pro duced. The remixes were made by Smith, Fiction chief Chris Parry and Mark Saunders. These mixes were both featured on the CD single (US Elektra 66702); the respective vinyl configurations, however, featured just one version of the track - 7-inch and cassette single Elektra 69300; 12-inch Elektra 066704. "Fascination Street" also featured on one unusual US single, released within Elektra's Spun Gold vinyl 7-inch series, where it was backed with "Lovesong" (US Elektra 65936). In 1992, it would also be included on the rare Canadian promo collection, Pure Cure (Canada Elektra CURE 1), alongside "Open," "High (Higher Mix)," "A Letter To Elise," "From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea," "Just Like Heaven," "Why Can't I Be You," "Never Enough (Big Mix)," "In Between Days," "The Lovecats," "Boys Don't Cry," "Lovesong," "Close To Me (Closer Mix)," and "Hello I Love You."
The Songs - Prayers For Rain
"Fascination Street" would receive further exposure following its inclusion in the movie soundtrack Lost Angels. In addition, a live version, recorded at London's Wembley Stadium at the end of the Prayer tour, would be featured both on the UK and French pressings of the Entreat album, and the green-sleeved "Pictures Of You" 12-inch and CD singles. This same version would also resurface in 1992 on the Five Live mini-album, issued in Australia only, as a limited edition alongside the Wish album. As its name sug gests, Five Live comprises five live tracks, culled from the Concert and Entreat albums: "Primary," "A Forest," "Pictures Of You" and "10.15 Saturday Night" completed the album. A second live rendition, recorded at London's Wembley Arena on 19 January, 1991, was included on the 1991 Play Out video. And the song reappeared, in yet anoth er live incarnation, on the Sideshow EP and Show video, recorded in 1992. In 1990, the extended remix of "Fascination Street" would become one of four tracks from Disintegration selected for inclusion on the Cure's Mixed Up dance mix ret rospective. This remix would also appear on the Mixed Up Box, a French limited edition 5CD collection featuring ten of the regular album's eleven tracks (France Polydor 867529). PRAYERS FOR RAIN At four seconds over six minutes in length, "Prayers For Rain" was the first of the mammoth tracks with which the Cure intended weighing down Disintegration, and its importance to the band can be measured by the decision to title their forthcoming tour
The Songs - The Same Deep Water - Disintegration
after it. A live version, recorded at London's Wembley Stadium at the conclusion of the Prayer tour, would be featured both on the UK and French pressings of the Entreat album, and the purple-sleeved "Pictures Of You" singles (all formats)
THE SAME DEEP WATER AS YOU At 9.18 minutes in length, "The Same Deep Water As You" is the longest indi vidual track the Cure have ever recorded - live, it often extended even further, towards 11 or 12 minutes. Yet there is not a wasted moment in sight; indeed, "The Same Deep Water As You" ranks high amongst Robert Smith's most important compositions, and the band's failure to offer alternative live versions of the song has been very much to the bootleg gers' advantage: a genuine highlight of the Prayer live shows, the presence of "The Same Deep Water As You" is often the greatest incentive to purchase an unofficial recording from that particular tour. DISINTEGRATION At 8.18 minutes in length, "Disintegration" promptly became the second longest song the Cure have ever recorded. The center piece of the album, Robert claimed, untruthfully but nevertheless appropriately, that he wrote "Disintegration" on his 30th birthday, a mere two weeks before the album hit the shops. "I can perpetuate that rumor," Robert claims. "Because it is true, sorta. It hap pened like that in my head. Unfortunately there was about a six or seven week period between when they drugged me. I was chloroformed up to my eyeballs and left in the cor ner."
The Songs - Untitled
A live version, recorded at London's Wembley Stadium at the conclusion of the Prayer tour, would be featured both on the French and UK Entreat album, and the purplesleeved "Pictures Of You" 12-inch and CD singles. A second, superior, live version can be found on the Great Xpectations live compilation album (UK XFM 1), recorded at the XFM Great Xpectations concert, staged at London's Finsbury Park that summer of 1993. XFM was the local radio station with which the Cure had heavily involved them selves, and the concert was one of several events aimed at raising funds and support for the station in its bid for a government broadcast franchise. UNTITLED Although, at 6.30 minutes, it is by no means the most epic track on the album, "Untitled" is the key to the entire Disintegration song cycle. Robert explains, "that really is the key line in the record, knowing that everything's futile, but still fighting, still raging against the dying of the light. I am sometimes overwhelmed by a sense of futility and purposelessness and at that point you have to do something to affirm your existence. I write songs." A live version, recorded at London's Wembley Stadium at the conclusion of the Prayer tour, would be featured both on the UK Entreat album, and the American "Lullaby" 12-inch and CD singles. (The song does not appear on the original French pressings of Entreat.)
Bonus Tracks
BONUS TRACKS (CD and cassette)
LAST DANCE The majestically evocative "Last Dance" was one of two tracks familiar from the CD and cassette versions of Disintegration which could not be fit onto the regular vinyl release. In Spain, however, a limited edition of vinyl copies of the album were accompanied by a cassette featuring these two tracks alone (Fiction CUREC1). A live version of "Last Dance," recorded at London's Wembley Stadium at the conclusion of the Prayer tour, would be featured both on the UK and French Entreat album, and the green-sleeved "Pictures Of You" singles (all formats). HOMESICK Like "Last Dance," the 7.06 minute "Homesick" was one of two tracks familiar from the CD and cassette versions of Disintegration which could not be fit onto the regular vinyl release. In Spain, however, a limited edition of vinyl copies of the album were accom panied by a cassette featuring these two tracks alone (Fiction CUREC1) A live version, recorded at London's Wembley Stadium at the conclusion of the Prayer tour, would be featured both on the UK Entreat album, and the American "Lullaby" single (all formats), the b-sides. (The song does not appear on the original French pressings of Entreat.)
