1996 by Robert
French fanzine Three Imaginary boys
Translated in english from french by unknown
TIB interviews are privileged moments, and insights deeper than we can find in the media. These interviews often take place outside of normal promotional periods , and try to present a different side of The Cure. Bercy's backstage provided the starting point for these series of rendez-vous. From the tentative meeting in the fascinating atmosphere of The Prayer Tour, an irrepressible attraction to this exercise lead us to renew the experience, first in the recording studios during the Wish demos, then on the following tours. You'll read in this chronicle, extracts from the most significant words gathered as the years go by... (http://www.thecure.com/tib.html)
In 1996 TIB celebrated 10 years of existence...what could
be better than to return with Robert over these years and get his version of what happened
and offer it to our readers...You will discover how Kiss Me established the group's popularity, how Wish was recorded,
why Roger rejoined The Cure or which album Robert considers the best...Year by Year
(robert's note; most of these interviews have been transcribed/translated back from the french...
so some of them read a bit weird! (always like not i what speak normally like... )
if i get time, i'll go through them and 're-robert' them! and maybe re-write history... again?)
STANDING ON A BEACH
That time reminds me of France, the whole of that period because of making of Kiss Me album at Miraval not just the start of Standing On The Beach, it was all like France, we're always seem to be in Paris, staying at the Hilton and watching World Cup. It was good and it did reach the point where I found, it start to get a little bit strange. Do you remember the radio station when the people climbing up (Europe 1 or NRJ). That all got a bit kind of weird I thought. It was funny to be part of something that was like it was really nothing to do with us, a kind of media frenzy and it gave me an insight onto how it works, now it suddenly takes of and it fits on itself. We did things kind of naively, I think like Champs Elysees and stuff, believing that we could be different if we appear on the show and I think the first time we did it was quite weird. It was quite funny, I found it was quite surreal the fact that we were doing a show like that. I think eventually, probably by about 1987 we become part of what we were pretending to be taking the piss of, and I realised that but it sort of died away naturally anyway I think. Once we finished the Kiss Me Tour It kind of faded away 'cause when we came back after Disintegration, it wasn't the same. It wasn't the same kind of hysteria. People had growing up. But I mean, It happened like that in America in about 1984 with "Let's Go To Bed" and "The Walk", the similar kind of , on the West Coast, similar kind of people screaming all the time for no reason. But I remember very fondly that time. It was good. I felt that the group just started to become a real group, having done The Head On The Door, and I suppose we resigning the contract with Polydor and I felt more in control of everything so it's happy.
Kiss Me 1987 The Kiss Me album was the first time really that the group had been together somewhere, we've never been in a residential studio before, Miraval was the very first time that we lived together and made a record and that made the difference. But I think it's just the characters, when Boris and Porl first came into the group and Simon first came back for The Head On The Door, it would have been very extraordinary if they'd imposed themselves onto that record because they were in the group for like a month and then they were playing on the album so it was impossible really. Whereas with Kiss Me, it was two years later almost and like Boris brought very much a personality on drums and he wasn't just like the drummer and Simon can feel comfortable again, Porl was very confident and Lol became a pitiful figure whether with The Head On The Door, Lol was like an important figure in his own mind even in everyone else's, Boris and Porl kind of gave Lol respect because he was like an old member of The Cure but I think everything came change around by the time of Kiss Me album happened. It's probably the album that got recognised around the world, more than The Head On The Door. The Head On The Door worked in Europe and the Kiss Me album kind of consolidated in America, Australia and Japan. I would find very difficult to reduce everything down to be found on the Kiss Me album. I think if you took Kiss Me, Disintegration and Wild Mood Swings you could find everything else on those three but I think there's a lot of stuff on Disintegration that isn't on the Kiss Me album particularly, there's a lot of mood and there's a lot kind of depth to it there isn't really on the Kiss Me album. I think on Kiss Me album probably started like a way of working on a model, I suppose a kind of methodology for The Cure that follow right through and that'd be still used on Wild Mood Swings. It was a start of a way of working, a way of me thinking about what we were doing and a way that I actually tried to make the group involved as the group but I don't think musically it's as good as everyone still thinks it is. It's a kind of nostalgia.
