The Cure – Raw Interview with Robert Smith by Johnny Black ~ 1994

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the whole thing about you being childlike which crops up obviously endlessly and creatively but nobody as far as i can see looking through the cuttings and everything nobody’s ever actually asked you why you think you’re you’ve remained childbirth i mean is there a point in your development where you kind of made a conscious decision that you didn’t want to grow up and if you know i think it’s it’s a it’s a real misconception i think people fool themselves is kind of like a it comes across an interview because people want me to to be child like i mean there’s because of what i’ve done i’ve allowed and i i’ve i said i’ve been lucky but i mean there’s an element of that but i mean i’ve kind of been fortunate there’s any difference in i’ve put helped to put myself in a position where i can keep part of my life as being very childlike to an outsider with a casual observer i have like nothing to worry about but in fact in i mean i run like the whole thing like take all decisions related to everything and it’s like i don’t have anyone looking after me in respect of my outlook on life but i don’t even think it’s childlike because i’m i’m like horribly aware of like the the pitfalls of life the the meanness of people which children aren’t you know children are naive and like blindly innocent and just enjoy things for what they are i mean i don’t have that kind of child-like naivety anymore but but i’m i’m determined not to be ground down by by a notion of adult life which i’ve not never subscribed to never will i mean i i feel i mean i i can do all the things i do and take all the decisions i make and still retain a part of me as you know just like i protect it i just keep it away from which people say oh you’re able to because you don’t have to work but you know i always always dispute that because i mean i really love what i do but it still can be quite hard you know it’s like working flat on something for 20 hours i don’t have to and that’s the whole point no one’s telling me to do anything i can say i will pack up now and go home that’s it so you know it’s finished in that decision that like rests with me but so there’s none kind of like forcing me to cluck on but at the same time i i mean i work because i enjoy it but i do work and children don’t work the people that i really got on with have that same kind of um sense of wonder i mean it manifests itself in different ways so i like perry and i have astronomy in common and that to me is like as a way of like retaining like a child-like sense of wonder because i don’t think you can ever get too old to kind of like just be bored by by looking at the stars and and perry’s the same and so yes that but at the same time he’s really he’s dead growing up in other ways it’s like he lives you know he looks after himself as well so it’s a kind of this is there’s a mixture of misconception and i suppose a certain amount of artifice as well on my part to kind of project that idea of you know is it part of this difference between child like and childish that childlike is actually something that is quite desirable in people i think yeah whereas childish yeah he isn’t i mean yeah people always um i mean child like is very rarely used and people that you use like slag me off they will use childish without ever having met me of course but even i mean it doesn’t really matter i mean being child she’s all right you know if you do it around people who can put up with it but that’s why they say you can afford to do it around people but um no i think part of it also is that in songs you’re able to to look at the world with that kind of with that kind of i was going to say innocence but enough to believe what an essential thing is um i mean that that’s why somebody artificially it’s too strong because it’s almost a bit that it seems like i’m contriving it but i mean but i’m only ever moved to write words about anything from a sense of like other you know i’m from from extremes of emotion and that is a childlike quality and that’s what i mean by that that is ground down in people as they get older usually unless something really tragic happens and then people kind of move to to tears for a day maybe then they kind of like to sink back into you know their normal state of being which i have resisted and i would hate to just just feel that i’d reached a point where i was no longer moved to to to write about anything whether it would be but that’s i mean it’s something that i’ve you know i’m kind of prepared for a lot of people feel they can’t function in their minds if they leave themselves open to stuff like that which again people would say i’m lucky because i can you know but it doesn’t matter if i burst into tears because people think oh he’s described you know well your ability to have an income is founded on your ability to to remain open it’s a strange paradigm if you couldn’t do that then then you would you would be a laborer or whatever or i’d be writing songs about i mean you know and there’s an awful lot of people write songs that aren’t that that don’t have emotional content and then they’re just kind of songwriters and i mean i could i could do that it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun but i mean to say that what we’ve accomplished in like the last 10 weeks yeah is is i mean on this part this side of christmas is really what we’ve been doing i mean i’ve been kind of like structuring the songs and making sure they work you know toning like tempo wise where they go what happens to him but the stuff i’ll be doing after christmas is like what i do on my own which is like the words and the singing which kind of makes the song into something hopefully more than it is a present it’s not just like a piece of music becomes a song but i mean writing music and and writing words but there are things that can be contrived i mean i mean i have been guilty very past it’s like great sin but yeah i like playing with my nieces and nephews no i um not believe you did it i i honestly haven’t really spent enough time with you yeah i just don’t know so there’s no point because simon’s like so dead certainly he did that he’s just goes mad at mentioning his name so just play the albums now i think he just lives in such another world that he would actually get into that i must admit when it first came out i thought what’s what’s wrong i mean i would never do it because i’m not you know i’m not in another world like him but i can actually take a step back and think yeah well i can understand why he would the only people who could trust to be people who would trust him back and not want anything from his partner’s friendship the only people that are going to do that are going to be like young kids but speaking of make-a-wish i have lots of friends that have met him and spent time at his house it’s been it’s just absolutely nothing i all you hear is it was so good to them and yeah you know um i know well i don’t think that he would like seven it’s a pretty fucking elaborate set up just to like get into bed with something you’ve got so many people around inviting like loads of thousands of people just from the people i’ve heard i think he’s a strange person i think but you know an unusual person because now we can’t even have like the friendships of children because their parents were like i mean in some ways what’s been done to me is quite evil really i think so that’s what i think i feel sorry for him but i mean i can’t believe he’s guilty all i’ve ever heard from make-a-wish and all the people i know it’s wonderful things don’t put your daughter on the stage to crack my childhood with that kind of existence at five which is what happened to him yes it’s hard to surprise still enough of this jacksonville i think my responsibility is going to become too great for me to be quite as childish and child-like as i am because having said all that about taking decisions and stuff i still feel that i i’m i’m not sort of responsible to anyone but i don’t expect other people but i take them in like in good faith anything i think about other people but i don’t feel that they should hold me down to being responsible for their lives which is the one of the things that i’m doing this i’ve realized over the last three months that does wear away your child life qualities every decision that you make whether it be like what food you’re gonna have on the table um uh this question isn’t here but it’s relevant to where we are how did you come to be recording in here i mean is jane seymour’s house sort of on the market as it was a place where fans can come and record i wanted to buy our own stuff like enough equipment to to record wherever we wanted we were actually going to go on a boat and just somewhere and just record on the boat kind of sail around england on a boat but the costs involved were actually quite astronomical once we started to investigate it practically and it would cost a lot more than recording five albums in a studio so we ended up like the best second option which was the manner which is like really nice you know very locked away from the world you get everything you want but at the end of it we walked away and i kind of felt oh you know there’s another group following us in and in some ways it’s it upset me and i also thought well it’s pretty stupid because well in fact at the time it wasn’t like like the next group was invading your yeah homer yeah that we’ve kind of made ours just like we were there for six months and and then we definitely did all the stuff yeah yeah yeah but we were like you know discarded and forgotten like the next week i mean we actually weren’t because most of the staff got sacked but when we left but um i couldn’t really afford to buy what we needed because this is like five years ago um technology was such that i would have needed like a an arctic truck to carry everything around and like substantially more money than i would earn at the time whereas now the equipment i mean everything that’s in this house i’ve bought and it costs less than it would to spend like three months at the matter so just apart from anything else it makes economic sense but more importantly it meant that i could then look around i spent a lot of this year just kind of traveling around looking for the right place to record so i went to like loads of different houses and this was actually just by chance because this is this is on the market to be sold and i hadn’t and i heard about it from someone and they sent me a cut-in that was in some magazine and i just thought it looked really brilliant a description the ballroom and the orangery and i thought this is a good house so i came along just like view it and um and in that intervening period because we did the demos with as well as correctly buying the equipment we were doing demos in an old really run downhouse in east sussex and we were actually going to do the alvin it was about a quarter of the size of this same kind of scale but big enough to you know have two big enough rooms to do what we’re doing here although the recording room is about this size as opposed to like you know if you’ve seen the jewelry but um and that’s the library that we were in presumably yeah yeah so i thought well you know i’ll fall back into this inland into the house in east sussex but if i can find someone better than we’ll go somewhere and um the people that were renting the house