BABBLE "Babble" was one of two out-takes from Disintegration to be featured on the b-sides of the US "Fascination Street" and UK "Lullaby" singles, throughout their various permu tations. "Babble" alone appeared on the 7-inch and cassette versions. OUT OF MIND Alongside "Babble," "Out Of Mind" was one of two out-takes from Disintegration to be featured on the b-sides of the US "Fascination Street" and UK "Lullaby" singles, through out their various permutations. "Out Of Mind" only appeared on the 12-inch and CD ver sions. 2 LATE "2 Late" was one of two further Disintegration out-takes to be featured on the b-side of the "Lovesong" single, throughout all its worldwide permutations. "2 Late" alone appeared on the 7-inch and cassette versions. FEAR OF GHOSTS Alongside "2 Late," "Fear Of Ghosts" was one of two further Disintegration out-takes to be featured on the b-side of the "Lovesong" single, throughout all its worldwide permu tations. "Fear Of Ghosts" appeared only on the 12-inch and CD versions.
The Tour
The Cure opened their Disintegration tour, under the banner of The Prayer Tour, at the Glastonbury Festival in May, 1989, the first date of what promised to be a gruelling thirteen week trip around Europe's greatest sports stadia. Included in the itin erary were shows in France, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Greece, and Robert admitted, "if this tour had been six weeks, it would have been perfect." By July, however, "we're moving into the state where its physically quite demanding. Traveling every day, never being settled, never really doing anything normal... being stared at is a bit of a bind as well." There again, he boasted that the group had only had one major row in ten weeks, which was "pretty good considering we're all living together day-in, day-out. Always on the previous tours, we've never gone beyond the fifth week without someone hitting some one else. That hasn't happened." The tour ended with three nights at London's Wembley Arena in August, with the third and final show, July 24, ranking amongst the longest Cure gigs ever - three and three-quarter hours, all of which was recorded for future use. So far, however, only a fraction of the set has emerged, the eight songs featured on the Entreat live album. The group hit the United States in September, crossing the ocean aboard the lux ury liner Queen Elizabeth II, as Robert refuses to fly. The tour is comparatively short, 20 dates in four weeks, but Robert was clearly unhappy. In October, he told the UK music magazine Sounds, "this is the last time I'm gonna tour. Its reached the stage where I can't
personally cope with it. I just don't feel comfortable any more with the attention I've been getting. Its purely the number of people that want a bit of the Cure, or a bit of me." He continued, bitterly, "we were in some of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and I couldn't go out without man entourage. I tried a disguise and it didn't work. I had no make-up and my hair flat and a hat on, but people recognized me. When I asked them how they knew it was me, they said it was my shoes, so the second time I did it I changed my shoes and I was still recognized." The American leg of the tour was not the happiest of experiences either. "When we were in America... there was a lot of conflict in the group," Robert later revealed. "The concerts were brilliant but the problems with touring have always been there. Because of the way the group is, because of the type of songs we play and the make-up within the group, it generally leads to a kind of excess on tour. Not excess in the rock'n'roll sense but the feeling that you're there not only to perform as well as you can, as if its going to be your last concert, but also to experience everything as if its your last day on earth. "It tends to become very emotionally and physically exhausting. And as I get older, I find it takes me longer to recover. Touring's not intrinsically tiring, its what you make of it. Unfortunately, when we're together, we encourage each other to excess, it becomes very wearing. Its also very gratifying, but I'm just worried that we'll reach a point like so many bands when the concerts become secondary to actual touring. That's when the rots sets in. "There are some older acts that still make it. Neil Young's still good, but [David Bowie's] Tin Machine thing is a complete waste of time. There's definitely a performance drug that people will suffer any indignity to hold onto. The Rolling Stones are so hideous
Disintegration Live
its almost funny. I don't want to be something I've already started making fun of. This is most definitely our last tour." By June the following year, of course, Robert would have recanted, and the Cure would again be an on-going live phenomenon. Asked by MTV's Dave Kendall about his earlier pronouncement, Robert simply admitted, "I was mistaken." He continued, "Disintegration was a brilliant period, it was brilliant to do some thing with that kind of intensity, but you can't stay like that. We all got in quite a state again by the end of the American leg of the tour, the concerts were really fierce and the whole thing was manic. The last nights in Boston, I thought, 'aah, I'm here, this is what I always wanted,' but everything just went to pieces after that on a lot of levels with the group, as it always does, you can't maintain it. Frustration sets in and everything becomes commonplace."