DISINTEGRATION, A SOBER ALBUM
1989 Disintegration A dark album I think the darker side of the record came from the fact that I was gonna be 30 'cause I wrote a lot of the words around the time I was gonna be 30. 25 and 30 have been two ages that I thought that I'll never reach 25, I thought that when I get 30, I'll stop, now I'm nearly 40 and the story goes on. I don't know, there's a lot of things... it's not quite as gloomy as you've seen. Again, Disintegration for me is... "Lovesong" is one of the nicest song I've written. When you hit 30 it kind of you know. I supposed it depends on how you thought about getting to 30, it does have an impact. It did on me anyway. I mean, I was completely mental on my thirtieth birthday, it was the worst night of my life really. It's strange, 1988 was a very very weird year which like everyone was thinking it 's 1989, it's Disintegration year but for me and 1988 was , that was when all get written and all kind of demos recorded. And I had like huge ups and downs. It's got a mood. "Prayers For Rain" is a very angry song for me and so is Disintegration, both very similarly things both about the same person, I was bothered by someone basically. And it just got it out of my system. "Lullaby" I remember writing it at Boris' house, sitting outside in a summer evening. I actually remember a lot about it. "Plainsong" who kinda sets the tone for the album, but I wanted it something like very, I don't know, I wanted something very lush, very orchestral, a kind of a hard centre but it was a very difficult album to make at the end, Disintegration. The demos were really, really good fun, a brilliant fun. They were all done at Boris' house in summer of 1988 and I got married and I was in a good mood and when we started recording I was like so unhappy.
The best album... I think it's the best, it'd always be one of the best three, and sometimes I think it's probably the best one but. It's one of the things, if I only had one Cure album that everyone could listen to and I was only allowed to have one, all the others would like to be discarded, I'd probably keep Disintegration not Wild Mood Swings because it's more personal but I doesn't mean it's better. There's enough on it for me to kind of feel that. At the time, I thought that it was the last album we'll make and I thought that would be the last tour and I did when I used to say that, I really believed it was because I couldn't see how we could do anything better.
Souvenirs from the Prayer Tour
My memories of the The Prayer Tour are, huge American stadiums, a big kind of gestures It's just like the light show. It got bit kind of grandeur. It got to much too much somehow. It didn't seem like me but that was part of the drugs as well. I was very , I was living two really different lives on the Prayer Tour. I was like really nasty on The Prayer Tour. Musically some nights were fucking brilliant year and a lot of stuffs that we recorded that were discarded was excellent, we can only do one live album. But some of the very few bootlegs I've got from the Prayer Tour, some of the nights we played were kinda really emotional. It was just a difficult tour. There was a lot of shit going on. Backstage... It just has have an effect because if you'd seen it, to a certainly degree quite close up of how intimate everyone gets and how you're like in that kind of small world that just travels around, you can have a huge impact on other people around you if one person decides to act in a certain way, everyone else's is like kinda really fucked.
Mixed Up 1990 I thought it was really good at the time and I still do. I've always like it. I was quite shocked at the time how negative reactions it got from fans. I can't believe how it outraged people were.... I was astonished that people found the old songs so sacred. It kind seems really weird to me. It's actually one, it's The only Cure album I play at home without kind of worrying about it. If I'm playing, if we have people around and I'm playing snooker or something, and I feel like listening to something this like Cure like, that's the record I put on. I never play a Cure album, it would be really embarrassing... It's kind of like party music. I supposed a lot of memory of it is I had to go and re record with Simon "A Forest", because the tape got destroyed, the master tape of Seventeen Seconds" because Bill kept them by a washing machine, fucking idiot, and the motor erased the tapes. So when they dug out the old tapes of Seventeen seconds there was nothing on them. So we had to start, so we sampled Lol's drum sound from I think from "Other Voices" or I think "Play For Today" it was, the start of "Play For Today", just the drum we built up his drum sound and drum part again and then Simon got his old original bass and I got my original guitar, my original amp and we played it note for note, which was really good fun actually, it was a funny night but I changed the solo at the end. Just very daring cause I couldn't remember how the original one was and no one had a copy of the original in the building so... And I also remember from that time going down to, driven down with Mary to the river eelpye Studios on the Thames, there's a really nice stretch of river and that's where I'd listen back to all different mixes and put them together in the right order, we had a really nice day by the river doing it. That's probably why I got an affection for the album as well, the little things that makes the difference.