in east sussex actually took on this houses as jameson was agents so it’s just like one of those strokes of good fortune so you didn’t actually know jane socially or anything i’ve never spoken to her right and still inside she called one of the great disappointments of my life that woman i remember the first time i saw pictures of her and i thought she’s gorgeous and the more you hear about it [Music] when i came here to see it i mean it’s just like a big old house there’s like no one she doesn’t live here you know and it just seemed really tragic when he walked in it just you could feel it’s like really cold but i mean since we’ve all been here it’s kind of come alive and the whole house is just like a really excellent place to play and it’s perfect but the thing is it’s too it’s just too well known to buy it everyone knows that we’re here it’s around 20 miles it seems we’re here although we haven’t really been that bothered we’re not going to test it but the truck because the church is just there it’s like public access and stuff it’s not really that private it’s fine when we’re all here but i don’t really fancy living with the group for the rest of my life i love them dearly though but i think a place of the size needs lots of people in it and in the old days me and mary actually came here for the first two weeks of our let just on their own because i wanted to come and kind of sort things out and figure out what we were going to do and then just get used to the house and uh it was pretty uncomfortable i mean we lived in the library that was it another didn’t love all the kitchen you know scuttle between the two rooms he never came i didn’t even know his room existed until until the group came here um so it’s like it’s hopeless because i wouldn’t i don’t you know i mean we’re living with mary just until it’s really nice we’ve got this like normal sized house i haven’t said that it’s excellent for everyone to be here like for a period of three or four months and it and it also means that we can kind of work how we want and there isn’t another group coming in afterwards so she’s going to sell the house if she sells the house well no we’ve got it up until march all right and then we’ve been kicked out so i must say that she got um she gave us a price for it and then was offered about five times that price for this for letting it to an american company and she stood by her verbal agreement so her son likes this apparently plays trance he was keen for us to be here however her children were actually here the first time i was supposed to come here to view the house and i got here really late to go when did that actually start you said you and mary came here at the beginning of the line when was the beginning of the lab the last last week in september now the last two weeks because we have a party so it’s mary’s birthday at the start of october we had a party for their family and then the group arrived the next day okay so have a long night i think it’s totally it’s three yeah it’s 12 weeks this side of christmas and nine weeks the others these questions are kind of zipping about backwards and forwards there’s no chronology to these they just think that came up while i was compiling the chronology and i just kind of stuck them at the back so um let’s go for the solo album when you were working on it before it mutated into disintegration was the was the band afraid that you that they were being deserted and obviously i’m going to ask them this question as well no because i think well the i think the only members of the band that would care if they were being deserved probably simon i don’t really think the others would have seen it though i don’t think boris roger or paul kind of thought of the cures in the same way and they could have thought he’s doing a solo and we’d get it out of his system and then we’ll do an album i don’t think they’re really worried i think cyan would have been the one that would have been able to see it more as a kind of personal yeah i think he would say he would get very paranoid that you know i didn’t like the groups i was doing so because because in a way he’s closest to you yeah and kind of and it’s good i think probably sees the group in this in a similar way to how i see it which is sort of more than green [Music] wow it’s jane collins i don’t think that that’s right i don’t think or roger i mean i think they would admit it as well ever really thought of the group as anything more than a group you know it didn’t really symbolize anything represent anything it was just it wasn’t it’d not be horrible it wasn’t like i’m wondering what’s inside your millions because it’s now it was job of work in some respects i think it was particularly to roger and paul i don’t really think they ever thought that like culturally or in any sense degree had very much significance they liked other things much more than they like to kill whereas with me and some we don’t really like anything more than we like to kill we don’t know any other grouping we’d like to kill and i honestly don’t i mean i think when we do things that are really really good they’re as good or better than anyone else does things and we do bad things but there is no other group that i think does consistently does things better than we do so i mean if i did be terrified i mean i would be doing a solo and i wouldn’t be working with the group i think perry sees the group in the same way as me and so perry sees things much how i do about the group because he was like a fan of the group and kind of understands the group does mean things to certain people like globally a handful of people but um you’re always aware that if you let yourself down you’re also letting those people down as well and whereas i don’t think boris roger or paul would ever believe that whether they would ever grasp the idea because they liked things that weren’t you know kind of very different and so i don’t think they they felt deserted at all i mean i shied away from the idea of a solo because i felt it was too much work and two kind of solitary it’s almost like writing like that because effectively disintegration was an awful lot of it i treated it as a i treated as a solo album anyway i just sent people around that sounds really callous as well i mean everyone played on the record button and played really well i mean without roger i mean everyone derived from janelle but with that roger disintegration wouldn’t it be a patch in the album that it is because his keyboard plays excellent sounds like homesick and that we know we’ve never done an album with competent keyboard i think he really added a dimension but he did it without really understanding what was going on in turn you know i don’t think he really grasps what the songs are about that’s perfectly possible yeah i mean it didn’t but it didn’t bother me now with disintegration i had a very very strong idea of what i wanted the record to sound like what i wanted to be like and no one was going to get in the way because i supposedly bothered they just kind of did what i wanted and whereas with i think it’s nice that you take a different approach virtually for everyone you have a different kind of mental set well disintegration result i was 29 when we started 30 when we finished and kind of had a period of like i think everyone does it certainly they get like a and then i kind of went through a period of a month in the middle of doing the album where i just went completely berserk since i’ve done since i was like in my early 20s so i suppose i mean i i distinctly remember being looked at very peculiarly by other members of the group i don’t think they’ve got to know what’s he he’s going on now and kind of playing up to it i mean and i felt very sort of left alone but in a nice way i think they felt so like you know protective towards me but i remember just i mean i slept in the control and stuff i sort of lift the record for like three months that’s good i mean i meant acting yeah well i just i i thought i mean it was going to be like you know like my last will and testament record i think at the time you’re going to die or um yeah that’s overly dramatic i thought that that was that was it i thought that was like that was the last cure album that was like you know that i’d kind of exhausted all the possibilities of what i could do lyrically and within that framework of like being robert smith with the cure i thought that was it i think that period around your 30th birthday is a period that deserves reasonably lengthy treatment in the book um just judging by all the things you’ve said about it in other interviews and things it keeps it keeps getting referred to but it never gets expanded on it and there’s a lot of things that you often refer to that don’t get any bigger in the retelling and i often think i actually want to know more about that so there’ll be several things will come up that i’ve noticed you keep bringing up the interviews but the interviewers don’t seem to follow them so i’m going to try and i found it very strange because i always thought it would be 25 you know because it’s like a really crappy sort of fucking role but um it’s actually like the closer i got to 30 but through my 29th year i just had a real sense of doom which i could never shake like for the whole year that’s kind of and that’s what like disintegration was just born out of that feelings like despair when did you actually record disintegration outside studio and that’s in barracks isn’t it yeah it says i think it’s the nearest bookend manner it’s called who came the man [Music] yeah yeah and i knew it was called outside studios or whatever it was but i didn’t know where that was i mean it’s very similar in setting the stranger to here really it’s a but a very very different feel i mean the house is um is old but it’s been modernised and the studio is all brand new it’s really really clinical which i liked at the time i thought was really funny because it was kind of i like the idea of just being in there training you know as a transient and then being forced to leave it appealed to me which i i hate that at the moment the night of my 30th birthday right yeah i mean disintegration that album presumably goes back to this business of worrying about disintegration since you were 13. yeah um the quote is on page four about halfway down if you want to remember what you said about it [Music] [Laughter] [Music] misquoted yeah i’ll be hamburger too young to remember pains um worrying about disintegration since you’re definitely what does that mean i mean what happened when you were 13 that did something happen that made you start to worry about disintegrating it is kind of a yeah going going to big school kind of comprehensive of the real world or something like there i went it was the first bunch of you know the ones that went to mid middle school and they invented that like from 11 to 13 and it was dead arty and kind of like closeted existence so this funny english education system i don’t really understand you could do what you want you know it’s like you could go you could attend lessons if you felt like it was that sort of deal and suddenly like going to um comprehensive for the complete nazi headmaster it’s just that i think that so it kind of sort of started me thinking about um you know i mean i’ve been reading books after that point which hinted you know books like that i shouldn’t have been reading something my i’ve been actually asked to do something book thing next year nice