DISINTEGRATION -LIVE The Cure have never felt shy about preserving their concert persona on record and video, yet Entreat, the live album which was drawn from the final London date of the Prayer tour, stands head and shoulders above them all - the British Melody Maker, his torically a staunch supporter of the group (one-time reviews editor Steve Sutherland coauthored the official Cure biography, Ten Imaginary Years, with Robert), would describe Entreat as "possibly the finest live album ever." It was, however, also one of the most controversial. The original release was
Disintegration Live
planned for French consumption only, a limited edition featuring live versions of six songs from Disintegration: "Pictures Of You," "Closedown," "Last Dance," "Fascination Street," "Prayers For Rain" and "Disintegration." It was available only in France, a free gift for customers purchasing three or more back catalog Cure albums. With a change in jacket color, from pink to yellow, and the addition of two fur ther tracks, "Homesick" and "Untitled," the album was then released in the UK as part of a similar giveaway organized by the HMV records chain; this time, two purchases were necessary, from a twelve album "A Complete Cure" offer. Robert himself had approved only the French release; when the promotion crossed the channel, he admits he could have prevented it. Unfortunately, "the trouble is, I give up," he sighed. "I think 'what is the fucking point of doing this?' then everyone rushes through this nonsense and then I think, 'oh no, I spent so many years making sure everything's right,' and then I rush back into the fight again." The full UK release of Entreat, in 1991, was geared towards those collectors who had balked at the high prices already attached to the French and HMV versions of the album, but whose collections would remain incomplete without them; released at a budget price, it became an instant hit, peaking at a most impressive #10 on the British chart. Unfortunately, it still misjudged the Cure's devoted following, who now found themselves with three separate versions of the album to try and hunt down for the sake of completeness. All in all, it was a very botched exercise, and one which was only exacer bated by the ready availability of 50% of the album on the b-sides of various singles. "Last Dance," "Prayers For Rain," "Disintegration" and "Fascination Street" had all appeared across the different "Pictures Of You" singles; in addition, "Homesick" and
Disintegration Live
"Untitled" were featured on the American "Lullaby" CD single. This left "Pictures Of You" and "Closedown" alone to compensate the Cure fan for the price of admission. Despite such failings, however, it is not difficult to concur with Melody Maker's enthusiastic report. Entreat is a valuable document for any Cure fan as it offers a rare opportunity to hear almost an entire studio album in its live state, after several months of previous shows have already seen the songs reach what could be termed their ideal state of development. "Seventy-five per cent of the Cure's stuff I've been disappointed with," Robert said around the time of Pornography, and it is a sentiment he still agrees with. "I've enjoyed much more than that while we're doing it, and revitalizing it live. The live atmos phere has always been better." Certainly few of the bootlegs recorded earlier in the tour offer such powerful versions of the songs included on Entreat, while later recordings see the band already beginning to lose interest in them, at least so far as on-stage creativity is concerned. From these unofficial recordings, however, a sense of the sheer variety of a Cure live show can easily be gauged. Past (and future) official releases have overlooked this, yet it is perhaps the most important factor in the band's continued live success, the fact that every night brings the possibility of a rearranged set, with Robert in particular given to improvisation, lyrically and otherwise. It is a well-known fact, for instance, that the title song from the band's third album, Faith, is one which he will only play live should a show have gone particularly well, while he has never been averse to dipping deep into the Cure's back catalog to pull out wholly unexpected crowd pleasers. Throughout the 1992 Wish tour, for example, sev eral tracks from the second album, 17 Seconds, were regularly gate crashing the set.
Disintegration Live
The band's official live catalog, however, barely hints at this variety; indeed, the 1993 Show and Paris albums, although utterly complimentary in every conceivable way, were released as separate discs in order to show "the two sides of the Cure": the fun-lov ing side which runs through its hits and leaves everybody smiling (Show), and the more somber, melancholic side which dwells on despair - Paris. It is for these reasons that the Cure, more than many bands of the 80s and 90s, have benefited immeasurably from bootleg recordings of their live shows; a good boot leg of a good show is worth more than a thousand rave reviews. Entreat would be followed, later in 1991, by another live offering, the curious The Cure Play Out. Recorded at a variety of venues and occasions, including the band's much-loved MTV Unplugged appearance on January 24, 1991, Play Out featured three songs from Disintegration, taped during the band's return to Entreat's home venue, Wembley Arena: "Pictures Of You," "Fascination" and "Lullaby" (Windsong Video WIV 007). The band's most intense burst of live souvenirs, however, was to emerge in the fall of 1993, when two separate live albums, plus a third comprising extra material, and an accompanying video featuring even more songs, appeared. Recorded on the band's most recent tour, promoting the Wish album, Show (UK Fiction FIXH 25, US Elektra 61551), Paris (UK Fiction FIXH 26, US Elektra 61552) and Sideshow (US Elektra 66275) between them served up a total of 36 live tracks - it should be noted, incidentally, that four of the five cuts on the Sideshow EP were in fact includ ed on the UK vinyl pressing of the Show album.
Discography Of Selected Bootlegs
Considering it was the band's last-but-one album, Disintegration was not partic ularly well represented on the albums. Recorded at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Detroit, MI, three cuts appeared on the Show/Sideshow collections: "Pictures Of You," "Lullaby" and "Fascination Street" all fit in well with that set's stated purpose of high lighting the Cure's brighter side; surely, however, "Lovesong" alone was not the only cut appropriate for the darker Paris collection, taped at the Paris Zenith in October, 1992. The Show video, Polygram Video 087742, incidentally, did not include any additional Disintegration material.