British Awards 1991 It seems to me less difference to us than any other band that ever won it. Because no one ever knew we won it. The following day, nothing happened which is probably typical really of what I was just talking about. Polydor couldn't decide whether like make the most of it and said "look they are the best British band" that doesn't fit with The Cure image. so we won't say; we will decide on it later, we won't say anything. We're pretending it never happened. It's totally surreal. I mean somehow I was glad it didn't make a difference looking back but at the time, I was really frustrated 'cause I say like everyone else has ever won it, had four page advert in all the trade papers, musically stuff. We had nothing. We had no congratulations or anything, It was just "oh, you won an award yes". I was a bit of a farce the all thing. I think 'cause the year before we made such a fuss about winning the best video. And I said it's just a fucking travesty, 'cause I thought we were the best band the year before as well. I think that's when Jonathan King started to get involve with it and there was a lot of sense of, you know what turned into the Great British music Awards thing, of him trying to get a sense of England great. And because we have been going for so long, we were like an obvious candidate. Our group that can sell a lot of records in America. It doesn't mean anything really. It's a bunch of idiots. And also the votes are really corrupt. They trades their votes between record companies. "If you vote for my artist in this category, I'll vote for yours in that". So we sort of suspected we were gonna win it before the event. So I had my speech ready. But we played "Never Enough" on stage that night and I thought it was really good. I thought one of the best moments of The Cure actually. We're really fired up for it really. 'Cause backstage there was such wankers backstage.
1992 Wish A guitar albumÝ? It was just more guitar orientated. Paul had his own bit at the manor, upstairs where he just play guitar and I really enjoy it. But Janet was there all the time, and had we wanted good keyboards, she was prepared to play, I think. I never asked her. But none of the songs really required good keyboards player apart from "Trust" and I think Perry played that. It just didn't suit, you know. The songs I suppose. It was a weird album, Wish, really 'cause the demos were kind of very easy and the album itself was very difficult to make. But there's pretty most memorable for all the rockets that we used to make. Perry used to bring back bigger and bigger rocket kits from Oxford and we eventually were sending rockets at about two and a half thousand feet into the air it was excellent. And built our own rockets was really dangerous. We've building up out of anything 'cause you can buy the engine as they are called like this size they kind of like fireworks basically, it's like compressed gun powder, so you can just like tape one to a cup and stick a couple of cup or wings on it and stick on it and it'd be a rocket. And that's really powerful. Dave Allen did the most stupid thing. He put a bowing arrow he learn how do a real arrow so he put an arrow to a coke can and put that up. Actually when it went outside, it came down, we discovered about a week later, it landed in the full things coming out of the coke can and he sent roof of a boat house, you know one the barges in the river. So it could have killed really easily it could have killed someone. There was a bet of two inches in their roof, we had to pay for their new roof. So things went quite down. Everyone goes "oh you can do better, you can do bigger and better" and afterwards I came and say "let's do something else now, forget the rockets, let's do something else". So then we move on to balloons. We had helium for balloons so we could take the most pale load up and then, that went out of control 'cause you had to have that little trail you'd like, the slow burning fuel on, and the hot air would like make.... That was the next step on, it was real hot air balloons with baskets hanging on, miniature models. And then we'd like put flammable stuff in, so they would start to trickle down, it would be dropping like . I forgot what we were using, I supposed .... alcohol in polyurethane bags and a bit of string so when it went up, the string will burn through and then the flaming bag would drop to the ground and you had to stay in the same position as a blue, it's a game of dare. A lot of that was drink fuelled. And we learned to fire eat as well at the manor. And I was the only one who didn't do it cause I had to sing. I learned to juggle at the manor. But the album turned out really well I think. Fame Wish. Yeah, it out sold everything up to that point. Well every album as up till Wild Mood Swings, it always outsold the one before. Or I think, Standing On The Beach is the biggest seller worldwide. Because everyone was "saling" in their garages But I don't know with Wish. Looking back when it got number one and stuff, but it still didn't really get the kind of acclaim it should have done and people still had the same kind of flurry "oh, it's another Cure album so what". There's a lot of that feeling. I mean it's from a British perspective. When we did the tour, I realised that people did like it a lot. But when it first came out I was kind of disappointed. It was a number one but the reviews were bad. I just said the reviews are notThere was about like two good reviews in about three really bad reviews of it.
