In 1983, The Cure frontman Robert Smith made a rather strange decision. At the same time that his band was making a huge breakthrough, releasing their first Top 10 single in the UK, Smith chose to tour with another band, Siouxsie and the Banshees, playing guitar.
And in the end, the decision turned out to be almost disastrous.
The Cure’s epic career is the subject of the cover story for a new one-off magazine, The History Of Goth.
This feature depicts the band’s early years as difficult and often chaotic.
The story begins in 1978, when the trio of Robert Smith, drummer Lol Tolhurst and bassist Michael Dempsey first played as The Cure at a venue called The Rocket in Crawley, West Sussex.
The band’s debut album Three Imaginary Boys was released in 1979 and featured early classics on 10.15 Saturday Night.
It was also in 1979 that Smith first served as a stand-in guitarist for Siouxsie and the Banshees during a UK tour, following the sudden departure of Banshees guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris.
Years later, in an interview with Uncut magazine, Smith praised singer Siouxsie Sioux’s stage presence and admitted that in 1979, his band had finished second to the Banshees.
He recalls: “When I saw the power with which Sue came to the front of the stage and kept shouting at the audience, I realized how weak The Cure was.”
The Cure’s second album, 17 Seconds (1980), saw the band expand into a quartet, with Simon Gallup replacing Michael Dempsey and keyboardist Mathew Hartley. This album included the band’s first Top 40 hit, “A Forest.”
17 Seconds was also the first part of what became known as The Cure’s “Doom trilogy,” which was completed by 1981’s Faith and 1982’s Pornography.
Faith was recorded at a dark time for Smith, who recently lost her grandmother, and Tolhurst, whose mother was terminally ill.
Smith later recalled in the Guardian: “Faith was the sound of extreme desolation, because that’s how we felt at the time.”
Intense touring and an unhealthy lifestyle contributed to tension within the band.
Lol Tolhurst recalled to writer Julian Marszalek: “For about 1,000 days, we played a show every other day and produced three albums at the same time.”
Tolhurst previously told The Quietus: “It had to be hell to make that kind of music, and we ended up pouring gasoline on that hell.”
By 1982, The Cure was more of a duo than a band, with Smith multitasking and Tolhurst on keyboards. The single “Let’s Go To Bed” gained attention on MTV in the United States. And in 1983, The Walk reached number 12 in the UK, becoming the first Love Cats to reach the top ten.
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It was at that moment that Robert Smith accepted an invitation to tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees again, after parting ways with another guitarist, the hugely influential John McGeoch, who also played with Magazine and Public Image Limited.
In addition to this tour, Smith produced a psychedelic rock album with Banshees bassist Steve Severin under the name The Grove.
During this busy period, Smith also produced The Cure’s fifth album, The Top, while performing and co-writing songs on The Banshees’ album Hyena.
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Eventually, everything became too much for Smith, who later explained to Uncut why he left the Banshees:
“I quit because people didn’t believe me when I told them I was dying,” he claimed. “I could tell by the look on the doctor’s face that something was very wrong with me. I knew that if I went on another tour with them, I wouldn’t be coming back.”
Smith provided much of the instrumentation on The Top, but on subsequent tours he and Tolhurst were joined by a new band line-up, including drummer Andy Anderson, multi-instrumentalist Paul Thompson, and bassist Norman Fisher-Jones.
However, it was only with their next album, 1985’s The Head on the Door, that Smith achieved the stability he desired with the return of bassist Simon Gallup and the acquisition of accomplished drummer Boris Williams.
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The band’s positive energy was reflected in the hit single “In Between Days,” one of The Cure’s most beloved songs.
Smith said: “Finally, I felt like we were a really happy, really musical group. It completely changed my idea of what The Cure was.”
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