Rock and Hard Places (14 page)

Ah. Smith, it must be said, is drunk. Heroically so, in fact, and operating according to the deranged and indecipherable logic the state engenders, which is to say that while I’m sure this is all making cast-iron sense to him, I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about. I turn to Gallup in some faint hope of support, but he’s got his head in his hands, is muttering intently to himself and clearly has no wish to be disturbed. I’m on my own.

“Come on,” says Smith. “I’m waiting.”

I’m thinking that somewhere, in some little-regarded footnote in a dusty thesaurus stashed in a dank corner of a cobwebbed attic owned by some mad, bearded, elderly professor, there’s a cracking French or Latin phrase for “the fear of making an irredeemable plum duff of oneself in front of one’s adolescenthood heroes within five minutes of meeting same for reasons you can neither control nor comprehend.” Still, I steel myself, extend a trembling digit to the small red sweet, push it around the others to the spot Smith had designated at the top of the table, and sit back, trying to look nonchalantly triumphant. There follow some seconds of confused silence, broken only by Gallup’s mumbling.

“Right,” says Smith, eventually, and buries his fingers deep in his hopelessly congealed thatch. “Ah . . . okay. I can see I’m going to have to make this more difficult.”

 

I’M STAYING IN the Claridge Hotel in Chicago, a renovated terrace house in which the halls are lined with glass cabinets full of antique
toys. Amusingly, the hotel also has a complimentary stretch limousine service, and a driver with enough of a sense of humour to cope with directions like, “Oh, I don’t know, just drive around for a bit and let me wave at people.” When I come back and turn on the television, there’s one of those uncountable, indistinguishable sub-
90210
teen angst soap operas on. This particular episode revolves around an outwardly normal, obviously beautiful, and tiresomely overachieving young woman who takes a stack of pills in an effort to kill herself. On her bedroom wall, looming above her as she belts back the downers, is what the show’s producers doubtless imagined was a definitive signifier of tormented youth: a poster of The Cure.

 

IT IS DECIDED, after a couple more hours of drinking and slurring by all present, that The Cure will give me and photographer Stephen Sweet a lift back to Chicago on their tour bus. While we huddle on a couple of couches, The Cure’s crew move into fluent action, packing up and rolling out everything non-human in black flight cases. Someone takes off the Sensational Alex Harvey Band CD that has been playing at excruciating volume since I arrived. “I was enjoying that . . . ,” protests Smith, half-heartedly. “Someone threw it on stage tonight . . .” He stops, looks slowly around the room, then embarks on an animated ramble about how Alex Harvey reminds him of his wife, Mary, and about something that once happened with his brother and some French women, which I can’t follow at all.

Gallup, meanwhile, is flinging surplus crisps, unwanted carrot sticks, empty cups and Robert’s M&Ms at the nearest available target, which turns out to be The Cure’s record company boss, Chris Parry of Fiction. One of The Cure’s minders makes him stop. Smith, by now, is wrestling on the floor with another of the band’s minders. It’s hard to say how serious it is. Given that Smith has the upper hand, it’s probably fair to surmise that he’s trying harder than the minder (I mean, Smith is a big bloke, and probably more than capable of looking after himself, but the chap he’s locked in combat with has arms thicker than my entire body and looks like he could kick-start a 747). A couple of crew prise the two apart and organise everyone onto the bus. As we pull out of the venue, the few dozen cars that have been parked, waiting, in the darkness alongside the road, start their engines and follow us.

The bus is as well-appointed as you’d expect, given that it’s carting about a bunch of thirty-something millionaires whose singer is pathologically terrified of aeroplanes (The Cure crossed the Atlantic on the QEII). There are lounges fore and aft, a small kitchenette, a toilet, at least two televisions, a VCR and, inevitably, a stereo capable of broadcasting to all points within six zip codes in any direction. The Cure’s on-board listening this evening rather belies their reputation as arch miserabilists: T-Rex’s “Hot Love,” Gary Glitter’s “Didn’t Know I Loved You Till I Saw You Rock’N’Roll” and, perhaps surprisingly given the bickering over stolen basslines traded by the two groups down the years, New Order’s “State Of The Nation.” It’s while Smith is on all fours in the bus corridor, cradling a beer in the crook of his elbow, bellowing along to Middle of the Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” in a hearty roar quite removed from his patent wracked whine, and trying, for reasons known only to himself, to tie my shoelaces together, that Gallup, entirely unprovoked, makes an announcement.