bedfordshire books fair or something to do what um desert island books like to be interviewed on stage about 10 out of 10 books i take the desert on and i was just thinking god i was desperately trying to think of like the books that i’ve read because i’ve been moving all my books at home and then there’s like hundreds of pokeballs i think i’ve read all these and i started looking at the spines or something i can’t remember what this is about it’s a really tough one but the thing is if you worry too much about that it’s like you would never read again you don’t do anything because you just like despair you can’t possibly remember um i i don’t know i mean i was going to say beowulf but i was trying to think of what that’s quite i mean it struck me i didn’t really understand what was occurring i mean i remember him reading it to me when i was about nine years old and then just feeling really uncomfortable he used to coming after my dad had read this you know the groom’s fairies read your kind of patience because he was doing it in college i said go sleep with all these images like men burning rafts you know big fur coats and some shakespeare as well my dad also tried to like um read a shakespeare as it was like to be enjoyed and he’s like shakespeare out by it sounded like king lear and stuff and it was like it was gruesome really so the thing i was for you know aware of like a darker side of human nature i mean my older brother always used to allude to it all the time you know oh you know you’ll understand when you get older and they sit down i can have a vision age but i think we’re really like probably a change of scoring at 13 it is like plus it’s like an age where you kind of you sort of you’re forced into decisions about your future are you going to kind of knuckle down or are you not you know are you going to join in like the ones that nick of school or are you going to start taking it seriously you have to say i think it’s a point where you suddenly realize that you you are going to grow up is it disintegration an awareness of death and age and all that sort of stuff was that yeah i mean did you work did you sit at school or at home and worry about that yeah that’s encouraging i don’t know anyone that didn’t the disintegration i think that that started off um like they actually did like the core of it was actually my my what i thought was my mental disintegration um around that i i felt that i’d i’d kind of peeked in my early 20s and i was like on my way out and it was that that’s why i thought that disintegration was going to be a swan song so i should never achieve these heights again i’ll never be able to rhyme two words again um and also my physical stuff like that the whole idea is like falling apart as well as you get older you’re just aware of your physical limitations and that you can’t do things that you used to do but we’re you’ve now moved on again to when you’re 30 and you’re you’re thinking about this only as opposed to when you were yeah but i think it was um yeah i think at 13 it’s still kind of just like a vague kind of disquiet it’s not really a genuine fear i don’t think i mean like endless poetry but i mean i look back and i cringe i don’t i i’ve still i’ve still kept some of the my old when i was really young stuff that i wrote right dreams and things like that because i would never really ask i would cringe i never showed anyone and i didn’t trust i wouldn’t ever throw it away and i wouldn’t ever kind of dismiss it because i i’ve always had this idea of like myself at different ages like key ages and what i would think of myself now you know it’s like a kind of doctor who theory you know five different difficulties um and now you go and in a strange way it’s a kind of like bars are going to like keep keep me on this you know my own particular straight in there what would the 13 year old robert have thought of what i’m doing he would be really really pleased i think now i don’t think it would be very um enamored of like the 25 year old robert i think you thought it was the right ticket as the 35 year old robert does um the 30 year old was the scariest though without doubt thirty year old yeah so you said that on the night of your 30th birthday you went home back to your mom and dad i just went completely off my head during the course of the evening you mean you might have got pissed or or what um what happened well i did a few silly things really i i took some drugs and there’s a i swear it’s i mean it sounds really stupid but there’s a park and i grown up there in this park they had a footbridge and i’d always wanted to drive under this footbridge there was like a gravel puff led up to it and it was an ornamental footbridge and it went it’s really steep it goes right up and down like that like it’s almost like a mono sort of thing and then it’s like this really steep hill ran down and i used to play there like all through my two years and for some reason i just had this like it would be really really cool because it’s like it’s a big block of flats and there’s all houses and stuff it’s like a small gateway into the park and there’s only one small gateway out the other side and cars weren’t supposed to fit through i figured you could definitely fit a car because i once saw a car in there that belongs to the parking lot so you can get a car through that gateway and uh that’s i started off in the evening and it was quite early actually it was about like nine in the evening and i jumped in the car and i drove up to to the park and i drove through the gates and i just went over and i took paint both sides of the car that’s how narrow scale footbridge and lost the exhaust part and went out apart and because the parts really knew my mom and dad’s mary was standing in the driveway and she was screaming at me not to go not to do it and i came back and i didn’t understand and then she got a taxi home because she knew that it was going to be one of those nights so that’s how it started so i thought i should do all the things in and around crawley that i wanted to do when i was young that i didn’t dare to do so i just went like them [Music] and she knew she’s just going to get more and more upset so she’s seen it before i mean i knew i was doing it because i knew why i went home i went in the afternoon i sat down with like my dad started talking about you know like when i was young on my dad with homemade wine out and i was completely bullish but i was like six in the evening so did you tell them you were going to do this no no i didn’t i mean at the time i mean i still remember screaming at the top of my voice when i was driving up to it because i thought if i don’t make it it’s going to be really terrible jarring impacts the car that smashes into the two pillars either side of the bridge and so actually fitting through it you know it’s like a real sense of consideration it’s like yes it’s one of those moments right you know it means nothing but it’s one of these things that because you were about to become therapy it was like i’ll either do it now or i never yeah well i thought that’s you know this is my one excuse when else am i gonna let me in i thought if i ever get default i’m not gonna want to do it anymore even at the time it was just fuels enough as the town council sent you the bill yet for uh fixing no it was in the paper it was in the favor because the people from the flat blocks um phoned the police but they didn’t know who’d done it it was just a small uh got the car what if they had found out who died yeah well i mean if you’re happy to admit this in the book that it would be great to get that cutting out and put that in the book you could say it were me yes but tell my mum at first i remember when i’ll put it in you can just take it out the um the swimming pool at the middle school i helped build all the time we were there it was like child labour looking back and you say oh you have a lifelong past to go swimming there if you help build it and we’re like used to go that weekend to dig the swimming pool and i went back when i was about 15 and one afternoon and they wouldn’t let me in i said hang on i’ve got a lifetime thing and the head mistress who was there said that wasn’t you know if that was true you know we’d have hundreds of people here i said what do you mean if it was true because no we had to say something to go you know parents little the children hell that’s this is despicable you can’t do that i demand to be led to this terribly sorry you can’t come in so later that night i went back and i broke into the swimming pool do anything but i used a towel i was quite drunk and i left the towel in the heat and i thought i’d just kind of rearrange it didn’t turn any lights or anything and i left all as it was and that was in the paper and my mum that they really blew out of all proportion they’re saying like um vandals hit swimming pool and like you know uh 35 pounds of damage or something you know that towel left in shreds it’s like it was me on my own i left a wet towel and i remember this is terrible this is the pool that you helped build oh really oh yes right now nice moment so i can see you’re looking at me [Music] [Laughter] over there just the other day [Music] so what other bizarre things did you do then on the night of your first year um i went into crawley town center i smashed a shop window which is the other stupid thing that i did that night i shot the manager of him and thrown me out a few years before and i knew still manage the shot was this before before you were famous um i don’t think i’ve never been famous in crawley room it was in my early twenties so it’s probably about seven years before it wasn’t really a grudge either it’s just like it was really it was a ship sort of menswear shop i had actually gone in with someone and they just checked me out i just it was like a symbol of all that i thought was wrong with crawling but actually what was wrong with crawley was me breaking the windows that’s pretty stupid [Music] i used to go to just because it was there’s a different part than the one yeah yeah this is like there’s a park at the back of the school that you could comprehend and it’s just stuck in i mean it was really like deadpool society it’s just like revisiting you know like keep up because i’ve grown up in the same town you know for 20 years i just like wanted to go i thought one last time sort of thing so i just packed it all into one evening i didn’t get up for like 48 it’s actually more like american werewolf than sorry you just made it you said you ended up about six in the morning just in just a pair of jeans in the middle of crawling trying to find my way that was quite worrying because i realized that you know when you see you start seeing milk floats you think that’s time to get home i know it took me ages to get home by the time i got home there were like commuters it’s really embarrassing and he said but but it was good i came to terms with a lot of things well yeah i kind of it’s just i got rid of a lot of idiot things that i wanted to do just in one night that kind of and the things that they’re not to even talking about that’s not they’re kind of irrelevant really because it’s one of those things i always find quite strange about but being asked questions about and and i answered because i’m asked um but if i was normal no one would i would have done it you know it’s not because of who i am and the only people that would know probably be mary and maybe simon and other people just