CLEVELAND, Ohio – The late Lou Reed and Robert Smith of the Cure had a lot in common, at least from a fan standpoint.
The old joke about two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Reed was, “You know, I’m just not depressed enough. I think I need to listen to Lou Reed,” and the same could be said of the newly minted Hall of Famers Smith and the Cure, who built a legacy that continues to this day on sad, sometimes whiny songs.
That’s one take on the similarities. The other is that Reed, who died of liver failure despite a transplant at the Cleveland Clinic, spent his whole career refusing to compromise his principles. And so have Smith and every incarnation of the band that began in 1976 and continues with its latest lineup today.
Lol Tolhurst's memoir, "Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys,'' tells his side of life with Robert Smith, whom he first met when they were kindergarten-age, in the band the Cure. Tolhurst and Smith and the Cure will be part of the Class of 2019 inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, on Friday, March 29.Courtesy of Quercus / Amazon.com
He told the Twitter fan blogger Craig J. Parker, who posts under the name @CraigatCoF (a reference to the Cure song “Chain of Flowers”) that the band has “just started, [but] not quite finished, recording our first new album for 10 years.”
Whatever the timetable for the follow-up to 2008’s “4:13 Dream,” you can be sure it will be the Cure as only the Cure can sound. Whether it’ll be commercially successful has never really been a Cure issue, anyway. So says original Cure member Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst.
Tolhurst, who has not been an official part of the band since being ousted over his alcoholism in 1989, despite having played a variety of reunion shows, remains true to the man he has known since grade school.
That’s despite having sued Smith over rights to the name not long after his dismissal. The two have since reconciled their friendship — hence, the reunion shows — which is one reason why Tolhurst will join Smith and six other current or former members of the band on the stage at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, on Friday, March 29, when the band is inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2019.
The other is that they continue to share a passion for what led to the creation of the band in the first place: an insistence on artistic success over commercial gain.
“Everybody sort of pretends when they get to be a little bigger that they never compromised any of their artistic ideals,” said Tolhurst, calling from his home in Los Angeles. “Everybody walked into a record company with their tape in hand and asked somebody to listen to it, even Morrissey.
“For us, we tried to ‘make it’ from the very beginning where we weren’t put in a position to compromise too much,” he said.
“The first album, we got a small advance — we were actually quite sensible about it,” said Tolhurst, who played drums and keyboards for the band during his Cure tenure.
“We paid ourselves a small amount every week, and by the time we came to the second album, we didn’t owe the record company any money, so we didn’t have to do what we didn’t WANT to do.”
Smith, who’s notoriously reluctant to speak to mainstream media, was not available for an interview. But there’s little doubt he’d disagree.
Despite the makeup, the lipstick, the “Edward Scissorhands” hair, and even the Goth reputation (which, by the way, he hates), he’s always had the working-class ethic of his youth, said Tolhurst.
“To Robert’s credit, he’s never been one to shirk working,” Tolhurst said. “We did a lot of touring and played a lot of places. That definitely helped and goes to the artistic side [because it meant] we could say, ‘We don’t have to do that’ when a label started making demands.”
That was the foresight that Smith brought into the band when it formed in Crawley, England, and shared with his band mates then, and those since.
“We saw [record company demands] as a possibility down the line, and that made us more concerned to do it the right way,” Tolhurst said.
“To my mind, I really think that it was the fact that we grew up where we grew up.”
That upbringing led to the band is it was and as it is.
“We were outside the capital, where everything was happening, but we weren’t far from it,” he said. “We were living in a small town on the outskirts of the southern parts of London.
“We were allowed time to develop,” he noted. “From [ages] 16 to 19, we didn’t play that many places. We’d go to Robert’s house and sit there three nights a week and work out how to play what we wanted to play, so that at 19, we were almost fully formed as performers.”
Yet there were still growing pains, said Tolhurst, who first played drums for the band before segueing to keyboards.
“When we first started, Robert would turn around and say, ‘What’s the next verse?’ ” Tolhurst said with a little laugh. “If he couldn’t remember the words, he would make some sound.”
The down side?
“I’d remember a lot of the cues in the songs by Robert’s words,” he said. “When it comes to a particular part, I’d think, ‘That’s 12 bars’ and I’d wait for the lyric.”
If the lyric didn’t come, he’d improvise, and in true rock ’n’ roll style, he’d repeat it again later on. That way, the audience thinks the clunker was actually intended. He called it “part of stagecraft.”
“I tell my son this because my son has a band [called Topography],” he said. “ ‘You always have to have to approach the audience like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. If you look scared, people will freak out a little bit.’ ”
The minimalist sound that pervades the Cure catalog has what could be called some curious roots.
“I think the only natural musician in the Cure was probably Porl Thompson,” said Tolhurst. “You could put any kind of instrument in his hand, and by the end of the day, he could play it.”
Perhaps Thompson, who will be part of the entourage on the Barclays stage, was the “only natural musician,” but the entire band shared a love of music that was as much a part of their DNA as their English accents.
“I think we had a love of music that was given to us by our families,” Tolhurst said. “Robert’s youngest sister is musical, and my father used to play sea shanties on the piano.
“It was always around us, unlike today, when most kids are looking at their telephones,” he said, going full-bore you-kids-get-off-my-lawn old man, but laughing a bit ruefully as he did it. “Music is an incidental part of their experience, but music was our WHOLE experience. It was our way out.”
Out from where is key. When he was writing his 2016 memoir, “Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys,” that fact surfaced. He wrote to Smith and said he was going to Google the streets on which they had lived — the two have known each other since they were 5, and Smith is now 59 and Tolhurst is 60 — go there and hang out.
“I haven’t been there for a long time, and it amazed me looking at it, because I realized that just the scenery, the countryside, just the way the sky looked influenced us as much as anything else,” he said.
And clearly, not in a happy way.
“When the punk thing came along, we said, ‘This is what we can utilize to get out of this place,’ ” he said. “It’s still the same dreary, miserable place.”
But one that celebrates its favorite sons.
“It’s kind of funny,” Tolhurst said. “Last year, the town opened a museum and had a Cure exhibition. They wrote and asked me if I had some stuff to send them. I did, and they did an article on the front of the local newspaper that said, ‘Even though he hates the town, we’re glad he did it.’ ”
Of course, you can’t talk about the Cure without that signature look, either: the big hair, the eyeliner, the dark lipstick, etc. You have to wonder how Mum and Dad took it.
“My family didn’t say much,” Tolhurst said, laughing. “My father was never that concerned about what was going on, and my mother rather liked it.
“It wasn’t a plan, just kind of evolved,” he said of the look. “Maybe it came from that first tour we did with Siouxsie and the Banshees. There was a different thing going on here. You tease your hair up and it kind of worked, so it stuck.”
As much as the look captured attention, it was still music first and foremost. While Smith and his band mates detested the Goth label, there was something about them that resonated with fans from everywhere, especially in the United States. It’s as if their Small Town, U.K., was transformed to Small Town, U.S.A.
“I don’t think of the Cure as being an English band,” he said. “I think of us being more universal than anything else. We’re as known as well here in the States as in England.
“We started out playing small places in small towns all over America,” Tolhurst said. “We were the local band, except we were from 5,000 miles away.”
Which is an uplifting thought, no matter how depressing the music. Lou Reed would understand.