“I can cook, me,” he informs the bus at large. This is greeted with total indifference.

“I said,” Gallup says, focusing this time on Sweet, “I can cook. I can.”

“I, uh, don’t doubt it,” replies Sweet, polishing his lenses with a view to recording the carnage unfolding around us.

“I’m one of the greats,” continues Gallup, swaying back and forth for reasons not entirely to do with the movement of the bus. “And I’m going to prove it. To you all. To you, my people, to whom I am a river.”

Gallup approaches the stove and begins waving ingredients around. The dusting of herbs and generous squirt of Worcestershire sauce that congregate on one shoulder of my jacket suggest that the tottering gourmet is working on Welsh rarebit. Smith, meanwhile, has hauled himself upright via my left knee, a table and a handful of my hair, and has descended again on his long-suffering minder, whose job description appears to encompass punchbag as much as protector.

Gallup’s culinary tour-de-force stumbles to a finish. He arranges it on a paper plate, and with a slurred “Ta-daaa,” taps Smith on the shoulder and presents it to him, having evidently forgotten who he set out to impress in the first place. Smith disentangles himself from a headlock,
takes the plate from Gallup, looks at it briefly, emits a maniacal cackle, and flings it across the bus, where it bounces off the wall just above where guitarist Porl Thompson is sitting, quietly reading.

“Piss off,” he murmurs, without looking up, and turns the page.

 

WISH,
THE ALBUM The Cure are in America touring with, went straight into the American Billboard Chart at Number Two. It was kept off the top spot by Def Leppard. Robert Smith claims that this doesn’t bother him. I can’t believe he means that.

 

AT THE CURE’S hotel on the bank of Lake Michigan, there’s a bigger crowd waiting for us than most bands ever get coming to see them play. This happens everywhere The Cure go, but the Chicago crowd are going to be luckier than most—depending on how sociable the band are or aren’t feeling after a show, the tour bus is often sent off empty, while Smith and company are spirited away in anonymous, windowless minibuses.

An obviously time-served plan is immediately in effect: two minders get off the bus, explain that the band will be coming out shortly, and will sign things and chat for a bit, but they’re all very tired, need to get up early and so forth (Gallup and Smith, at this point, are waltzing, cheek-to-cheek, unsteadily up and down the bus, each humming a different tune). The minders arrange the mob in an orderly queue between the bus and the hotel door. Porl Thompson, drummer Boris Williams and guitarist/keyboardist Perry Bamonte make their way briskly along it, signing t-shirts, shaking hands, exchanging brief pleasantries. The queue is then re-straightened, and Simon and Robert appear, holding hands and smiling shyly, like children being presented to friends of their parents.

It takes Smith half an hour to get inside. Most of the fans are just enthusiastic and excited, though there’s a few who give every appearance of being unhealthily obsessed. At least three are in floods of tears and hyperventilating, and there’s one that Smith just can’t seem to get past—the kid is a lot shorter and slighter than Smith, but in every other respect looks exactly like him, from his oversize white sneakers to his baggy black shirt to his powder-pale face to his artlessly smudged lipstick to his uproariously tangled black hair. The scary bit is that the kid doesn’t
say anything, just gazes up at Robert with a daft, adoring smile. “Look . . . ,” Robert starts saying, then rubs his eyes. “I mean . . .” One of The Cure’s minders notices what’s up, and hustles Robert past him.

Another earnest mascaraed waif, who’s seen me get off the bus just before Robert, comes up to me with her
Wish
tour poster and a marker pen.

Uh, I’m not in the band.

“Yeah, but you know them.”

Well, I only met them a couple of hours ago, and I meaningfully doubt that they’re going to remember it in the morning. I don’t know if that counts.

“Oh, please. Would you?”

I take her pen. With love from Andrew.
Melody Maker
, every Wednesday. Still only 65p.