be like oh you know you remember that time you did such end up the night with success throwing myself out of the window or something but um it was just i had to get rid of you know they were just like it was like a symbolic evening nothing actually did meant anything but i just i wanted to prove something that i could still do things without a good reason i suppose it wasn’t that wouldn’t that i know these were just they happened to be you know had i been on tour or something you know i would have chosen different routes it probably would have ended up throwing myself out and started getting on tour yeah i saw someone throwing something at the ground floor when it was really funny yeah they thought they were in bed it was looking roses that did seem to be a sort of a critical evening um and it did want a bit more about filling in although i remember from around that’s the most vivid night it was bonfire night at studio because i’d gone back and married got into hospital for an operation and and uh i went to visit that now i took her and i left her there she had something wrong with her eyes she said when operation arrived and she was really scared and i took it to the hospital and i left her and i came back to the studio and i got a lift back to the studio and i took i dropped some messages on the way back to the studio i went to a shop and bought loads of fireworks and had a really like wild bonfire and i felt [Music] [Music] without thinking of what the consequence is to try and break things do you do you do things and to make your life difficult in order to have something to write about i think i have done that yeah definitely in the past and looking back i’ve done things that are like i’ve had like you know a choice between a or b both equally as attractive and i’ve chosen b because it’s going to cause more grief and for no other reason than that just to see what the experience would be like can you think of examples [Laughter] [Music] i asked because funnily enough because eric clapton said in an interview with me that he’d done that that he had ditched girlfriends that you’ve been going out with for quite a long time in order to feel miserable enough to write the island the eye of lost you song i mean yeah it’s pleasant i don’t know i’ve never been that i think i can explain some of my more inexplicable actions because i think oh you know at some point a good song is going to come out of this but i don’t think i would stop and i wouldn’t like jeopardize my personal life just for the sake of writing this song i’d rather not write the song but i mean i i think it’s more that i would put myself in a situation that could be you know that could jeopardize you know other relationships or my own sanity you know just for the sake of the experience um but i don’t think i’ve ever got to the point where i could because i spent an awful time when i was at school my best friend’s dad used to remember one christmas i was around then he would chase me up you’re like the watcher all you do is like watch people you observe people you know what you’re fantastic foreign get rid of that and to actually immerse myself in what’s going on at the time i still find myself kind of like drifting away and just like watching and i don’t know because because i it’s it’s a terrible thing to like because you you can’t i’m trying to say you can end up kind of like living vicariously and actually just like taking material for songs or becoming a songwriter because that’s not what i want to be when i would much prefer never to write another song and enjoy myself then you know i don’t think i’ve got the right song but you know where’s my ankle’s gonna come from because i don’t have that that need i mean the need to write songs either it’s there or it isn’t i think to kind of manufacture it is pretty tragic really but i think this observing thing is quite well i hope it’s quite normal because i mean i i find that if you’re in a group like talking one to one you’re immersed in the conversation or whatever and then two or three people you still imagine what’s going on but i found it if i’m in a group of people sort of six or seven people in somebody’s house i tend to slip into that role of because you quite often can’t find anywhere to logically interrupt the conversation you’re quite enjoying what’s going on so you said watch it almost like a tv program i mean that doesn’t seem to be wrong to me you’re on my side though yeah well just in case you were worried very similar reason i just like i couldn’t think of anything to say i didn’t seem to point into just like interposing to be part of the conversation to be part of the group i found in this old in stratford-upon-avon there was this like little old lady that had like 10 rows of books and they were all like dictionaries and things from like 1988 or something but like at the very bottom all dusty and dirty was this one little book it’s like hand published by a book called logan pierce smith i’ve never heard of and it’s possibly his only book it’s a kind of mini diary just through a period probably of like 15 years just to extract his thoughts on life and his role in it but um that just made me think well i’m going to forget it now i’m sorry what was he talking about where did i get to that the book your best friend’s dad being the watcher and your best friend dad didn’t think that was odd about not bumping into a conversation that’s right i was gonna say he he’s got this this just this one piece so just like snippets in it and it’s something like oh once again this evening that i it’s a dreadful thing happening as a dinner party conversation jack going ticking nicely and i goat goats were mentioned and i told the story about the go to portsmouth and hideous silence okay an even more dreadful thought every time goats are mentioned do i really tell the same story about the goats see i saw that book and i immediately thought of you with like oh they’re just a little it’s good it’s got another really good one he’s um he’s really happy and he’s actually i won’t sum them up because it’s the way they’ve written this through but it just finishes at the end he says how did anyone say i’m drunk and the whole thing is like self-mocking that he’s like one with everything and his pills really strong like he’s really witty and stuff and he actually knows he’s using i only read a couple of those little ones because i photocopied like a load of them about 10 or 15 pages out of it to give to you which i think like the best things the early ones when he’s when he’s obviously younger and a lot more kind of very worthy as he gets to older in fact they’re really really sad that like the last few in the book but there’s some where he’s gonna it must be kind of like either early this century or late last century because it’s kind of it features vicars and bishops and stuff and he must be quite well after he moves in those kind of circles but doesn’t feel comfortable in it and then he’s at another dinner part and they’re talking about lord you know they’ve got like lord k he’s just young lord kay’s only 21 he just inherited the fault his father’s style he’s hated all the estate and everyone’s feeling oh you know it’s terrible what he’s doing with his throwing wild pies and stuff and they did the rounds everyone’s saying following each other and saying how much more terrible it was and how they spend the money in a much more worthy way and it got to me that’s just about showing and i thought what would i really do splendid chocolate this debauchery is wonderful that’s it and they look on the bishop’s face you can’t buy that book that’s excellent so if you get any songs out of it you have to oh i’ve got one already which one tell me you won’t tell me you’ll for this one [Music] if trouble is reading something like that is that that he’s actually put it far more succinctly than and if you try and expand what he’s reduced into one page and he’s trying to make something more out of it it becomes less because the fact that it’s really good is that he’s just diluted the essence of like a moment he’s explaining to someone to this girl and he’s trying obviously he’s just trying to like chat her up and he said and he catches himself explaining scientifically what the stars are how far away they are and how long it takes the light to reach us so they say and he catches up mid-sentences thinks this is all absolutely nonsense just walks off and knees have you seen the lion king i haven’t yet you’ll like it in that case if i stick my fingers in my eyes you know john comes up oh forget it i’m john he’s irrelevant to you i don’t think he wrote the songs i honestly don’t think he wrote the song they’re too much like classic disney songs for him to have written them so just just forget all that but there’s a looking at the sky secrets that you’ll love in that case i mean this is a very flash actually punchline but it’s very like that well i’m glad you enjoyed it um right so let’s forget this integration for a bit but um when did you actually move out of maineville mid 1988 was it um yeah well we’ve got married and august 88. that’s when we moved all right when you move down we’re moving out let’s get married he said you have to tell him i was talking gem called and um earlier when we were waiting for you and he um i was just saying oh yeah kind of telling what i had done yesterday i went down to wagner read we just had uh nick to go get to get to go get mary and and came back so i get off the phone and he goes did you say you got married [Laughter] the good news the veterinarian is in vogner regions um were there any any other possible titles for disintegration or did it was always disintegration was there another time it was ten one million virgins kiss me wasn’t it i think disintegration was always decent okay in fact the the album title do i say that was the night i wrote disintegration that isn’t true because i i wrote this information on whatever the tour was that preceded my 30th birthday right um [Music] september i saw you in september of 1989 in america i was 1389 because i was 15 i was one it was you sure because i’ve worked it out as being in april the 21st 88 i was born in 1959 i was one in 60. i’m always one ahead of whatever year it is you’re as good at math as i am then yeah so 69 was 10 79 i was 20 89 i was 30. but disintegration came out in 88 yeah that’s why i’m lying when i say that right we recorded through october november december january february of 88 into 89. i was approaching my 30th birthday we were doing disintegration i wasn’t yet 30. so my cathartic 30th birthday that had nothing to do lyrically with what went on disintegration because it’s already done i was still writing words with my b side and stuff but the bulk of the album had been done which one is this this is the this is a thing fancy one i like this one this is a pop song with it yeah at the end of 87 you just said the words to disintegration were written on the kiss meter in 87 and that was the start of like from through 88 we did i was doing like home demos and we were doing demos down at boris’s and that’s when i met you i think yeah yeah that’s when i was like the first time that was the second time yeah because yes we did we did two lots of demos at boris’s house in the summer of 88 and we started recording for real i think in september where’d you record that well kiss me mirrorville in france great okay oh i love you guys in france france france all right as in chris france it’s