DISCOGRAPHY OF SELECTED BOOTLEGS FEATURING DISINTEGRATION MATERIAL Alive And Well (London Wembley Arena 1/19/91) Pictures Of You/Fascination Street/Just Like Heaven/Lullaby/The Walk/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/In Between Days/A Forest/Never Enough/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/Disintegration - excerpts from this show were included on the The Cure Play Out video And Dreams Come True In 92 (source not stated, 1992) Kiss The Stone KTS 081/082 Intro/Open/.High/Pictures Of You/Lullaby/Doing The Unstuck/Just Like Heaven/Apart/ A Night Like This/Wendy Time/The Walk/Let's Go To Bed/Friday I'm In Love/In
Discography Of Selected Bootlegs
Between Days/From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea/Fascination Street/Never Enough/ Cut/In Your House/M/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/Charlotte Sometimes/Primary/A Strange Day/A Forest At The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea (world tour 1992 + London Town & Country 1/17/91) Backstage BKCD 004/005 Intro/Open/High/Pictures Of You/Lullaby/Doing The Unstuck/Just Like Heaven/part/A Night Like This/Wendy Time/The Walk/Let's Go To Bed/Friday I'm In Love/In Between Days/From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea/Fascination Street/Never Enough/ Cut/End/In Your House/M/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/Charlotte Sometimes/Primary/Big Hand/One 23 Four/Letter To Elise/Wendy Time Bite The Big Apple (NYC 1992) Big Music 026/27 Open/High/Pictures Of You/Lullaby/Just Like Heaven/Fascination Street/A Night Like This/Apart/The Walk/Let's Go To Bed/Friday I'm In Love/In Between Days/From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea/Never Enough/Cut/End/Close To Me/Why Can't I Be You?/Love Song/Doing The Unstuck/To Wish the Impossible Things/Charlotte Sometimes/ Boys Don't Cry/In Your House/Primary/A Strange Day Crystal Palace 8/11/90 (Exile Records CD 4005-4006) Just Like Heaven/The Walk/Play For Today/Primary/In Between Days/A Forest/ Coming Apart/Close To Me/Strange Days/In Your House/Pictures Of You/ Lullaby/ Fascination Street/Catch/Strange Girl/Dressing Up/Boys Don't Cry/10.15 Saturday Night/Killing An Arab/Never Enough/Why Can't I Be You/Untitled/ Somebody Else/Charlotte Sometimes
Discography Of Selected Bootlegs
Cured (source not stated - Europe 1990) Banana BAN 006a-B Shake Dog Shake/A Strange Day/A Night Like This/Catch/Pictures Of You/Fascination Street/Lullaby/Dressing Up/Same Deep Water As You/Just Like Heaven/The Walk/ Primary/In Between Days/A Forest/Disintegration/Close To Me/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/Never Enough/Boys Don't Cry Disintegration (Wembley Arena 1/19/91) Ghost Vipers DG D-89351Real Boot Pictures Of You/Fascination Street/Just Like Heaven/Lullaby/The Walk/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/In Between Days/A Forest/Never Enough/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/Disintegration/Hello I Love You - excerpts from this show were included on the The Cure Play Out video Europe 1990 (Glastonbury Festival 6/24/90) Postscript PSCD 1166 Shake Dog Shake/A Strange Day/A Night Like This/Kyoto Song/Just Like Heaven/ Primary/Disintegration/Close To me/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/10.15 Saturday Night/Killing An Arab/Never Enough Full Moon Concert (Leysin, Switzerland, 7/6/90) Swinging Pig TSPCD 086 Shake Dog Shake/A Strange Day/A Night Like This/Catch/Pictures Of You/Fascination Street/Lullaby/Dressing Up/The Same Deep Water As You/Just Like Heaven/The walk/Primary/Inbetween Days/A Forest/Disintegration/Close To Me/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/Never Enough/Boys Don't Cry
Discography Of Selected Bootlegs
Hot Hot Hot (Torino Palasport, 6/9/89) RRCD 2029/30 Plainsong/Pictures Of You/Closedown/Kyoto Song/A Night Like This/Just Like Heaven/ Last Dance/Fascination Street/Cold /Charlotte Sometimes/The Walk/A Forest/In Between Days/The Same Deep Water As You/Prayers For Rain/ Disintegration/ Lullaby/ Close To Me/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/The Lovecats/Hot Hot Hot/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/Faith
Imaginary (London Town & Country 1/17/91) Sherwood Robin Hood 2 Big hand/Pictures Of You/Lullaby/Fascination Street/One 23 four/A Letter To Elise/Just Like Heaven/Dressing Up/Wendy Time/The walk/Let's Go To Bed - excerpts from this show, which the Cure performed as a warm up for the Wembley show two nights later under the name Five Imaginary Boys, were included on the The Cure Play Out video Just Like Heaven (London Wembley Arena 1/19/91) Kiss The Stone KTS 035 Pictures Of You/Fascination Street/Just Like Heaven/Lullaby/The Walk/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/In Between Days/A Forest/Never Enough/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/Disintegration/Hello I Love You - excerpts from this show were included on the The Cure Play Out video Laughing Soap Dish (Minneapolis 7/13/92 + New Orleans 6/8/92 + Miami 6/4/92) Flashback Productions 09.92.0188 Open/High/Pictures Of You/Lullaby/Just Like Heaven/Fascination Street/A Night Like
Discography Of Selected Bootlegs
This/Apart/Doing The Unstuck/The Walk/Let's Go To Bed/Friday I'm In Love/ Inbetween Days/From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea/Never Enough/ Cut/ End/ Lovesong/Close To Me/Why Can't I Be You?/Primary/Boys Don't Cry/A Forest/ Impossible Things/A Letter To Elise/M/The Figurehead Lullaby (Stuttgart, 5/18/89) Subversive Rock Produktions Close To me/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/A Strange Day/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/The Same Deep Water As You/Prayers For Rain/ Disintegration/ Lullaby Never Enough (festival tour, summer 1990) Red Phantom PRCD 2082/83 Shake Dog Shake/A Strange Day/A Night Like This/Catch/Pictures Of You/Fascination Street/Lullaby/Dressing Up/Kiss/Lament/Just Like Heaven/The Walk/Primary/In Between Days/A Forest/ Disintegration/Close To me/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You7/10.15 Saturday Night/Killing An Arab/Never Enough The Secret Gig (Town & Country Club London, 1/17/91) Red Phantom RPCD 1037 Pictures Of You/Lullaby/Fascination Street/Just Like Heaven/Dressing Up/The walk/Let's Go To Bed/Why Can't I Be You?/In Between Days/A Forest/ Disintegration/In Your House/Primary/Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry/10.15 Saturday Night/Killing An Arab - excerpts from this show, which the Cure performed as a warm up for the Wembley show two nights later under the name Five Imaginary Boys, were included on the The Cure Play Out video
