1990-1992
t
he embers of six months crackle in the fireplace. A fine old chessboard sits unattended. The tang of freshly percolated coffee mingles with the comforting funk of Irish wolfhound and oak. The grandfather clock is stuck permanently at 12. The ghostly sound of piano keys being jabbed filters through into the empty snooker room. On the sideboard sits a bottle of Sandeman’s port, a single daffodil, a discarded archery arrow and a garish tube of Living Nightmare Glow-InThe-Dark Make-Up. Someone upstairs is playing ‘Loveless’ by My Bloody Valentine. We are in the heart of verdant Oxfordshire. The clock might, if it was working, strike four. So, who lives in a house like this? It’s The Cure – or, as Roger Daltrey had it on last year’s Brits, when he presented their Best British Group award – “The Kyoo-aarhh!” The Manor studio, at Shipton-on-Cherwell, owned by Richard Branson (as hinted at by the embarrassing hippy mural of Phil Collins, Mike Oldfield, Feargal Sharkey and Peter Gabriel halfway up the stairs) costs around £6,000 a week to rent. But The Kyoo-aarrhh can weather that. They are, after all, the most popular and successful cult band in the world. And this, for the time being, is their house. There is a rumour going about the place that a) Branson is thinking of selling up; and b) The Cure are thinking of buying. This would be good. Robert Smith and his quaintly dishevelled, forever-adolescent thirtysomething pals should live together in the same elegant country mansion with tons of wolfhounds and chess and grouse-shooting. You wish.
The 1980s: now there was a funny decade for
actually seen the world; teen angst gone mad. But goth music was filling the Albert Hall by 1986, in the stark, skeletal form of The Sisters Of Mercy. Many of the goth bands gave the genre a bad name, though some of them extracted high drama, cut-price kicks and even some humour from the goth manifesto of unforgiving railroad rhythms, guitar histrionics, Hammer imagery and lost chords. But it was The Cure, from Crawley in Sussex, who took it out of the belfry and into the front room. It was Robert Smith whose own particular brand of back-combed foppishness found a place in the glossy pop papers. The Cure grew into a goth hit machine (19 to date), an international phenomenon and, yep, the most successful alternative band that ever shuffled disconsolately about the earth. Their only contender in the profit-margin stakes at record company Polydor is James Last. And he makes two albums a year. To deftly write goth off as a peculiarly ’80s phenomenon is to deny the existence of hundreds of black-clad, aromatic, asexual gormtroopers who huddle in coffee shops and refectories and branches of the Body Shop up and down the land to this day. The goth is (despite appearances) alive and unwell. All About Eve are not a goth band. Nor are The Sisters of Mercy. At least, that’s what they say. Being a goth means, well, never having to say you’re a goth. Goths think ‘lazy’ music journalists invented the term. They did. The question is, will The Cure admit to being a goth band? Are they embarrassed that they invented – or at the very least popularised, legitimised, patented – goth? Robert: “Do you think we did really? When we were making ‘Pornography’ there wasn’t any such a thing as goth, we were just miserable, not like goth with the flour and the hats, all that. I’ve never actually liked goth bands. I’ve always despised The Sisters Of Mercy.” Why? “’Cos the music’s shit.” “I always use gel, not hairspray. It’s called KMS
our old pal pop music. The Smiths, Madness, New Order, The Human League, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, ABC, Public Enemy, The Stone Roses, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Margaret Thatcher, acid house. You were there. But something else happened between the years 1980 and 1989, and it was somewhere between a fashion movement and a creeping mould on the underside of post-punk Britain. It was gothic rock, or goth, so called because it investigated the grandiose and the macabre, the dark and the doomy. From out of the disenfranchised sneer of punk it came, a more verbose, decorative incarnation which borrowed its greasepaint and finery from glam rock, and its morose indulgence from European metal machine music. David Bowie, Edgar Allen Poe, Morticia Addams and Frank-N-Furter went to the carnival and someone turned the lights out. Your goth was an apolitical animal, nocturnal, introspective, tribal, almost “Hey, great hair! hermaphrodite. The goth The job’s yours”: was also about 19, worldPerry Bamonte (second right) joins weary without having
and it comes with hexagons on. I backcomb it a lot too. I did use mousse for a while, but it used to drip onto my nose when I was on stage.” – Robert Smith, Just 17, August 1985
Face it,
The Cure’s ludicrous look has been their fortune. Robert Smith, in his over-generous fluffy sweater, wrinkled black drainpipes and the undone trainers of a much larger man, crowned with that award-winning ha-ha-ha-have-youhad-an-electric-shock hairdo, is, whether he likes it or not, a modern-day icon. On the day I meet up with The Cure at Chez Dick, they look very much like The Cure. Smith may have trimmed his head-topiary recently, and the blind man’s lipstick is absent, but he is still a satisfying caricature of himself. Large, bird-like bassist Simon Gallup claims that all five of them happened to wear black because, “It’s the most practical colour, you don’t have to wash it till you smell,” but this is clearly a reflex cover-up (and a typical dose of laddish hygiene bravado to boot). If The Cure changed, thousands of sprayed teenagers the world over would feel cheated and betrayed. The Cure are loved and invested in and stuck onto walls because – since their commercial watershed in 1984 – they NEVER CHANGE. ‘Wish’ – despite the band’s protestations – is another Cure record. This is no put-down. Another Cure record is a good thing. If ‘Wish’ were a film, it wouldn’t win any individual Oscars, but would probably scoop one of those Lifetime Achievement Awards. That’s the sort of album it is. In short, masterful slowie ‘Trust’ on Side Two made me want to weep in an underpass, and the single ‘High’ miraculously cured my flu when they put it in the office. ‘Disintegration’, The Cure’s last LP in 1989, sold in excess of three million copies worldwide. So why make another record? “Why did we make the last one?” asks Robert, rhetorically. Is there any thing else you can get? Any more fame, any more satisfaction, any more cash? “It’s not about continual gain. We don’t think, ‘It’s about time The Cure made another album, if we make one more the bank balance gets a bit bigger.’ I look forward to our new records. There are very few things that you genuinely look forward to hearing.” The Cure are still going because they tend not to shed their audience. You can always spot an older Cure fan – they’ve grown out of having the funny sticky-up hair. The band themselves pull it off because they are The Cure. It’s harder to have funny, sticky-up hair when you’re 30 and living in the real world. Robert: “I haven’t got funny sticky-up hair.” It’s quite funny. “There’s a lot weirder-looking people – older than us – walking around in Oxford. They shout
Bob’s happy band
PAUL COX/ DEREK RIDGERS
“I’ve never actually liked goth bands, ’cos the music’s shit”
NME ORIGINALS
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