because it’s got you know i mean if it didn’t have those songs if it was the the why it’s like a hundred times better than pornography i think it’s because it’s got pop songs on it but obviously didn’t and it’s like because it’s like it’s an old cliche and a light and shade but particularly with the record it works i mean my favorite records even my nick drake my favorite nick drogo was like five leaves left because it’s got a man in the shed and a couple of other songs that kind of like lift you out of the mares whereas i think people tell you know pink moon’s like his best trick would be good but i mean it’s too uniform okay i don’t know because you can’t see how sort of gloriously tragic something is unless you’ve like you’re laughing one minute i like all that it’s like a really good record it’s going to like drag you about a bit like you know it’s like good horror films always have very funny bits in them as well yeah and it’s the combination of the two that really gets your emotions see-sawing around so i don’t know i mean i think that i mean a song like that is there well apart from the fact that it’s just like a really catchy sort of song and i like listening to it and it puts me in a good mood i can imagine by listening to that next summer and kind of thinking it is good to be alive that’s what i like about this one it kind of feels like that kind of like and it’s nice and some of the other ones at the center i could think will they suit me when i’m feeling a bit yeah you always stress that the importance of a song is the emotional content emotional commitment presumably you put the same emotional commitment into a song whether it’s happy emotion or or miserable yeah the thing is i remember um driving home from um when we were doing the wish album it was getting towards the end was like after month four and i listened to the tape of what we’ve done and i thought what we really need is like these really catchy pops on and that night when i got home i started singing to myself and when i got home that’s just that’s a really corny story but i actually wrote fry down in love and i thought while i was doing it i was thinking music the music and i thought this is going to be a really catchy song you know because stuck in my head all the way home just about i was listening things on the radio i thought that’s like that’s a good sign um and the next day as i was driving back to the studio i thought right i’ve gotta convince them that it’s a really good pop song so i thought what should i sing about and i just thought and it was actually a friday and i was thinking about how good it is because i felt really good so i’ve got this really good song done at home and i was like trying to be better i still thought we were going to the pub i thought it was great friday you know so that’s like the german idea and i wrote it in like about half an hour and but which is really extraordinary because i very rarely write anything like that but it took ages me to get it right while i was singing it not just like lyrically but actually like to make me sound right when i was singing it i just couldn’t get it right like the other songs in the album was like ten times more difficult to sing you would imagine um like trust or something really you know that very emotional songs i just couldn’t get fighting i couldn’t get myself into the right hand every time i came out and listened to i thought you’re faking that you’re not you’re not that happy and it was right near the end and it’s like really throw away in fact we already started celebrating the end of the direction i was going to do the vocals in another studio and i thought i could sing that song now i just had like one of those things and i just like did the whole song one go and that stuff that the song suddenly you know it was it was like oh that’s so it some ways it was contrived but in others it wasn’t so you’re right and i i couldn’t do it and think oh well you know we’ll get away with it because it’s it isn’t you know it’s got to catch a tune the lyrics work it’s going to get played in the radio but i thought but i want to be able to listen to it and that’s what i always think about what we do i thought if i listen to that and it doesn’t make me happy then what’s the point in doing it whereas now listen to my hearing i think and it actually makes me smile because i think i remember doing that and i was in a really really good mood i think that’s right that’s why i think i i like the really i enjoy the really happy and ones because because when i’m i come over and i switch like an incredible time over here i’m usu you know it’s like my happiest time coming over and doing all this for a week or whatever and so those songs kind of remind me you know maybe that sounds really corny as well but it’s true but everybody has songs that remind them yeah it’s great we live our lives yeah but i mean i still do without something like you keep your book i mean yeah when i do a vocabulary i think that’s it i only get one chance you know once this records out i can’t even say i actually i didn’t mean to do it like that i want to do a different way i think i have to like know myself and i listen back to in years to come that’s you know i remember doing that i can remember doing almost every vocal on every record i can’t remember like having anything about that anything else to do when did we decide on that snare drum sound that’s like completely irrelevant but the vote was like for me it’s like the key part of the record kind of make makes or breaks themselves me some songs we’ve done i’ve been really good but i just can’t get a vocal right and they that’s it you know their lives stop there so i think were actually when we set out recording the wizard we were intending to do a second album like concurrent of them late night jam sort of stuff which never comes out although we’ve got a couple of things i’ve learned really excellent i’ve got on that which is like two hours just bashes you know with the dashboard the dat runs out and we’re still bashing away and we’ve got a couple of those here actually here a couple of the channels have been went into and i’ve suggested that we’ve gone i was dancing that counts as something doesn’t it he had to one one of the jumps and we played from about 8 30 in the morning to do a concert well that was you guys i went to bed at seven in the morning and i think you guys played like a half an hour and a half an hour longer and you had started before dinner because for the first i needed like three tapes before dinner then we had dinner and then i went back in and you played until something i’m telling myself too much i think you went to bed perry said you went to bed about half an hour after i did but then i went to bed about seven a little after um yeah i mean the other the other option is to audition for turrets no i mean i like again it’s one of those things i the funny thing about the whistle was a lot of people thought that like all the guitar shows and stuff was poor but they’re all me i just do it under the cover of paul so i didn’t get ridiculed you know and paul did it on stage which suited me fine so i just couldn’t do it on stage couldn’t do that in front of people um i just thought i’d feel really really i feel much more self-conscious like if i was to do a guitar so if i’m in a forest i can live with that because that’s an adventure but you know like things you know kind of like he’s got the right moves you just can’t you you either can you can’t do it i just can’t do it but um in the studio that’s really good i love you i really really enjoy your time i like i love playing as well you think that there is on stage i remember on the on the kiss me too i did we used to we opened with um the kiss that we was like all the while frenzy workout i used to really enjoy doing that because like it’s like heads down sort of music and that’s what we were doing the other night i’ve done something here just like five minutes of me playing well but in fact it did that when the whistle wasn’t cut there’s a bit there’s a bit of that track or quite far into a couple minutes there’s a link comes in and it’s so you i kind of couldn’t i couldn’t replay it to you and i didn’t tell you what it was but it just kind of it’s like it’s like hitting an old friend it’s like running into somebody unexpectedly oh yeah that’s rubber but it’s nice it’s really nice feeling because there’s quite a lot of the guitar guitar playing that’s going on there it could almost be any good guitar player yeah but every now and again something comes out and you go oh yeah that’s definitely him it’s nice no i do actually i’m i’m relishing playing guitar i must admit on this record because then let’s take a piss out because i’ve got so many guitars and i’ve never played a lot of them up till now 30 odd guitars is it a more guitar album no the strange enough this record i had a really fixed idea of what it was going to be like when we were doing the demos in the summer and it was like that that’s something we heard before this one it’s kind of like fluid bases it’s just just going to use like freshest breakfast for us it’s just on brushes it’s almost kind of it would be like an entirely acoustic album infection like my touchstones were nick drake and um van morrison like uh astral wigs was like another one i had like a few a few records they were thinking fuck rock yeah yeah i mean joni mitchell is expanding a little bit into like an acoustic area i thought i could really go that’s how i felt in somewhere else that’d be nice to sit this two hours after that and then all this stuff happened with boris and then i started doing these demos of it and not really as a reaction to boris but suddenly there was like all this like weird music coming in and like there was that you know just like pop songs like machine music and i thought here we go it’s all running out of control again and the third lot of demos that we did without boris it’s actually quite regulatory because we used just like machines to you know to run the percussion and stuff and it’s like we’ve got like three lots of demos one and towards the end and went back one exactly a year ago to see if we should start thinking about doing another record because i i thought was a really good song i mean some in the summer and then we did some just before we came here and they’re all completely different it’s just like a complete mix i think the record is going to turn into a very strange mix of songs um there’s not a couple of them that are just keyboards so it’s not going to have no guitar disintegration yeah that’s the only one that was what that was how i imagined it would be well i didn’t let anyone change it um but with this one this is so so much stuff and we’ve demoed about 50 songs and we’ve recorded 23 so far and of those 23 there’s certainly that there’s there are sort of five or six that definitely have a feel to them and i could still turn it into the album i wanted wanted it to be if it did like another five or six in that vein but then like i said earlier about light and shade we wouldn’t be able to use a song like that i think well why you know what what what am i trying to achieve it’s like that song will make the song before it work because i mean the song before it’s good i mean there’s some songs because a couple of eight-minute songs and by the end of it and you need something like that to so you can just sort of and then you’re ready for like the next bit you try and put