The Mixed Up Remixes
Wembley Arena (London Wembley Arena 7/89) RS CD23 Pictures Of You/Closedown/Last Dance/Fascination Street/Prayers For Rain/ Disintegration/Homesick/Untitled - apparently a pirated version of the UK Entreat, with seven additional tracks recorded at Santa Barbara Bow, 7/13/87
THE MIXED UP REMIXES 1990's Mixed Up album was an ironic offering, in that keyboard player Roger O'Donnell had been very keen on the band involving itself in dance music, but had been despatched from the group before they got round to trying it. The original plan for Mixed Up had been to compile all the band's original remixes, but Robert admitted that when he actually sat down to listen to them, "they were awful, really dull. So it seemed pointless to just bring it out as a kind of archive thing and I thought we should use the opportunity to do something no-one's done before" - in other words, remix an entire chunk of the band's back catalog specifically for this new album. This rule was not, however, cast-iron. Four tracks were culled from Disintegration for remixing: "Lullaby," "Lovesong," "Fascination Street" and "Pictures Of You." All four were represented by their original 12-inch mixes, and for this reason, unlike several of the other cuts on the album, however, the mixes themselves were given nothing more than the most cursory retitling - the first three tracks appear as simply an
The Cure Interview
"extended" mix; "Pictures Of You" was presented as an "extended dub" mix. It was not an easy, nor a particularly successful project. Robert Smith himself had very little to do with the album, beyond selecting the tracks and the remixers. two songs, however, were rerecorded - "A Forest" and "The Walk" - after the original master tapes were found to have disappeared; a third track, "Never Enough," had been recorded for release as a one-off single earlier in the year. Smith himself would acknowledge that not every track worked, but he contin ued to defend Mixed Up. "Everyone should ,listen to it at least once. The only reason we've ever released anything is because it's musically very good. A small nucleus of fans feel that certain old songs shouldn't be tampered with, but we're not that precious about it." Mixed Up was released on vinyl (UK Fiction FIXLP 18), cassette (UK Fiction FIXHC 18) and CD (UK Fiction FIXCD 18, US Elektra 60978) in November, 1990. It reached #8 on the British chart; #14 in the United States.
THE CURE INTERVIEW This interview took place in February, 1996, at St Catherines, near Bristol, England, towards the end of the sessions for the Cure's latest album, Wild Mood Swings. Present were Robert Smith (RS), Simon Gallup (SG) and Roger O'Donnell (RO). Q: With songs like "Love Cats," "Hot Hot Hot" and "13th," the Cure have developed
The Cure Interview
something of a reputation for stepping outside of people's usual perception of their music. Is this a deliberate policy? SG: Doing things as a departure makes it sound like it's contrived. If I looked at '13th' and wasn't involved in it, I could say, 'oh look, it's got a Latin beat in it, it's got all this stuff,' but because we've all been involved, we all think it's a good song. And I'll be thoroughly honest, we're not trying to break new ground with it, because its actually quite a sleazy song in a way. But if we were to go out tonight and we heard that song, we'd dance to it. RS: I think we lost our belligerence years ago. I think people have become used to the fact we'll do what we do, we're not trying to upset or shock or amuse anyone, we just want people to think it's fun. Q: Do you ever worry that people won't understand that? RS: I don't have any delusions about our standing in the market. Our record companies love us when we're selling records, but they hate us when we're not. And while we've got a history of having good videos, so that's in our favor, if it's not a good video they won't flog us, which disturbs me because they will flog other people's videos which are shit. SG: When we did the video for 'Pictures Of You,' the Chart Show a UK music show wouldn't show it," RS: That's because it was a rubbish song.
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SG: No it wasn't. They wouldn't show it because the video wasn't up to a 'professional standard,' because it was shot on Super 8. But then you get these bands with all these digital bollocks, and they'll show them because it looks posh. No-one ever looks at the entertainment value. RO: I thought it a bloody fine video. RS: Yeah. I thought it was one of the best five we ever made, and it never got shown any where because the song wasn't a single. If that had been the video for 'High,' we would have had a hit. 'Close To Me,' people remember the video and the song comes with it. If that video had gone with one of less catchy songs, it wouldn't have been shown so much. Q: The Cure were one of the pioneers of the rock video through the 1980s, usually work ing in tandem with director Tim Pope. Now that that partnership has ended, what effect do you see it having on future videos? RS: The whole point of me saying I can't work with Tim Pope anymore, is that I can't be 'Why Can't I Be You'-Man again. I'm not that person and I won't be, but we can do stuff that's infinitely better, but on the same level, that's done like we want, and as big as we want to. The advantage we had when we first started doing things with Tim Pope, was that no-one had really done that much, and in the world of video anything you thought of was new. And now...."
