Monocled Alchemist

Article published in Sounds, 3rd May, 1980

The Cure encased in New York. Observations by Phil Sutcliffe.

The Cure | Manhattan Interiors | “The sun rises slowly on another day. The sky grows cold. Winter water colours. Shades of grey. Something holds me, holds me hypnotised . . . I stare at the window. Stare at the window. Waiting for the day to go. Winter water colours, shades of grey” (‘Another Day’)

MATTHIEU HARTLEY, Simon Gallup and me in a strange room in a friendly hotel in strange and friendly New York. We sprawled across the beds and drank the whiskey I’d brought from home. Simon was chewing over the Cure‘s publicist-engineered meeting with Debbie Harry outside their dressing-room at Hurrah’s club the night before.

“I feel really . . . enamoured of having my picture taken with her,” he said. “She was a very nice about it I thought.”

Credibility

Robert Smith hadn’t been very nice about it at all, I gathered. While the star smiled her smile and joked about “Hey, your credibility’s gone now” the artist turned his back to the camera and tried to screw all the photographer’s attempts to get a shot for the biz magazines like Cashbox and Billboard who run lots of snaps of people shaking hands so that the corporate readers can see everybody’s happy and everything’s right in this best of all mega-profitable worlds.

Whereas Robert Smith doesn’t believe it and would rather not endorse it or supply their need for reassurance. The TV advertised Hubba-Bubba, the non-stick chewing gum, then Holy Sepulchre mausoleums, the neat and cheap way to bury your family with no messy grave-digging.

They both seemed like good ideas but we switched off so that I could hear the Cure’s new album, ’17 Seconds’ for the first time. Even with the thin sound emitted by Matthieu’s little cassette player the music was to run up and down my spine and tear round my brain. It was moving and beautiful. I rather suspect it was art (but don’t hold that against it — rhyming with ‘fart’ doesn’t say it all).

The Cure | Manhattan Interiors

HEREWITH some talking and thinking about a few of the songs. If your stamina’s low let me say it adds up to the following message: listen to the Cure — singles, albums, concerts, listen. (Pretty please.)

“A lot of people have said this is a headphone LP,” said Simon, his voice hopping along over a slight stammer. “I tend to agree with that. It’s supposed to have a subdued atmosphere, no, relaxed, no, not relaxed in a lethargic way . . . what’s the word? — the excitement still there . . . “

Subdued excitement. In ‘A Forest‘ (the single, no airplay and a No. 41 UK hit as I write: how come?) the syndrum whiplash (Lol and cool droning keyboard (Matthieu) paint you a frontier, the barbed wire, the watchtowers, the no-man’s land. But the words aren’t about that at all.

A Forest

It’s a forest that frightened Robert Smith in his childhood with its mysterious noises and tall tree-giants. But this isn’t biography either. Not a child’s nightmare. The protagonist, the ‘I’ of the songs, is never exactly Robert Smith.

Not re-creation but creation. The forest is an emotional landscape and the ‘story’ is the distilled essence of experience and feeling. Also it’s boy-meets-girl (or tries to).

‘I hear her voice calling my name,
The sound is deep in the dark.
I hear her voice and start to run
Into the trees. . .
But the girl is never there,
It’s always the same.
I’m running towards nothing,
Again and again and again (repeat and fade)’

A hard, dead sound. Extreme economy and clarity of word. The key Cure images of isolation in oppressive, elemental settings. Remember the beach in ‘Killing An Arab‘? Staring at the sea, staring at the sky, staring at the sun . . . And this is boy-meets-girl still. But boy-meets-girl in the heart of darkness.

Secrets

Sticky bubblegum, can’t shake it off. Because the Cure have a vision, a full-colour (every known shade of grey) picture of what they want to say, and what’s rare is that it’s consistent (although it changes — recognise that it’s evolution and you’re with them hang-gliding on poetic licenced logic).

‘Secrets‘ has a guitar pulse as internal and private as the one in your own wrist. Smith whispers ‘Keep quiet’ then sings with pained deliberation a story so compressed I can barely make out what’s happening.

A self-tormenting tension is plain enough though. Night, a room, another girl, talking, weariness, thinking of the girl he loves — shafting through the philosophical bleakness the romantic, yearning plea to ‘Remember me the way I used to be,(whispered) I wish I was yours’.

Love at the hot-rod nuclear core of anxiety, and more important than all the pessimism. Perfect naiveté? The thinking boys’ and girls’ Undertones? More on love.