two eight-minute songs together but very few people can pull it off you guys gotta be an extraordinary good guitarist or whatever you’ve been like a virtuoso to kind of hold someone’s attention or you’ve just got to build on a mood and i know you have to like want to do that just pull that kind of music off you have to like feel right and i don’t feel like doing that sort of music we did that on the wish haven’t started a couple of songs of these two-hour jams there’s stuff in there that’s kind of just like you know it’s almost not there and you can hear us chatting but one of us is sort of keeping playing and it gradually picks up mutates moves on it’s like it’s really good it’s just like a communal music and it was something we had never done before never ever jammed i’ve never allowed us to challenge one of my fascist rules because jam’s always deteriorated into standard fare couldn’t the band tend to jam without you though yeah go off in the room what’s been the safer what’s going to save you simon can’t jam he’s coming you still can’t you have to like write the notes down through it you just cannot do it so it’s kind of sad in some ways it saves the group from like endless jamming because this is too much trouble so when we jam now i i play both a song a song but it’s always been quite good on this session with them having different dramas coming you know each one of them has been completely different like personality while it’s dramatic some have been really up for it others have been very laid back trying to impress couple have been very nervous so that’s been good it’s kind of expanded the way we’ve worked anyway because i’ve had to think about what drama gets what song to try and and why and what do i want out of that song so it’s actually i’m thinking about the songs in a different way normally i just like leave boris to get on with him and i i’d come down and like listen to his finished drum show particularly but i’ll live with it whereas this is like i’m having to be there all the time kind of encouraging them and discouraging themselves good drum [Music] road when he was playing a very worrying way to kind of cut off but yeah much earlier with him but a couple of drums very audible in the control room he’s good um where did you go in your honeymoon i didn’t have a hammer you didn’t i was in the paper you had just jetted off on your honeymoon at the end of the wedding i presume that’s something that the local newspaper invented because because people do jet off on the honeymoon after weddings we actually we we jetted up to uh we stayed in the same hotel the night before as the night after right we were the last to leave it’s i thought that’s it it was all timed so the last song because they wouldn’t serve us drinks after two in the morning so that our song went on that was it i was away everyone waited until that car had gone and everyone followed it um no then we went to my armada and i still stayed there for the night and then we went home well i mean it was a honeymoon because we moved in to a new house so it’s like by the sea so you just feel that they need to go away well i just couldn’t imagine doing this right um we’re just about to start recording the other thing i think we went i think i had like two days in the new house and then went down the boroughs because i got confused about um again it’s funny you get all these cuttings and you think it’s all going to make sense but because it doesn’t really where does that fit in you know why doesn’t that end without um there was a holiday that you went on to south of dublin yeah now that was before you got married [Music] and watched the scene at some point in 86 i think it was i decided to take a year out because in fact it must have been wrong pretty much it was the last book yeah it was december 86 actually we signed a new contract with polydor that’s what all the court case was about and and i was advised that if i could manage to stay out of the country for 10 months at the following 12 i would be entitled to not pay tax all right one of those scams so we were touring for like seven months so i had to kind of find somewhere to eat something for three months and then you can only stay in area for like three months and then you have to start paying them tax i think so so i just i moved into this house with this woman in this bloke for three months where was it mary came over to visit me that was the south of dublin in a place called dolkey seems very very nice it was a very nice house i just used to kind of get the ferry backwards and forwards you’re only allowed a certain number of days one sixth of the time that you’ve had out something so i had to because i think the simon carroll were getting married so i had to kind of time absolutely because i was the best man i i had to have enough time enough to go to be back for that and then so mary was with me up until they went and then we came back and then i went back on my own and i stayed there on my own for about a month i don’t know why actually i watched it why are you coming oh you’re never going to be in your room tonight we know what’s happening yeah that’s right 87 i’ve got i’ve got it as being sort of around about july 87 two week holiday night yeah but it was like it turned into i mean we made it into a holiday kind of because otherwise it would have felt like an you know enforced egg science or thing i was just hoping the thing was i was never really taking it that serious i thought if anything goes wrong you know like if there was an illness in the family about that i was going to go home because i wasn’t and i told my accountant please don’t get to month nine months how can i i don’t want anything to happen but if it doesn’t i’ll have to come home but we we’ve kind of spent seven months touring around the world so it wasn’t any big deal and if that alive it was quite nice it was a break and that there was no phone in the house i had to phone the office from the cool box at the station when i wanted to speak to them which was about once a week so it was perfect and that just that irish place like over a period of three months i really chilled [Music] other thing i like about ireland is it’s incredibly lively music scene almost anywhere in ireland yeah although i didn’t call playing i went to that’s it yeah that’s what i was going to say i didn’t go into dublin at all but i went to um this one pub in dolce that had like live music every night this used to go there and just like you know usually country western songs or whatever but it’s true but there’s music everywhere in ireland everywhere yeah the best thing is that i remember in the interval people would have brought along you know just like a guitar or a squeeze box or something and they would fill the interval with music and then quiet quiet you know the main that to be back and it was all just felt really nice children were just yeah like no one was showing up it was they didn’t want the music to stop there’s no jukebox and so they’re kind of like filling the gap we’ve got a pub near us where people can just go along on a tuesday night take the guitars and think they’ll sit around the fire it’s really nice good atmosphere but oh yeah you should go i’m not good at doing things i know i’m teasing was it when you were in ireland that you can you remember that you read sarps road to freedom trilogy i think this is a very specific question yeah i only want to know because because i do want to try and relate books to periods yeah if i can i i really don’t um i mean i remembered i had a suitcase of books i took to ireland with me and that’s what i did was just like went sat on the rocks and read books i tried to read all the books that i felt like and the people thought i had read and i felt i should have read can you remember any of them that you did probably it probably wasn’t i remember reading a lot of books i didn’t enjoy so i’d imagine that i read rose for freedom and a particular trip because i didn’t really enjoy it i know i actually know what i read you know i read the complete works of nature in in dolby um you know black whether it isn’t beyond good and evil that’s right you mentioned beyond good and evil at the same the same interview that you mentioned road to freedom so you probably yeah yeah it was all around centaurus it was kind of wading through you know to try and make sense of them who was right and who was wrong because i know i was given a book it was called something like a great philosophy of the modern age or something and it had like a short piece at the front about philosophy up to like the 19th century and then detailed chapters on what they consider to be the main philosophical giants since like 18 20 some arbitrary time started off by someone who’s like completely unintelligible his thoughts what to do with water and very bizarre stuff um i remember reading through and trying and comparing actually making notes like that’s back at school in the margin like having a notepad and trying to make sense which i just it didn’t say anything to me as a place like camus with such which i actually genuinely enjoyed and so i read all the nature and then i realized i hadn’t read anything by such apart from lucky’s book books like nausea and which which is really good and i did read racial film because i thought it was pretty awful i didn’t think it compared so in fact i’m just about to start rereading the walls here i’ve got that upstairs i just i just i think it’s quite it’s very you i mean the whole reading books a lot of you grows out of things that you read and think about and i think it’s quite important you know to say that when you were in that place like on that two of the books you had with you where such and said i just i just like that well i think i mean you could probably if i should be bothered i suppose i could just probably trace a line lyrically from certainly from like also spraxxer orthestra through to something on disintegration it’s about something on you it’s like you can think of it i mean if i dig out my copies of them i always bend like the bottom corner this corner page down to like something of interest making a new sort you know this is just like a phrase i mean i don’t feel bad about nicking phrases from people but um but everybody mixed up yeah i mean i still i mean he’s a really good writer i’m very skeptical of what he writes about yeah it’s like he’s pretty brilliant the way he puts things together brilliant composition but it does get kind of you start doing things i would be sitting there on the rocks and i’d read and i’ll get to the end of the chat and i’ll shut the book up and not look out this doesn’t matter what it is so i’m very kind of wary of picking up books that haven’t either been recommended for other people that i can trust or they’ve been given to me that i kind of have you know read a good review by someone that i can trust because i know if i pick up a book and this boy sent me his first book and it’s about five times as thick as this and i’ve had it now for about three months and the first page inside written in viruses i i know that you won’t start readings i know you’ll never read it because if you read the first page you’ll be forced to read to the end and you think it’s going to be shit that’s it and he’s right because i’ve kind of like just like looked at the first couple of sentences i thought [Music] just like that nice poor well yeah yeah it’s so logic to us your fans seriously guys as long as i’m number one