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55
RO: You mean we were writing our own cliche? SG: Roger and I were talking the other night, about how Tim Pope always goes down for making these really weird videos, but the videos that he's come up with ideas for, with out the group, have been pap. RS: Some of the videos he's done with other people have been boring. SG: 'Love Song" was a bloody travesty. RS: Please, let's not hark on about how he's failed us. He's also made some good videos. SG: He took two days to make those stalactites. RS: But hang on, that was number two in America. And the video made me look glam orous, and it's the only one ever to do that. It was a poor video, but it made the song. SG: We all looked like we don't look like. RS: if you haven't got the ability to step outside of what you're supposed to be, and do something that's really dumb, you're fucked. It's like you're saying, 'ooh we can't go near that, our idea is to go Nick Cave style, where I'm just reinforcing endlessly my idea of a goth god.' In the next video you'll see us look-
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ing more stupid than we have in any other video. Q: At the same time, you have been very vociferous in your condemnation of two of the videos you did without Pope: "Charlotte Sometimes" and "Letter To Elise." RS: "Letter To Elise" was the worse thing we ever did, it got shown on MTV once, we had a bearded cameraman and he was in more of the video than I was. Nothing against bearded cameramen, of course, but it was a really good song but it wasn't a single. We had 'Doing The Unstuck', it was the best single, and Polydor and Elektra [the Cure's British and American labels] wouldn't release it. It was a great pop song, I was saving it for the third single, and when we got there they said 'what the market needs is...,' and I said, 'great! A song you have to listen to, which doesn't have a hook, and which will never get played on the radio. That's a really good idea.' Q: Which would suggest you deliberately write some songs as singles, some songs as album tracks, and some songs as complete commercial turkeys? You could sit down to write "Holy Hour," "Siamese Twins," and wrench those words from your soul. Or you could sit down and think "I'll write a song about why midnight is better than a bag of snakes," and end up with - God knows what you'd end up with. "Friday I'm In Love," probably. RS: No, I never do that, I never sit down and think I'll write a song. I can't sit down in a calculating manner and say I will write a song about... I have done it, but the songs that come out are like 'Let's Go To Bed,' or 'Why Can't I Be You,' very flat -they're good on a
The Cure Interview
certain level, but they don't resonate. The ones that do are dead obvious, like you said, 'Holy Hour,' 'Siamese Twins.' But 'Want,' I sat down and wrote as quickly as any song I've ever written in my life, I literally sat down outside my house two summers ago, and I was dissatisfied, so I just made a list of everything I've ever wanted and as I went on, it made me laugh, and with very few changes....Some songs are very particular to a particular moments, others are very general, which is why I write about the stuff I write about, which goes on year after year after year. On the [new] songs, lyrically you couldn't say what they're about. On the 22 I've put words to, I'm ranging from things that happened to me, things that I've experienced, things I've observed, and other people's points of view altogether. That's also the difference between now and then - whenever 'then' was. It was all pure autobiography, taken exclusively from things that had worked me up to the point where I'd write a song. Now I can take situations which don't really upset my equilibrium, I can hear something we could do musically, and I'll write a song to compliment it, which in the old days I would never ever do. I had no interest in it, I just wanted to put my own point of view across, and say this is how I feel about some thing, and the music was just a backdrop. I suppose there is an element to it that every time we get back to songs we think are really good that we want to make them sound as good as we can. But it's changed around, I've tried on this record [Wild Mood Swings] to enhance the music that will push you towards thinking in a certain way, which I don't think I'd really... it devalues the song a little for me personally, as the singer, but in other ways it enhances it immeasurably as a member of the group. Wish was the first time I tried that, with 'Apart,' that was the very first song I ever wrote where I wasn't in the song; it had nothing to do with me at all, I was trying to
The Cure Interview
encapsulate something that I was seeing. Q: What brought on the change? RS: When we first started, we weren't selling records, we were only playing to a few people, and the idea of shouting, we had to shout because it was the only way to be noticed. Now I don't, because it's gone so, so long that I know people do notice. There's enough people I've met who do understand. Q: But at what point then does your art become artifice, where you no longer believe in what you're writing about, but you still write it? RS: That's a pretty huge area to deal with in a question because we have to establish what is art. Q: Spontaneity? Honesty? RS: If you want to define it that way, I will talk about it in those terms, but I don't feel making an album, there's very little spontaneity involved. Live there is spontaneity..." Q: Stick to song writing. RS: so I can write about - otherwise I'm just gonna focus on the same subjects all the time. You have to insert a certain idea of craft into a song, which is an old argument I've
The Cure Interview
had for five or six years, it's not spontaneity because there comes a certain point when you learn to distill what you've done, add a certain essence. It's an argument I had with, not to drop names, the Thin White Duke [David Bowie], that he thinks the first thing you write is of the essence, and that's it, that's like the performance, and I don't think it's true: you get that first idea and distill it, you use certain words, its like Dylan Thomas, the first poem, the first thing he writes is going to be the best - is it fuck, he might have spent weeks refining it, and if someone like that, who's that good at writing words, can spend that amount of time refining words, I don't feel obliged to think, ooh, the first thing I say... I sing stuff on stage that's the first thing that comes into my head, and at the time its incredibly gratifying, its a huge relief, and afterwards I'll listen to the cassette and I'm mortified at how shit it is. To honestly believe that the first thing you do is the best you'll ever do is so lazy. Or a degree of self-confidence that is manic. It's like the first pot you make, believing it'll be better than the tenth. It might be funnier looking.... "At Night" is lifted from a Kafka story piecemeal, very Thin White Duke style, things that resonated in our lives, I just lifted a few phrases, put them together and it made sense, but that was because I couldn't be bothered to write a song, also the advantage I've got is that I have music and in some ways I can get away with stuff, I can use words that aren't just there to be read. The best songs that the Cure have done are ones where the words are intrinsically tied up with the music, they can't be divorced from them, you read the words, you hear the music. Q: And of course your audience acknowledges that with the mania for dissecting your lyrics.