 

ON THE PLANE to Toronto, I’m reading the entertainment liftout of
The Toronto Daily Star
, which has Robert Smith on the cover, his face bathed in a green ink that makes him look like a QEII passenger who’s wishing he’d flown after all. Inside, the
Star
’s resident rock’n’roll hack has bashed out one page of cribbed Cure history and a couple more pages of the usual lazy rubbish about doom, gloom, misery and despair, all rounded off with a few of the standard jokes about Edward Scissorhands and how, gosh, Robert Smith looks a bit like him. Also included for the edification of the readership are “Ten Frightening Facts about Robert Smith.” Among these lurk the revelations that “His mummy knitted him ten pairs of socks to take on the current tour” and “He has a habit of sticking his fingers in his mouth when he talks, which makes him look silly.”

 

IN TORONTO, THE Cure are playing the Skydome. The Skydome is a vast concrete barn that can be configured to hold 80,000 fans for a Blue Jays home game, or 25,000 for a Cure gig. When weather permits, Skydome’s roof can be opened to the heavens. The fact that the heavens above this gaping slit are dominated by the endlessly upright form of the CN Tower must make Toronto something of a must for holidaying Freudians.

Backstage tonight, after a performance that was perhaps more
competent but rarely as passionate as the one in Chicago, the mood, appropriately, is more subdued and, not to put too fine a point on it, sober. Members of The Cure and the support band, Cranes, sit quietly waiting for the tour buses, lost in Skydome’s labrynthine tunnels, to find them. Assorted press, record company types and examples of that breed who always end up backstage without anyone knowing quite how, or why, or who they are, mill aimlessly about. Thanks to the increasing road fever being experienced by The Cure’s tour manager, the backstage passes these people have affixed to their jackets don’t read “Guest” or “VIP” but “Freeloader,” “Blagger” and “No Idea.” Mine says “Poser.” Porl and Simon are playing with Porl’s new toy, a sort of cross between a Polaroid camera and a fax machine that instantly prints out blurred, grainy, black and white images of whatever has just been photographed.

“See?” says Porl, pointing at a hopelessly blotched and smudged sheet of thermal paper. “It’s you and Gallup.”

After being hit by a tank, possibly. What’s it for?

“For?” asks Porl. “Well, it’s for . . . for rich idiots with more money than sense.”

He goes off in search of a more appreciative subject. Smith appears with two handfuls of beer bottles and apologises, definitely more out of politeness than remorse, for the carryings-on in Chicago. “It was just a good show,” he says, “and everyone was just in a good mood, and that can tend to get out of hand.”

Smith suggests that we should go and sit somewhere quiet and talk about stuff before the buses find us. At no point does he put his fingers in his mouth. I forget to ask about the socks.

“It’s a funny tour, this,” he begins. “Everyone’s been in such a good mood the whole time. Staggering! There’s only been one violent row in twelve weeks, and that was really early on, when we were all still settling in.”

As I saw in Chicago, The Cure kidding around and unwinding backstage could be mistaken for a Wild West all-in. An actual violent row must be something to see.

“Yeah . . . the arguments, when they happen, do get pretty intense. I mean, one-on-one, we’ve had few set-tos, but there’s only been one big group row, which was very easily sorted out. I think it just comes from
a constant reappraisal of what we’re doing. The first couple of weeks were quite intense. We had a lot of MTV and record company bollocks which we went along with, which was a bit dumb of us, really. We used our days off very badly. Since then, we’ve used them wisely.”

What do you do?

“Do? We don’t do anything.”

Smith, as he points out himself, is more constrained than most people in his position in terms of going outside for a bit of a walk, or trying to see the sights. He . . . there’s no other way to put it. He really does look like Robert Smith. This isn’t as fatuous a statement as it sounds: a lot of famous people, in the cold light of reality, look nothing like they do on television, or at least can get away with not looking quite like they do in magazines. The hair alone ensures that Robert Smith is unmistakeable. Robert Smith, possibly uniquely, has a famous shadow.

“Last time we were here,” he says, “we were also playing stadiums, but somehow people still didn’t know who the fuck we were. People in, like, Reno didn’t know who The Cure were, but this time they do, and it’s quite strange confronting that.”

It has its points. Having previously fronted American customs to tell them that I’d come to interview bands called Violent Femmes or Hole, it was nice to be able to say something that impressed them.

“Exactly. And it’s the first time that’s happened. And because of that, it’s still quite funny. Like, playing the Rose Bowl still just feels like . . . like a mistake, like it shouldn’t be us playing there.”