The Cure | Manhattan Interiors

‘Play For Today, which features gloriously subtle rhythm guitar from Robert undermined by a too-clever behind-the-rhythm syndrum splash, offers this collection’s farewell to the group’s earlier Camus-influenced nihilism . . . and/or punk cliché attitude-copping.

‘I don’t really care’ it claims in the same way that ‘So What?’ said ‘So what?’ and ‘Killing An Arab’ argued more elaborately that

‘I can turn and walk away, Or I can fire the gun . . .
Whichever I choose it amounts to just the same,
Absolutely nothing’.

In ‘M‘, which is nothing to do with the modish old Fritz Lang movie, they say ‘Your face is drawn and ready for the next attack’. Get that. ‘Your face is drawn’. ‘Drawn’ as in tired, as in a weapon unsheathed, as in a lottery?

The second one is my favourite (a mortal wound, just one look was all it took, yeah). But the point is how much kick, sheer energy they are capable of crushing into and bursting out of one word.

At Night

THE CURE are writers. And this is how they do it.

Simon: “That song ‘M’ has been around for ages. In fact, it used to be called ‘S’. When we play new songs live Robert ad libs a lot until he gets the feel of it. Then when we record if it’s still not right it means everyone sitting around Chris Parry‘s (their manager’s) kitchen all night scrawling sheets and sheets of paper —for ‘At Night‘ we got really desperate and finished up at six in the morning with Lol standing on the table pressing his head against the ceiling because he thought that might help.”

Meanwhile Robert might have been seen “staring at a glass of milk and bleaking out.” It seems to be the moment to mention that Matthieu is an ex-hairdresser, Simon an ex-plastics factory worker, Lol an ex-ink factory worker and Robert a sometime postman and council gardener.

They are all around 20, Robert 21 two days on in Boston. What does this mean? Only that their lives have changed a good deal and quickly. Back into analysis, friends.

Two imaginative songs, the human condition on wheels.

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‘At Night‘ is marked by a slow rip-and-tear fuzz bass (Simon).

‘Sunk deep in the night,
I sink in the night.
Standing alone underneath the sky.
I feel the chill of ice on my face.
I watch the hours go by.
You sleep . . . sleep in a safe bed,
Curled and protected,
Protected from sight.
Under a safe roof deep in your house.
Unaware of the changes at night, at night.
I hear the darkness breathe, I sense the quiet despair.
Listen to the silence at night.
Someone has to be there,
Someone has to be there,
Someone must be there’.

In Your House

Trying to keep their brains alive on the road one game the Cure devised was imagining the perfect place for each of them to live.

Matthieu: “Mine would be a vegetable garden I could eat my way through forever. Simon’s town had everything made of leather, even the houses, and inflatable wimps you could chain to your leg and kick as you went along.

Tolhurstville was a long street with a sweet shop then a pub then a toilet, then the same again and again into infinity. Robert’s place would be full of people in separate rooms sitting and staring at the walls.”

‘In Your House‘ used to be called ‘Two People’ and, before that, ‘A.M.’ Later that night it shook up the Hurrah’s crowd. Despite its measured tread they whooped as if it had been rifferama.

Bleak-out boogie, it hit them where they lived. The tone and words cut through so directly.

‘I play at night in your house,
I live another life, I pretend to swim in your house.
I change the time in your house,
The hours I take go so slow.
I hear no sound in your house.
Silence in the empty rooms . . .
I drown at night in your house,
Pretending to swim, pretending to swim’.

Consider these last two songs. They are essence of Cure, the very vaccine. Emotions, themes, sound and symbols in poetic coherence. The dark night (of the soul), the dark night (as living nothingness, hear it breathe). Cold. Silence.

The Cure | Manhattan Interiors

Time proceeding with uncertain pace and direction, as adjustable as clock hands (’10. 15 on a Saturday night . . . and the tap drips, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip’ tic, tic, tic . . . ).

These things are the scenery. Then come the active images, the magical dynamics which make these pure and elliptical stories work rather than wank.

The house is safe, ideal, the girl is barely the ghost of hope, constantly referred to but never described. The outsider (the protagonist) is trying everything he knows. He’s the sentinel at his post, watching (‘Someone has to be there’).

But at other times he’s the intruder, breaking into the house, stealing time, pretending to swim — and drowning. Wherever he is, she isn’t. His only moments of unblemished strength are in acceptance of isolation, but he has to keep searching for her.