IN BETWEEN...
1993-1994 Boris & Porlë departure I think for a lot of different reasons than they just got tired of being in The Cure. There was some conflict between me and Paul but I think there was also things happening in Paul's life that he needed to get away from the group and that has to do between him and Janet, not to do with him and me. And I think with Boris, he was kind of encouraged to leave The Cure by Caroline. Because I think she probably found, just from the few conversation that I had with her, difficult to accept that The Cure was more important that what she wanted to do musically, which is understandable because she's an artist as well. I think she wanted Boris for herself as her drummer. But I mean, it was Boris' choice but I'm not sure that was the right choice up to me in the long run it proves to be good for us 'cause having Jason in the group made us a better group, on a lot of different levels, not that he is a better drummer than Boris but I think we needed something new, the group needed someone new. So I don't know if Boris feels he's made the right decision, you'll have to ask him.
Lol The first letter that I got from Lol, from his was actually 1990. I knew that the court case was impending like over more than two years which was slightly unsettling really looking back. At the time I try to ignore it but I was getting letters on a very regular basis because they were all trying to sort it out, I didn't really want to go to court because I realised it would be a waste of time and money, whether I won or not so there was a constant stream of communication between Bill and Lol and all sillystism trying to sort things out which I think distracted me quite a lot. I got really fed up with them all. I just couldn't understand why it was happening to me. Or I wrote songs and I supposed I lived but in some ways it probably was a good thing that we didn't make another album straight away 'cause I don't think I was in the right frame of mind anyway. 'cause the court case, I kinda reacted against the whole thing. I probably would have end up writing a couple of songs about Lol which would have been tragic. But the court case is in 1994, it's January, February 1994 and once that was over... Because towards the end of 1993, I was given the date of the court case, at the ultimate of 1993 and then I had to start going to London and having serious meetings with lawyers so a lot of my time was taken up by. I had to read all the old contracts, I had to read everything, I had to read all the letters that have ever been sent between me and Lol and Fiction and there was like thousands of pieces of papers completely boring, tedious that I had to familiarise myself with because I know that they would ask me about everything once going to court. And really until the court case finished, I just couldn't relax very much because had Lol won, it would have meant a lot. I wouldn't been allowed to call the group, The Cure so it's quite important that I won. The court case In a funny way, it was good the court case 'cause I saw everyone again and we all lived in the same apartment block for a month and we had some really good evenings and strange enough, The Cranes were staying there as well, we didn't know. They were working on an album or doing demos or something and one night we just discovered that they were living like four floors bellow us. It was quite good. If I didn't have to get up so early in a morning, I would have enjoy it a lot. But that kind of kill me after a while. But it was quite tense I suppose as well, it affected everyone in different ways and when it finished, I felt a bit empty in a strange way. I don't know. 'Cause the verdict didn't come through until October 1994 so I had to wait like six months not knowing the outcome of the case which is also quite distracting. 'Cause even if I suspected that our side had done well and that I should win, I couldn't really be sure so there was another round of like making previsions in case I hadn't won the case. What was gonna happen. What was the group gonna do. Was he gonna fight an appeal or not? I was just bullshit a lot of it. And in the summer of 94, we did some more demos.