The Cure Interview
RS: And you wonder why I'm paranoid about the first thing I write? I remember the very first time - there was a college in CA, strangely enough, and someone sent me a letter say ing could you give me an insight into 'The Blood' because I'm writing a thesis and I can get a certain amount of credit points, because they're running this course and it's called 'Robert Smith's Words.' I inquired independently and I found out it was genuine, that was around the time of Disintegration, and that's the whole point of what we do. It's not, we don't think, oh we're in a group so whatever we do is good, and everyone who's in the group understands that, and that's the difference because having been in and around a lot of groups over the years a lot of people have reached the point where they think because they're in a group, whatever they do is great. Its tragic, it really is, you always have to think about what you're doing, why you're doing it, why is it working, why isn't it, and a lot of it isn't put into such obvious terms, but there are times when we have to think, well we could get away with this but do we really want to? And we don't because that's a very slippery slope. Q: Yet despite all the convolutions, the British New Musical Express recently described the Cure as "quintessentially Goth with pop overtones," which suggests old reputations die hard. How does it make you feel when you read something like that? SG: Why say that? What is Goth? We've never done weird - well, we have, but... RS: We're not a true Goth band, we fail the audience in too many ways.
The Cure Interview
SG: The bracket of Goth - there was a name, Goth, and then certain groups went into it, the Mission - God bless 'em; the Sisters, Fields of the Nephilim. But you couldn't say Faith sounds like First And Last And Always, although it is true that the audience always divides up at gigs, between the 'typical' Cure fans who are dressed a bit Gothy, the half who got into us for the early stuff; there's the half which only wants the new stuff, and there's the half who...." Q: Three halves? SG: They couldn't get in, so they're selling bootlegs of our b-sides in the car-park. [A 1987-1992 bootleg b-sides collection has recently resurfaced] Q: The Cure does have a history of making material suddenly unavailable or obscure, which given a collectors base as substantial as yours, does seem to be asking for trouble in that direction. RS: We are the sort of group that people do look to the B-sides, we have a tradition. I remember what I really liked about Siouxsie and the Banshees: they were one of the first groups where I'd buy all their singles because the B-sides were usually better than the Asides. "Love In A Void", which was on the other side of the German "Metal Postcard," that was great. In those days, I'd buy a single and I used to play the B-side first, because if that was good, you'd bought a good single. But it's a lost art now, because people just bung out - they use mixes, inane mixes, as an excuse for not doing anything different.
The Cure Interview
Q: Which, of course, is what happened with the "Pictures Of You" single; did we really need twelve different versions? RS: We were sort of misled, because I was probably tired at the time, and we got sucked into the idea that it would be good to do twelve different versions. It was pretty dumb, but not really. Q: But you also have a history of limited edition releases, obscure live b-sides which still haven't been collected together, plus there's things like Curiosity (the oddities b-side to the Concert cassette), the Carnage Visors soundtrack (available only with the cassette ver sion of Faith), the Lost Wishes out-takes EP.... RS: It's nice... no, it's not nice in some ways, because people will pay a lot of money to get it, but a lot of stuff in the past was released with the idea of it being just a one-off, just of the moment, disposable. If you make everything available for posterity, it's bit precious, really. There are some things that are best left obscure. Since the mid-1980s, it's been impossible for us to do something and believe that it was going to remain obscure. But before that, there were a lot of things, odd B-sides... no-one bought the A-sides, no-one bought the albums, we weren't trying to be obscure, it's like we were lucky to sell 50,000 worldwide of the album! Q: Who actually oversees these projects... the live albums Show and Paris, for instance? SG: Robert had to mix Show... I was there, but when you see videos of bands sitting
The Cure Interview
round the mixing desk joining in, its all a lie. Perry and I were there for moral support really. Q: What was the thinking behind those albums? After all, there really is no shortage of live Cure material on the market. SG: With the Wish tour we knew Porl was going to leave, we didn't at the time know Boris was also going to, but it seemed like a good way to end that chapter and again, to be quite honest with you, we didn't know if we were going to do another record, we're not that clever that we think in two years time we're gonna do another record, we tend to get together and get excited if someone's got a tune, just like what we did with Wish. Q: And now there's a book documenting your discography, Daren Butler's The Cure On Record.... RS: That book introduced me to a world that I was totally unaware of, honestly was total ly unaware that that kind of mania even existed. Q: But you've done so much to feed it! RS: No, because a lot of that book was related to what goes on globally. If you serious ly think we have any control over a handprint and a bit of squiggle on the Brazilian cover of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, it doesn't happen like that, they do what they like, every where except Europe and America. There's stuff comes out of Australia, New Zealand,
The Cure Interview
still, that bears no resemblance to what we're doing, and there's African things, we've been on albums with the Specials and Joy Division, whoever they can get their hands on, and it really is stuff they've just taped off the radio, and remastered back onto vinyl. RO: We've been talking about doing a collection of B-sides, because there's been some demand for it. RS: At the end of [1996], there'll be something. It'll probably just be fan based, stuff that's been missing. We did a tape in 1986, the cassette of Standing On The Beach [the Cure's first Greatest Hits collection] had a B-side of B-sides, but that was it, just the tape. Q: So, b-sides are important to you still? RS: I figure most Cure fans are going to buy the first single off an album just to see what it's like, which means the b-side is going to be heard by everyone who buys the single because there's no such thing as a B-side anymore. You buy a CD single, or a cassingle, you're not really gonna play one song and not the other. But the reason a [song is a ] b-side is because it doesn't fit on the album. It's not a bad song, it really is a good song, but I found it impossible to work it in. There again, if people hear it and think that because it's a B-side, it wasn't good enough to be on the album, you start to think it must be a great album! RO: The thing now is, if you don't do something about the rare stuff, someone else will, and they won't do it as well as we would. Do it very cheap. A bootleg of Cure B-sides