you’ve obviously not got enough to do with your money so was there any truth in the theory that in 1987 when you started the american tour you had to be barricaded into your hotel on the first night and hire 12 sumo bodyguards or did you make this lineup no no you didn’t say it was reported it was reported in a fairly down market tablet like the mirror or something like that yeah i think um i remember arriving in 1997. catch had just been released in england yeah the 1997 christmas tour of america was quite a um hysterical tour all in all as i remember and you would remember having 12 sumo bodyguards definitely don’t remember that well i wouldn’t actually because i’d be the other side of the door and i’d be completely oblivious so what somebody else might hire them without telling you yeah i just think there’s like a lot of people in the corridor they’re looking through the spine they just look big anyway there’s a lot of men in nappies that’s all right there’s nothing new there it’s the american sex convention it’s still in the cruise hotel it’s like it’s deering like that all the time okay and it’s just one of these stories that i think has to be cleared up there uh perry might remember because he was on the crow for that so he’s probably better to remember anecdotal material from that tool as long as i coach him to be very careful about what he does and doesn’t that was also that was also the tour on which you played madison square garden but was it the tour on which the doorman at madison square garden didn’t actually recognize you the band didn’t know the band where which is something that you did say in an interview it must have been because we’ve only played that once can you remember the incident i mean can you actually remember the doorman not knowing who you’re being i remember arriving at the um it was one of these interviews i remember it being difficult to get but get back stuck but she got into like a holding area and this bloke wouldn’t let us into the dressing room and mary’s cousin is this blond-haired girl he’s really like a brassy bottle blonde that’s like that comes from doncaster and she appeared on this huge place said no it’s all right that’s him and it’s like one of those surreal moments i’ve only ever met her once in my life at a wedding i kind of dimly thought that that’s mary’s cousin what’s mary’s cousin doing now dressing her in madison square gardens and she was there on her own and she made a sandwich from the rider and she don’t decant a beer she was like sitting there chatting to this enormous security bloke and he thought that she was like the artiste of the evening and like she was letting us in remember walking and everyone no one said anything because they all thought well she must be something to do robert she’s like you know she talks in the right voice she’s like one of his family and i just i sat there and i said to him her name’s carmen how did you get back here she goes i i don’t know because i just kept walking through and everyone was just letting me through i kept saying oh yeah yeah i’m cure i’m cure i’m with the cure they just thought that she was she’s she was an artist called cure because we were just reaching a kind of level there but we hadn’t reached a level there where people knew we were and she got all the way into the inner center when you see you hadn’t expected her to be there did you even know that she was in america no no she was on holiday and just turned yeah they said last night then she just like said and she’s actually she left her friends in a bar and come there on her own to ask me if she could get some tickets for the show i had managed to get all the way through that yeah do that you know she’s just like so the guy’s giving you a hard time yeah and it’s only her statement that gets you in sorry they’re okay there’s a classic moment you’ve got like an entourage like 10 of us big brian with this one [Laughter] i liked your imitation of him quite a bit but this bloke was seriously big i mean bigger than brian oh it was like a double door sized man um they’re very in place like that though very in fact more phonetic on there and some of the much bigger places like the people that run it very proud to be working for madison square gardeners it’s got kind of a prestige where it’s like other even bigger venues people are much more kind of like let’s say there’s so many people wondering about backstage like the football stadium that they give up it’s like 30 different kinds of laminate so they just don’t bother you wearing anything that glimpses that you get through well there are certain places which have a certain prestige but the madison square is one of them coming in places like that yeah they have a thing about it um mexico and we weren’t allowed backstage mexico because we had the wheelchair we had the wrong laminates there were so many bootleg laminates that the real laminates were considered to be the fakes classic classic mexicans who was that in mexico where in mexico um [Music] but you were like close to texas yeah it wasn’t mexico city it was the one what’s the other big town is it there’s somebody el paso in texas it happened yeah but it’s mexico city just living there like one day there is the equivalent to smoking two packs a day that’s just bizarre there are about six or seven hundred people in this backstage area it’s like a football stadium and they’re all wearing these fake laminates there was only like you know like our little entourage or ten of us with like the real mccoy and the bloke wouldn’t let us in and it’s only like dimly became aware that we were like talking in the you know in a foreign language and we just arrived on a fucking humongous bus maybe we just were who and so then they proceeded to try and round up all these other people with fake memories and they spent about five minutes and i thought no no it doesn’t matter so then they just like barricaded us into this into the men’s toilets and everyone else just carried on as normal yeah but this was actually in the urinal yeah they’ve been packing people into this staging from about two o’clock in the afternoon and all the sanitation so you’re gonna go there again did you go down south in mexico no that’s just nice we did spend i mean we drove um we drove around but um never really got far enough away from the urban center not like in brazil we never actually went out and saw the country because we just kind of like we headed down there we played we came back but i mean it was a very interesting three days but not really three days i’d like to experience you should go to the to the yucatan down south i remember seeing this object come through and just last minute i moved my head back and then sort of like being going everything going after a couple seconds and coming to kind of like staggering the belt stream no just like i sang the next line i only missed one that’s true great photo with me after zero good luck blood [Music] [Laughter] [Music] that’s what isn’t that what um what’s your name’s being sued for at the moment oh no it’s happy mondays are being soon aren’t they pinching the tune i’d like to teach the world anyway right so we ended up in mexico um in the week of madison square gardens you also i think it was the same you played a charity gig at the ritz in new york yeah what was that aid of i can’t remember your charity and bill will remember that actually because he set it up i think if i’m right it was it was all to do with the canadian arab scandal and i think it was an aid of homeless arabic and and jewish american children half an hour to each you just you’d just be disclaimer like tell the arab and arab communities it was nothing to do but then we couldn’t just give the money to homeless arab children but no it’s arab orphans in new york we had to do it to jewish orphans in new york as well otherwise would have them on their backs as well the excellent concert that was actually yeah that was the last night [Music] purely for our amusement because the club is just so packed and you know the rest of the backstage areas like that like that corner we just couldn’t face the prospect of going yeah so we just actually went just straight from the van onto the stage three hours before um no it’s just like we wanted to go well i was about to get there early like simon does as well to kind of get a feel for the place let me see what the mood’s like what the crowds like what you’ve got to it was just so packed already that we didn’t bother going in but it was a good gig i remember it being quite funny i remember sitting down on the stage watching not doing wild thing just chatting with people in the front room wild thing he’s saying it at certain points now but low points in her career he has some wild thing on stage here three times i think he’s standing too never again i’ve never actually seen this event i mean what what is significant about it well it’s just absolutely awful because all he knew is like wow thing [Music] oh it just it was funny for us because it it highlighted his lack of timing which is why we liked it lots of gaps in it lots of stuff [Music] i think it was in september that roger joined and he’d just come from a stint with the force again this isn’t entirely clear from what i’ve got but no roger definitely joined earlier that roger can you give me roger’s number anyways roger joined for the kiss me talk because kiss me till roger was on it right all of it so he joined actually in dublin while i stood in dublin because we had the tour rehearsals in dublin in about the probably the april april 87 the first thing roger diddles i think was april or may 87 he was through with he was with us throughout that year where i got that from i got that from the guinness um who’s who rock stars yeah there’s a lot of them and there’s a lot of nice information about roger general and everything that’s been written about us people kind of muddy up that time because the reason why why roger was brought into the group was because lowell couldn’t play any of the cable diners on the kissimmee album so we had to get something to play keyboards that’s why i know that he was when we finished recording that and we did we did the cut in february of 87 so it must have been between february and may of 87. in fact he came and did he did what was the tube he did one of those i’m not even going to have to read the book it’s just going to get it out right here can you remember if that if that was around the time at the end of that tour that you decided that you were going to do a silver or that idea been around for a lot longer a lot longer when i was originally going to do a solo album was actually when simon left the group when we ended up doing let’s go to bed in the walk and those songs we did i actually did demo four songs i still got a tape for my solo so that’s when the whole thing started because i’ve got now about two hours worth of stuff most of it actually i reviewed it before we came here it’s pretty turgid i don’t think i’m gonna use it i don’t think after at the time i liked the idea of it because it was very kind of like small and yeah naive and kind of like inconsequential just didn’t mean anything to anyone else i didn’t want it to but now it would be contrived for me to do that because i’m not the same person so they just thought nothing those songs are just there but i think from time to time through the years i’ve kind of like had a dissatisfaction with the group whether it be with the lineup or like