Summer 1982 was drawing to a fitful close when Robert Smith slid his guitar under the bed, scrubbed away the last of the mascara and packed his sleeping bag. The Cure frontman was about to step outside the door of his parent’s house in Crawley, West Sussex, and away from the goth-rock troupe he had led to unlikely success across the previous six years. He was heading into the blue yonder in a desperate attempt to silence the tumult in this head, the chaos that had come crashing down on his music career.
He didn’t tell anyone but he suspected that, after four albums and a lifetime of upheaval stuffed into half a decade, it might be the end for the band. As far as Smith was concerned, The Cure were over. And so here he was, a literally unhappy camper about to hit the road. “Everything seemed to be going wrong,” Smith would recall. “So I decided to go off for a few months. I took a tent and went around England.”
The Cure would rise like a moody phoenix, of course, and this Sunday they tick another accomplishment off their bucket list when they headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. They come to Pilton after an extensive European tour that has seen them revisit every phase of their career with one notable exception. Conspicuously glossed over is the period leading up to Smith’s 1982 meltdown and his desperate camping excursion. Just one song on the 2019 setlist, the toweringly foreboding “One Hundred Years”, is from Pornography. The torrid fourth album that drove Smith over the brink and nearly devoured the band is otherwise out of sight and out of mind.
“Everything got to be too much. The whole thing had become too intense” is how Smith summarised that period in The Cure’s history. “It was very depressing. Everything seemed to be wrong. We didn’t achieve what I wanted us to achieve. Me and Simon were just fighting all the time.”
Simon Gallup was The Cure’s bass player in the definitive early line up (Gallup had first crossed paths with Smith while playing in another band, Lockjaw, at the Rocket pub in Crawley in February 1978). Always volatile, the relationship between frontman and bassist had taken a turn for the worse recording Pornography.
Drugs and alcohol were becoming a dangerous crutch for the musicians. To further darken the mood, someone had suggested that they explore disturbing imagery (they have never gone into the details). It added up to six months of unexpurgated hell. “During Pornography, the band was falling apart, because of the drinking and drugs. I was pretty seriously strung out a lot of the time,” Smith confessed to Rolling Stone. “I know for a fact that we recorded some of the songs in the toilets to get a really horrible feeling, because the toilets were dirty and grim. Simon doesn’t remember any of that, but I have a photo of me sitting on a toilet, in my clothes, trying to patch up of some of the lyrics. It’s a tragic photo.”
“We immersed ourselves in the more sordid side of life, and it did have a very detrimental effect on everyone in the group,” he continued. “We got ahold of some very disturbing films and imagery to kind of put us in the mood. Afterwards, I thought, ‘Was it really worth it?’ We were only in our really early twenties, and it shocked us more than I realised – how base people could be, how evil people could be.“