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would cost 25 quid. RS: So we could put it out for 30. But it smacks of 20th Anniversary Retrospective. Seeing other groups that have done it, iconic 80s groups who get towards the end of their career, so they package everything up together and make it very saleable... Wait until we've stopped. Do a three CD box, put it in a box and bury it. RO: What, the B-sides? So we've come full circle. We were going to do it a minute ago. Q: Speaking of the 20th anniversary, yours' is just around the corner. Isn't it time for another volume of Standing On The Beach? RS: The whole point with Startling On The Beach was saying to people, you wouldn't buy a Cure album, but this is what we've done and you might like it, and it worked, a lot of people, it was the first Cure album they bought, and they thought I quite like this, and a lot of people who bought that bought Cure albums after that and found they liked them as well. That album was aimed at people who wouldn't normally buy a Cure album. It was like an old garage, you look around, 'ah, I recognize that, ah "Live Cats," I liked that, I'll get it to play in the car.' They're not really buying a Cure album, they're buying songs they know. You're not really gonna expect that person to then buy Faith and sit back and say, 'ah my life's changed.' RO: I think people do, I talk to young fans who've just got into the group over the last
The Cure Interview
couple of years and now they're working their way back." RS: Yeah, but they're fans. I'm talking about casual purchasers, like the people who bought Standing On The Beach... at least, I think it was Standing On The Beach. Standing On The Beach, Staring At The Sea... the compilation." RO: 500 anorak-clad people wait outside with train schedules, who would beg to differ if you're wrong. RS: Early Cure albums appeal either to people who were there at the time, because they recapture something, or they resonate through generations of people. I don't think you're gonna buy the Wish album, and then think I'm gonna check out their back catalog and pick up 17 Seconds. They're still good songs, but younger fans, they're always gonna like the early stuff best because we were younger when we did it. Q: Which, by a process of elimination should mean, old people will like the latest one because you're... RS: I'm 36. Q: Do you think the time is coming when you'll feel too old to carry on with the Cure? RS: We were in Holland recently and met up with a journalist who talked to us when we were there in 1981, and he asked why we were still going? I asked him why he was? This whole thing about how come we've remained successful over a long
The Cure Interview
period of time, the answer's so simple. The answer's the songs. If the songs weren't good, we could have the best look, the best attitude, but it would mean nothing. How many other bands have so many good albums over the last 20 years? Very few bands who started when we started had any fucking idea of what they were doing. A few bands started in the early 80s, who still manage to do it - New Order who are nominally still going, although they're not really; they've done some excellent stuff, although I don't like them really. There are others which I won't bother to name. But all it comes down to is the music. Everyone says 'oh, it must be this, this and this,' and it isn't. If you haven't got good songs, it doesn't matter at all what you do. You cannot fool an audience with more than one record; if you put out a shit record, they're not gonna buy the next one. They're not going to if you don't have a voice any more. SG: Age is irrelevant. Even before Robert and I met each other, we were both Alex Harvey fans. God knows how old he was [he was pushing 40 by the time of his first hit albums], but he was brilliant. RO: I've been in other bands that were running parallel to the Cure, and they pulled their hair out and beat the shit out of their manager, wanting to know why the Cure was doing it and they weren't. But you can't pin it down. Q: There is that reputation for being stubborn. RS: I haven't been stubborn in the slightest. Year after year, I do exactly what I want.
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That's why it's taken four years to make Wild Mood Swings, because I haven't really been bothered. RO: If anything, Robert is stubborn not to do it anymore. He would never go on tour. Robert makes records despite himself, and it's the same for the Cure, the Cure is suc cessful despite itself. SG: Oasis may be able to record an album in two weeks, but we did that in less than two weeks." SG: We started doing demos [before that], but because we didn't have a drummer it's a bit weird rehearsing with a drum machine, so there was a lot of things going on but it was only just over a year ago when Jason came in and we knew it was going to be permanent that things started moving on. RS: We recorded Wild Mood Swings in less than one week. That's our new story. Q: And anyone who remembers the hoopla which surrounded the release of Disintegration in 1989, hot on the heels of your 30th birthday, will remember you reck oned you wrote the title track on the happy day itself, mindless of the fact that the album would be in the stores two weeks later. Forget recording quickly, that sets new records for mixing, pressing and promoting as well.
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RS: I can perpetuate that rumor. Because it is true, sorta. It happened like that in my head. Unfortunately there was about a six or seven week period between when they drugged me. I was chloroformed up to my eyeballs and left in the corner." RO: We only had the daylight of two weeks. We didn't see daylight for ages. RS: You don't have any choice when you're first making records. We had to make 17 Seconds in ten days because we couldn't afford to be in there for the eleventh. Marrying the two things together for me is redundant, how long something takes and what it's like; because what it's like is something more important. If you say you banged something out in two weeks, I'm not gonna go slack-jawed, 'did it seriously take you two weeks to make it,' because it should have taken two hours." SG: It's never mattered to us if it's a year between albums or ten years. The only criteria is do we like it and, fair enough, we're meant to be in a situation where we shouldn't care, but the thing is, we do actually care what we're doing, and that comes down to the songs. That's what excites us about doing something. RS: If it was my choice, this group would have ended ten years ago. But they've got too many things they can hold over me which I can't afford to have come out. When it comes down to it, it's what do we like? We sit down, the five of us, listen to music, 'that's really good, that's really good - why do you like it?' You don't sit and think I like this album because.... The whole thing is just instinct, and that's the only thing
Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Cure: JoAnn Greene (Bobcat 1987) The Cure -10 Imaginary Years: Barbarian, Steve Sutherland & Robert Smith (Zomba 1988) The Cure - A Visual Documentary: Dave Thompson & JoAnn Greene (Omnibus 1988) The Cure - Songwords 1978-1989 (Omnibus 1989) The Cure - On Record: Daren Butler (Omnibus 1995) The Cure - Faith: Dave Bowler and Bryan Dray (Sidgwick & Jackson 1995)