And, all right, she is his girlfriend insofar as the Cure are the Undertones —but she might also be clean-cut abstractions like truth and beauty, or the more shapeless jumble of aspirations most of us chase to death.

Process

SHEESH . . . I think I’ve finished. A risky business. Are you still there? I’m sorry, but it didn’t seem possible to nudge-nudge glad-hand you into listening to the Cure, of-oi, knoworrimean, jolly-jolly. jolly.

Simon and Matthieu had really enjoyed playing through the album and they spoke a little about how the process of joining the Cure, begun last autumn, was developing.

Simon: “We’ve all got bad things about us of course, but we know them now. I don’t think there’s a better band or better friends. Our girlfriends get jealous because if we’re split up for four days we miss each other.

The other three are like brothers to me. I suppose Rob could seem to people to be, not aloof . . . what’s the word?”

The Cure | Manhattan Interiors

Matthieu: “He could appear to be selfish. He does have the most say in things, but that’s fine because to my mind he’s the most capable. He handles the lot – all the financial side from our point of view.”

Simon: “Sometimes I wonder why he isn’t a nervous wreck. We do respect him. He’s a good pal.”

Matthieu: “And of course the same goes for dear old Lol. He’s the master. We beat him up, wind him up, frame him up, but he understands. He knows we have to release our tensions in some way and he’s the target.”

I interviewed the target, and the archer, some hours later in the dressing-room at Hurrah’s. It turned out rather peculiarly. I hardly said a word apart from asking them to talk about art and girls and they were off, Lol all animation in face and voice, Robert sending his sound-and-vision signals miniaturised.

Schizophrenic

Robert (after a long pause testing the water he dived deep): “Well, it’s always about the same girls. I’ve been in love with Mary for five years and Lol’s been going out with his girl for three years. I think Matthieu and Simon are in roughly the same position so it affects us all.

“If I wasn’t in love being in a group would be an ideal existence. But for me it’s getting more and more difficult, really schizophrenic. To function at all I have to keep the being-in-love completely separate from the Cure otherwise I would lose perspective and get sucked into the rock ‘n’ roll syndrome. On the road I close down my emotions.”

Lol: “YOU do have to numb yourself a bit. There are two categories of you and they’re battling against each other. If you value what you’ve got it’s a case of being totally celibate half the time.”

Robert: “That’s why I don’t enjoy company. I’m walking around in a daze. So many times I’ve seemed to have a choice between keeping Mary or keeping the-group. Lol too.

“The ’17 Seconds’ set was written at the end of the Banshees tour (when the Banshees split was followed by original Cure bassist Michael Dempsey‘s departure). So many emotional wrecks walking around, so many things were awful in the group and at home.”

Lol: “It’s difficult. On the other hand the situation has the habit of bringing out the best in the songs.”

Why bother?

Robert (refusing Lol’s look-on-the-bright-side offer): “Often I would have been perfectly happy to leave the group. At one stage I demanded certain things of Chris which I knew were impossible just to have an excuse to go. But there’s a responsibility on me because I know that if I stop the Cure stops.

“So why bother to play in a group? Why bother to do anything? Because you have to work away from negatives like that. And if I’m going to write songs I want them to be about something that matters to me. I have written a lot of happy songs but they don’t stand up.”

Lol: “‘Twee’ is the word for them. We feel most comfortable expressing strong emotions.”

Robert: “I just don’t like joyous songs. Maybe angst-ridden youths do get a bit tedious but I don’t think the Cure are in that bracket either. We’re not alienated from the whole human race . . . except for me.”

In Your House

He related his theme to ‘In Your House‘ and I started to lose him.

“It’s about uncertainty in love, our knowledge that what we are doing is destroying our personal lives . . . which in a sense an interview like this is doing. Where is the line between public and private life?

“You keep saying ‘Oh we’ll just do this tour, go to America, and then it’ll be all right’. But if it falls flat you can be left with nothing and always bitter about it. It can destroy your life.”

We couldn’t go on. Horace from the Specials had bounced in full of compatriotic good cheer and sociable Lol tried to match his mood while Robert slumped with his head in his hands, the image of dejection.

I’ve never upset anyone like that in an interview before. I felt terrible because he felt terrible, but there was nothing I could say to put right.

I sat staring at the wall and opened a packet of Hubba Bubba. It really is non-stick.