Jason Well, when we did the third rows of demos which was towards the end of 1994, no just before I went to Ste Catherine. I went to Ste Catherine with Mary for her birthday in October of 1994, that's when we first went there. And I just went because I knew the verdict was coming up and I wanted to be away from London and I wanted to see what Ste Catherine was like to see if it was suitable to record here and by that time, there was just me, Simon and Perry because I hadn't make any attempt to form another group, cause I didn't see any point at the time 'cause I thought if I'd appeal I've got to go through this again so I was getting quite upset by the all process really. But when the verdict came through, it comes like a real relief and I decided to stay in Ste Catherine and invited Simon and Perry down and then we started to think about putting the group together and that's when we put the advert in the paper and we auditioned people. We wrote a questionnaire and we sent it out to anyone who respond we sent him the questionnaire and they filled in the questionnaire and then we sat around a table in Ste Catherine in about I don't know, early November of 94 just reading through everyone sent a photograph and then we just get pass around and around the table to eventually we left a party about 30 people that we thought would be suitable. And then Bruno went to John Henry in London and videoed. They came over like three days and everyone had half an hour and they played 10 minutes of anything they want so we could decide in the first 10 minutes of the video when we watched it whether it was shit and we didn't like it and they played 10 minutes of "Want" 'cause we played to the demo of "Want" but we had no drums on it so we thought it would be interesting to see what someone does with that song, what kind of beat they do and then at the end they were asked to play "Disintegration". And that's when they knew it was The Cure. Some of them knew anyway but some of them didn't. And that was just the test if people had a good sense of rhythm and had good stamina 'cause that's a really difficult song to play. So they had to play "Disintegration" for ten minutes and if they could do that, they would fit. And we watched them, the following week we watched all the videos, we sat down and then we gave them marks. Well we watched them a Friday night and we got really drunk and then I looked everyone marks and no one agreed with me so I thought it's really stupid. So we sat down on Sunday and we did it without drinking and then everyone's marks would kinda gradually seems to be there were five people that we used out of he was the best drummer basically. Or Ronald Austin, from the God Machine, I wanted him to play because he did auditioned and no that he was as good a drummer as some of the others technically, he's really really a nice bloke and I've known him for a long time I knew that one of his ambitions was to play with us so I thought it would be nice to get him to play. And "This Is A Lie" was like an easy, relatively easy song to play 'cause it was just fill just toms and Mark who had played in All About Eve, obviously we'd known him for a while, he's an excellent drummer and Jason. It was really in between Mark and Jason so we invited them to Ste Catherine in sort of cross between Christmas and New Year to 95 and then at the end of it we just sat down ask each other who he thought was the best but I mean, everyone wanted Jason. Well there was a bit of descent I mustn't say who but there was... Mark is really nice but he's much more like a drummer, that's the reason why he didn't get it. Whereas Jason wasn't... like a drummer 'cause he's done other things it at the time it was very important that we had someone in the group that wasn't because Boris isn't like a drummer, 'cause he knows too much. He's done too many things. I mean it sounds really terrible for a drummer but someone who's been, I mean I'm not really in a good position to say because I've doing the same thing all my life but lots of the time someone who has been a musician in a band that hasn't been that successful over a period of year they do develop a certain character trace which is evident, it doesn't matter who you are, what band you're in, what kind of music you play. I think with Jason he's slightly different idea of what he wanted to do. He's more interested in something that he enjoyed rather than doing something that was successful.
Roger Well I actually sent a tape of two songs we'd done to this girl to play piano 'cos I wanted a pianist. That wasn't very good and then I was gonna ask Janet and then I thought that would be complicated because that would mean Porl would be there and I thought the atmosphere might get a bit strange having Janet playing and Porl not. She would have probably said no anyway. And then I thought that maybe I should do it and just like fake it by slowing everything down and playing it slow and then speeding up. But then I thought, well I kept in touch with Roger by fax every Christmas and the we used to fax each other and I mean it's pretty stupid what we thought the score is gonna be but it's kinda like two pages a way that we can kept in touch, so we had nothing really to say to each other so I phoned him up and asked him if he wanted to come over. I just wanted him to play on one song just to see if it would work 'cos I wasn't sure of how Simon and Roger would react when they met each other again. And the first night that Roger came back it was obvious that it was going to work so he just stayed. He played on all of the songs( quite brilliantly actually). .
