Searching for the Cure
Things don’t look good. A couple of days after two extraordinary sold-out concerts at Paris’s 15,000-seat Bercy Auditorium, the Cure is getting ready to play a glorified gymnasium in Reims to a crowd of only 4500. Even at 8:30 in the evening, when the band hits the stage, it’s not yet dark; the sun streams through the skylights, turning the place into a muggy greenhouse and overpowering the band’s extensive lighting rig.
But that isn’t the worst of it — earlier, the band’s leader, Robert Smith, took about an hour to get off the tour bus, then shuffled backstage, puffy faced, ashen and bleary eyed, looking barely human. He stopped, grinned sheepishly at the rest of the band and crew and lurched to the bathroom. Everyone smiled knowingly, assuming it was a hangover, but in fact Smith is suffering from a vicious stomach virus, probably not helped much by his drinking until five in the morning.
Smith takes the stage and paces like a zombie back and forth — the kids (most of them are well under twenty) must think it’s part of the act, because they go berserk. Without so much as a perfunctory ”Hello, Reims!” the band launches into the set.
Even out here in the provinces, Cure-mania lives, and the audience quickly turns into a heaving throng; girls who can’t withstand the crush against the crowd barriers are hoisted out of the teeming mob by an alert team of security men. Unlike their rough American counterparts, the French security men gently cradle barrier victims, even dispensing an occasional sweet, reassuring peck on the cheek. They actually pour Evian water on the sweltering kids, who open their mouths for it like feeding chicks.
The songs from the band’s new album, Disintegration, get lots of cheers, and the response seems to energize Smith. Amid copious dry-ice fog, he pulls off a strong performance despite waves of staggering nausea. After the band leaves the stage, Smith shambles over to an equipment case and buries his face in his hands, saying nothing for several minutes. A crew member says, ”He might make it,” and laughs sardonically. But the Cure does go on for a five-song encore, and although the show falls well short of the three-hour set that’s the norm on this tour, the audience seems to go home satisfied.
The concert promoter left the band a few cases of the local pride, champagne, which is now on the tour bus. This bibulous band usually takes good advantage of such windfalls, but guitarist Porl Thompson and keyboardist Roger O’Donnell have come down with Smith’s virus, leaving bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Boris Williams to sip the bubbly and indulge in a favorite pastime, watching horror movies on the video system.
Smith has decided not to watch The Omen III — after all, he’s sick — and he might prefer to be reading anyway. Lately, Smith says, he’s been reading Nietzsche, who said that you can transcend despair through art. Perhaps that’s why back in Reims he cut loose on a long, long scream during the bitter ”Prayers for Rain,” seeming to wail irtto the abyss and then listen to the echoes, ”I was trying to expel the sickness,” he explains later. He was talking about his stomach virus, but the metaphor stands.
With his trademark stand-up hair, moon-pale face and red-lipsticked mouth, Smith is a postpunk icon; his fever-dream lyrics, awash in minor-key angst, are at the forefront of a genre somewhat disparagingly tagged ”mope rock.” A man who can sometimes make Morrisey seem like the most happy fella, Smith is a virtual messiah of melancholy, a guru of gloom. Over the years the Cure has amassed a vast cult following, if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms, and today millions of teenagers strongly relate to Smith as a kindred spirit — so many that the band is playing exclusively large arenas and stadiums on its current American tour. ”Sometimes I feel really smug and contented,” Smith says, ”thinking that we didn’t really try, and we made it anyway.” Indeed, though Smith can write a catchy tune when he wants to, the Cure makes unlikely stadium pop — the sound relies on subtle seduction and the lyrics are profoundly self-absorbed.
One would hardly expect such a tortured, self-interested soul to believe so fervently that the show must go on. But that night in Reims, Robert Smith proved himself to be something of an iron man, a real trouper. Actually, his stoutheartedness should come as no surprise, since the Cure has been around, in one form or another, for twelve years, and always with Smith at the helm. Much of the reason for the Cure’s growing collection of gold and platinum discs is the band’s longevity.
Yet Smith is adamant that this is the band’s final tour. He also insists that Disintegration is the band’s last album — of course, he’s said the same thing about the previous two efforts, But this time he sounds serious. ”I’ve actually reached the point where nothing in the world will make me go out and tour again,” he says resolutely. ”I’d break my hands not to do it anymore. I’ve got twenty-seven more concerts left, and as soon as we finish America, that’s it. For me, anyway.”
Since Smith practically is the Cure, that’s a serious threat, especially since he’s already begun work on a solo album. Smith downplays the solo effort’s importance, saying it will be a folkie album in the vein of the late British cult favorite Nick Drake, but the rest of the group is apparently a little upset anyway, Smith says he may invite Gallup and Williams to play on the record ”to lessen the blow.” Smith claims that his record won’t be released any time soon and that there won’t be much of a fuss made when it is. But such a low-key release is unlikely, for much to his apparent chagrin, Smith’s odd teddy-bear cuteness has made him a genuine teenybopper heartthrob.
According to O’Donnell, all the breakup talk is just a bluff to fight complacency in the band and, by extension, the audience. ”Robert likes to say that, he likes to keep us nervous,” O’Donnell says. ”But of all people, I think Robert doesn’t like change. Then again, he doesn’t like things to be settled, either — it’s a very difficult contradiction.”
Smith repeatedly ducks any suggestion that he dislikes change but finally admits that ”when I find someone I like, I try to hold on to them.” Since 1982, the band’s only video director has been Tim Pope. The band’s only manager has been Chris Parry, who signed the band to his Fiction Records label in 1978. Smith’s wife, Mary, became his girlfriend when they were fifteen years old, and Laurence ”Lol” Tolhurst, the band’s recently departed keyboardist, has known Smith since they were five.
Of course, there are times when even Smith is open to a change — as the saga of Tolhurst suggests. It was Tolhurst who made up the band’s name, and, besides Smith, he has been the only person to survive all of the band’s incarnations. But from a musical standpoint, Tolhurst was always iffy at best — when O’Donnell joined the band in 1987, he was mystified that Lol, with his one-finger keyboard technique, was in the band at all. But as Gallup explains. ”It was fun to have him around, even though he didn’t contribute much to the music. He was a part of the Cure.”
Increasingly, Tolhurst’s part in the Cure was being the butt of the band’s jokes. The others say Tolhurst used to give back as much as he got. That changed, though, when he gave in to drink. ”He was like a safety valve for all our frustrations,” O’Donnell says. ”Which was really sick. By the end it was horrible.” During the band’s 1987 Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me tour, the situation got way out of hand. ”Lol just drank his way through the tour,” Smith says, ”to such a degree that he didn’t bother retaliating. It was like watching some kind of handicapped child being constantly poked with a stick.” Tolhurst hadn’t participated much in the Kiss Me album, so Smith told him he had to shape up immediately, and Tolhurst promised to do better.
But the Disintegration sessions were the same, with Tolhurst spending most of his time watching MTV, drinking and killing the morale of the band. According to Smith, ”The only way we could communicate that he was turning into a complete parody of himself was by beating him up.”
Apparently, they are all on good terms today. Tolhurst invited the band members to his recent wedding, which they couldn’t attend because they were on tour, and in turn the band invited him to the concerts at Wembley. Lol Tolhurst, who’s reportedly made some good investments and is getting points on Disintegration. won’t talk to the press.
Smith says he’s positive that if Tolhurst had stayed in the band, he would have drunk himself to death or ”Simon would have thrown him off a balcony. And then my best friend would be in jail and Lol would be dead. It was much easier for him not to be in the band.”
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