The Cure’s Robert Smith named the song with the “best intro of all time”
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The “one time” Robert Smith was “really frightened with The Cure”
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s easy to imagine Robert Smith lurking solemnly through tranquil graveyards searching for a nice stained glass window to touch up his eyeliner and hairspray. Alas, wrong the outsider would be; The Cure have actually had a rather riotous ride over the past 45 years.
Starting as a Sussex trio riding in the tailwind of the punk movement, Smith and his incredible knack for poignant punk composition brought the group to the dizzying heights of stadium sellout success as much as it irked them. In fact, after the exceedingly popular release of Disintegration in 1989 and playing in front of 44,000 people at the New York Giants Stadium, Smith reflected glumly: “It was never our intention to become as big as this.”
One of The Cure’s most riotous moments came in the 1980s while working on and touring with their darkest album, Pornography. During this period, the band consumed beer and drugs in great profusion, putting further strain on a battle of the ego between Smith and bassist Simon Gallup.
The mounting pressure reached a head while the band was on tour in Europe in 1982. After a performance at Hall Tivoli in Strasbourg, France, Smith and Gallup found themselves in a bar brawl. “I was about to leave when some guy came up and told me I hadn’t paid for my drinks,” Gallup remembered in the book, Ten Imaginary Years. “He thought I was Robert. I was knackered, but the bloke took me up to the bar, and Robert appeared to see what was going on. I hit him, he responded, and we had a fight.”
Smith also gave his account of the drunken frenzy. “I was on the first floor of this club when they came up and told me there was a problem downstairs,” Smith recalled. “Simon was so wound up that no one could talk to him – he was screaming at the barman, this young kid who was nearly in tears. By himself, Simon would have never behaved like that, but he was surrounded by the road crew, so he was behaving the way he thought a rock and roller ought to behave.”
The incident led to Gallup’s temporary departure from The Cure as Smith took some time out to work with Siouxsie and the Banshees. Fortunately, Gallup rejoined in 1984, and the feud was brought to a resolution, but at this stage, the madness was only just getting underway.
In the mid-’80s, The Cure lived in a pub and subsided on a diet of magic mushrooms and all-night drinking sessions. On one occasion, Smith made a drunken bet with a friend while travelling that he could scale the perimeter of their hotel by jumping from balcony to balcony. Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale after some sharp rebuke from his wife.
Having survived a punch-up with Gallup, death-defying drunken antics and the wrath of his wife, Smith still maintains that the only time he was ever “frightened” with The Cure was when on tour in Argentina in 1987.
Prior to the Buenos Aires concert, stacks of counterfeit tickets had been sold across the city. On the evening of the show, the stadium, which had a capacity of 60,000, was descended upon by 110,000 ticketholders. Denied entry, a mass of over 50,000 fans swarmed outside the stadium, and it wasn’t long before a full-scale riot broke out. After the dust had settled, dozens had been injured, a hot-dog salesman had died of a heart attack, and three police dogs had been killed.
“That was ugly,” Smith recalled of the evening in Buenos Aires. “It was the one time I’ve been really frightened with The Cure, because we were locked in this basement room, and we could smell burning, sirens were going off, and I thought, ‘We’re not going to get out of this.’”
After the tragic events of 1987, The Cure opted not to play in Argentina again until 2013.