FESTIVALS
I enjoyed it for the camaraderie. It was like being on holiday really. I thought some of the festival shows were good and some of them weren't really good at all. The one that we played with REM I didn't think were very good, Torhout and Werchter. I liked.... Glastonbury was good. 'Cause I thought we were really angry, we had a point to prove so we tried a lot harder. And I think I quite enjoyed the one... the one with Blur... Belfort That was good. It was a good crowd. They were much more like a Cure audience than a festival crowd. And the one we did in the rain in Italy with Page And Plant was funny but I think I enjoyed that just because it was so absurd. The whole thing was just like really weird, having Paul supporting us and stuff it's quite funny but it did actually slow up making the album as well 'cause we rehearsed for like a month and then that took about, really two months out of the year doing those festivals.
1996 Wild Mood Swings We changed everything when I got back [from the festivals]. It made the album better but it took a lot longer because I was really unhappy with the words I had written. When I was on stage and like singing some of the songs, I was kinda think "the words I've written for the new songs are not as good as this" and I had a sinking feeling. And also, Jason redid, ....up to that point, we'd kept everyone drum parts all the different drummers and Jason was only on four songs. And when we got back he played on virtually every other song.
Words I honestly, I couldn't believe I would be able to write another album other songs to be honest for Wild Mood Swings. What I was doing was just like getting away with it in the first part of the year, I was kind of just write stuff and thought that would do, which is terrible. I don't think I could do it again. That's the one drawback to like planning a new album 'cause I can't see... Well I have got an idea of what I could write about but it's not like, it wouldn't be like a Cure song so maybe it's a good thing. But I find it very difficult as it goes on to write songs that are intimate and to feel kind of passionned about things. Cause I have actually reached the point where I go through the same mental cycle when I'm upset by something, I kinda work my way through the same process and I arrived at the other end I'm completely drained of any kind of sentiment or emotion without actually writing anything down. Whereas before, part of that process was actually writing something down and I've kind of, I got rid of that because I find it pointless. I've recycle... I don't know what it is.... spare... just futility really. I don't see any point in it.
[Wild Mood Swings was] The most difficult and the easiest [album to make]. It's the most difficult lyrically and vocally because I just couldn't sing either. I had like a mental block about singing. Everytime I sang it sounded flat and everyone was saying "no it's fine, it's not flat". And I couldn't believe that it wasn't. But I think that was one of the main reason why I found it difficult personally. I think Steve Lyon didn't really help the process overly much. I don't think it was really the right person. He's a good engineer but he wasn't the right person to be part of that album. And mentally it wasn't right. And it slows the process down and he managed to alienate everyone over the course of a period of three or four months because of his methodology, his way of working with equipment. The kind of technical side came first and the personality came second. And with Dave Allen it's completely the other way around. He doesn't give a fuck as long as everyone is happy and they're like doing something that they think it's good. His job is just to make sure it goes onto tape. Whereas with Steve, even I have like to spend, you know.. he used days trying to say "you gotta be quicker, things gotta move quicker. But they wouldn't. And that got really frustrating and everyone got frustrated, kind of in some ways, it spoiled the process. It was actually the best time I ever had making a record. We had some of the best nights I've ever had in my life in Ste Catherine. We just like take drugs and step out and playing music which was fucking brilliant. Go out and then walking for miles in the snow and just... We didn't have to do anything we just like, we'd all put our coats on we just walk for like three hours and then we arrived to a pub somewhere than we've never been before that we discovered. It was really good it was like being a part of a big happy family for a lot of the time. It got worse as the year went on, we'd kinda fell apart a bit but the first three months were absolutely brilliant. And the last month was good when everyone knew, when we were mixing and everyone knew the album is finished, that was kinda done. The atmosphere was better. But it was good, I mean, overall, it was my favourite year so it can't be that bad.
The best Cure album... So if I think that Wild Mood Swings is the best Cure album that we've made, I think it because it more accurately reflects how I feel at the moment. When we made Disintegration, I thought Disintegration was the best, when we made Kiss Me; I thought it was the best. I always think each album... I always say I honestly do thing which one we make is the best album.