my part within the group or how i perceive like my role in the group and they just throw out the idea of a solo album to kind of shock people something like that okay do it on the own it’s there back in line it’s my cracking of videos oh yes okay yes yes we will play in full force or i’ll release the sword um now here’s a really quite good question probably just before you went off in the european tour at that point just 17 magazine revealed that your essential travel kit included crimson sculpture mary corn lipstick is that right right boston crimson sculpture crimson sculpture scorchers scorcher can i still use it i thought some of these things sounded wrong um all my eye pencils and something called my makums here i mean i’m not a great user of the ufc so but comes doesn’t sound to me like a no i couldn’t thought it was cool but i used at the time it had a hexagonal design on the front and it said things like ph one form you know it’s like dead scientific oh animal testing is it yeah it’s the only stuff that stays up on stage i tested it on myself it ran into my own eyes tonight stuff that didn’t work [Laughter] i can tell they tested earnings because this stuff runs into my eyes and it doesn’t hurt do you see that makeup she’s going fully very flat with the island [Laughter] i love all these things you’re gonna have protesters robert smith i’m gonna let it out you have the pet of protesters um let’s uh move ahead here um to october uh european tour starting in oslo and then stockholm i mean do you have any particular memories of that tour that are worth the kiss me too yeah no yeah in the morning which i presume from what i read was in stockholm and going out and watching people going to work and making you feel good does that bring any memories back yeah although i i my main was the first tour that we um started videoing we bought a video camera and perry would video the audience i remember all through that whole year oh is it just the only interesting thing yeah asking audiences yeah sitting backstage watching the all night perry would come in half an hour before the show and kind of put it on fast forward through the boring business this person’s got something good to say you know and it was really good it would get all the whole group round that’s what i’ll do and we talked about that would be mine what we were gonna do and it actually like really helped like the group performance i said because roger was like a newcomer as well and i was trying to like make everyone feel like part in a part of a group um he probably felt like a little bit left out and i just remember that that was when simon constantly tried to make lolla before we would go on stage trying to make him up with various things he’d always suggested like particularly good well this would look really good but really trust me and lol would be just on the point of being drunk enough to trust him i know that you’re gonna do something horrible but go and do it anyway he’d like to sit there and simon would do like a v on his nose or he’s like really really heavy i know going down i here accentuate his jowls or something with blusher and it just would just laugh you know just it was one of those one of those in jokes that the more it was done the funnier it got do you think a lot of that i mean because lol became the butt of a huge number of jokes do you think a lot of that was by the way of trying to get him to make his own decision to leave yeah i mean it said a huge number of jokes but i think i mean it was primarily simon which one is exclusively silent and and it stems not simon’s war against long well extend from when when me and simon were a three piece and lol was like a normal human and played drums and contributed and understood what was going on and talked lucidly and was a nice person to have around when simon rejoined lol had friends in the city who drove porsche cars rest his money about was a boring wanker and simon and it took like two years for that to happen and simon came back and was i think he was like born out of kind of he was utterly destroyed what love would become and his way of bettering him like all combat and that was just start to have a go at all times at all costs but he did it in a way it was i mean a lot of it was really stupid it was like banal something was genuinely surreal humor and someone would set up things just so that lol was going to get it at the end you know i mean just like constant um i mean one of them survives this day where simon laughs in the last thing during the hawaii fiber [Laughter] closer and closer the point would get at the end then you go oh as we all were i don’t have no idea why it was wife either but simon something had happened that triggered it and there were loads of things like you know tattoo from fantasy island it was all like just like trash culture that someone kind of weave in very tenuous links just to have a go at all but i mean but log deserved it really it never it didn’t come from anyone else i mean boris would kind of like if lowell was being like drunk and obstructs kind of like learning all over all you know burroughs would just fuck off that would be it that would be boris been horrible to laugh would be short sharp you know cheerful um and paul would you even bother saying anything paul would just like hit him i mean but that could be really obnoxious part of the bermonte conspiracy that’s taking over popular music and he i think severine is kind of you know a bit not really envious but i think he used to like ridicule me in a sort of half-joking way as well did all the benches about that i would stay you know that mary was my girlfriend and i led like a boring conventional kind of existence and i should get out and about all that sort of mentality and i could never see it and i said i get the best of both worlds from what i’m doing i’ve got like a best friend that’s always the same that i can always talk to i think i’ve ended up one last thing i’m vindicating i sort of think that they well i mean soon budgie and married now so that’s nice i [Music] i think it’s pretty wasted in the benches he’s all right he’s got you know similar kind of chip though about talking to people that aren’t someone um [Music] because everyone was really horrible to marry which i couldn’t bear but they used to do that to wind me up it’s a great pleasure reminding me i think that was what i didn’t like but it didn’t seem to me to be appealing people didn’t no they’re not really strange girl she’s one of the most intellectually pretentious people that i’ve ever met anyway this is irrelevant back to law what is the other charming soul um [Music] i mean was it just that just slagging off for his own sake or do you think simon everyone wanted him to leave the group because there’s two there’s two things that occur to me about that leave the group or um get your act back together and become a human being again i mean was the hope that he would be pushed into one of those two things i i think it was left up to me to get lol back to normal back to being a human being and it was like and if log didn’t change that path it was kind of up to simon to make sure he left the group it was that sort of you know that was that was the balance that was sort of like that but things i mean i used to offer like counselling and friendship really like right the way through to in fact even while we were still at brushwood doing the disintegration stuff i remember sitting at the table with lol there and saying that this is really like your last chance if you don’t stop drinking now you’re going to be out of the group whether i want you at the group or not because there isn’t going to be a group of you to be in or out because everyone’s going to leave but i mean it all started threatening to leave they would have yeah yeah i mean if i hadn’t thrown out the group then the others would seriously after the record had been made you just have gone they weren’t going to go on tour with lowell again none of them could say nor could i really honest but i decided more sort of pity i kind of remembered what he was like and i suppose i deluded myself longer than anyone else that he could become that person again but um and simon and was kind of egged on by pole really the making of the videos can you remember anything you were saying how you would sit and watch the videos and and there would be things on them that were interesting and you’re people saying can you remember any particularly interesting things that panthers said that appeared on those videos or was it only interesting at the time it was only interesting at the time because you were kind of you’ve because you knew those people like there but they were only like 100 feet right through a few walls and you were going to go out and play to them and there they were just like most people and they were like talking they were talking to the camera talking to you they said oh robert you know yeah what do you think about this i know you’ll never get a chance to answer but i’m like if you could say something down like can you wish sansa happy birthday just really little things but it was really good to see this major did you do those things yeah because when you went outside you actually felt like you knew some people in the audience and it made the whole audience kind of like were you ever able to sort of address people by name because i’d used to cheat and take notes out on stage yeah actually i used to give them to jimmy olsen in a monitor man needless to say no and uh and clark can’t see the lighting from technology he would hand me these notes so you know don’t forget to wish veins like that but mainly it was just um perry would ask him about what songs that they they would want to hear that we might not play so you try pick out pure fans once that obviously look like you’re fast we try and like chuck a couple in the encores it was really for that but it kind of developed into this sort of ritual where we’d all get around the telling like and talk about the performance behalf of now and i found it really you know it enhanced what we did an awful lot and um i think that sort of women began to feel low wasn’t really part of it because lol wouldn’t do that he just saw the uh fancy her you know it’d be that and you think oh that’s like come on you don’t need to say it is like i’m having a video conversation with one particular girl for more than five minutes deep down he’s thinking she’s nice it’s very nice why is the ratio of girls to boys always like 90 90 to 10 percent why is it always the attractive girls that get on the video no he wasn’t like that it was very fair in fact he would stand there and not anyone that wanted to come up you know you two took a stage with him by actually putting a booth around there man with the camera um no it’s good i mean the thing was that we couldn’t we had to stop doing it when perry was got in the group this is not it was because it was perry doing it yeah that people actually would feel at ease and would actually talk to him you know he’s kind of hard to stop the camera and show them just how you can talk to anyone he’s never never seems to be stumped so it was a valuable yeah i mean that’s my overriding memory that what’s made that tool stand out really and also the shirts were all matching shirts white shirts were different we all learned a different pattern from the catch sleeve on our shirts which i thought was really cheesy and that moment of life very reservoir [Music] you …