KMKMKM Promotional 12" interview 1987

country and western song and I don't think people would be that surprised. I hope we never do. Porl loves it, you see. He actually wrote a country and western song and pleaded for it to be included on the album but I haven't gone that insane yet. A lot of it sounds new, and a lot of it is, but it's like we've gone into areas we've never worked in before but at the same time it's taken a lot of elements that we've used over the years. It's just the actual flavour of some of the songs, particularly some of the slower songs. Like `A Thousand Hours' would be a song I would really have loved to have written around the time of `Faith' because it encompasses an enormous slice of what I was feeling like at that time and how I still feel but I think it's much more accomplished now. With a song like `Shiver and Shake', that's what `Give me it' always wanted to be. It's just like a really vicious, really angry song.

There's all bits of what we've done, but made that much better because it's the whole group. There's input from different personalities rather than always just me. It's a very personal point of view. I don't suppose other people will see it in quite the same way because they'll only hear it for the first time as The Cure, whereas I'm hearing everything we do from the point when it doesn't even exist and I see it right from the point when someone will give me a cassette and say, "What about this? ", so I'm obviously looking at this record in a very different way. For the first time I'm seeing the group work as a group. For the first time ever. Musically it's never happened like this before. Everyone that hears it thinks it's the best thing we've done but it's making the others horribly arrogant. "See, if we'd have written the songs all along", they keep saying to me.

-"The Kiss", the first track, is a really really brutal opening song. What kind of feel were you going for there?

Robert : I worked myself up into the frame of mind to do the guitar part in one go so that it would sound like an actual piece rather than bother about drop-ins and structure and stuff and it's just played through until it naturally ends. I just thought it would be good to start an album with this ... It's got such pretty songs on it and it's generally so nice to listen to and quite easy to listen to I thought it would be good that you have to get through 6 and a half minutes of bitterness before you actually start to enjoy it. It's made to appear as diverse as it can by the actual way the songs run into each other. They're all a completely different song but I thought the other extreme would be to put a song like, `Why can't I be you' or `Catch' or `Hot Hot Hot!!!' or one of the easier songs right at the head of the album and people would think, "Oh, this is going to be jolly", and would get the wrong idea. Whatever we put at the head of the album you're going to get the wrong idea of what the record's about really. I think I've never listened to the first track on a record without listening to the rest of it, even if I hate it. Generally I feel that people should be prepared to listen to the first side as a whole.

-"Catch" is quite a whimsical song. Is that going to be another single?

Robert : That'll be the next single, yeah. I'm not loath to put out a second single from this record because there's so much disagreement about what's on the album. There's at least 5 different singles. There's probably agreement on `Why can't I be you', like there's a majority agreement within the group that, that should be the single but certainly after that we are going to do `Catch' because I think it would be a nice change and we can do a nice film with it with Pap and it'll be like a summer record.

- Is `Pap' the nickname you've got for Tim Pope?

Robert : Yeah.

- OK now. Tim Pope's been involved in directing all of your videos for the last four years or so. In the current video for `Why can't I be you' he managed to get you dancing. How did he manage that?

Robert : The thing about the videos is that he always asks me about what I think the video should be. He always says, "Go on, tell me what you think". Nine times out of ten what I think the video should be, he's already thought the video should be, within broad parameters. We think the same, which is why he does our videos. He has the same sort of visual sense as I do of the group and with `Why can't I be you' the whole group felt we should do some choreographed dancing as it would be the last thing that people would expect from The Cure. I can see why now, having made it! It's not exactly Five Star. The woman who was trying to teach us gave up. She was despairing at how inept we were.

- We look at you in the video and you're obviously taking the dancing so seriously...

Robert : You had to! I was desperately concentrating all the time. Like, one, two, one two three; two three, two two three. It was like awful, it really was! I can see why we've never made a choreographed video before. We'll never make another one either. But it looks funny, which is what it's designed to do.

-'Why can't I be you' is in the charts at the moment. Is chart success that important to you now?

Robert : No more than it ever has been. It's relatively important in different places because it means more or less to us in different places. It's always been immaterial but it would be frustrating ... It's difficult for me to say it doesn't mean anything because everything we've done has always been slightly more popular than anything we've done before so it's easy for me to be very dismissive about it but I think I would be very frustrated if we had less success than we have ... if the records were completely ignored by the media I would be a bit distraught I think because it would mean that people weren't being exposed to what we were doing. I enjoy The Cure getting played on radio because it means people have to listen to it if they've got the radio on. It doesn't matter if people like it or not. I dislike 99% of things that I'm exposed to so I don't see why if people dislike The Cure they should get away from us. But it's not important in the sense of status or anything.

In one way we would never have had this longevity if we'd had chart success a few years ago because we would have been too easily labelled and people would know exactly what we're like. Now we're able to deal with it; we're much more slippery now. We can escape tags and things because I'm so used to playing the extremely foolish games that you have to indulge in. Doing television shows now we're much more adept at putting ourselves across exactly how we want to. We're never been overawed because we've never been desperate for that sort of attention because we've concentrated as much on playing live as we have doing anything else. I can't, on the one hand, say I honestly and sincerely worry about chart success when the last time I bought a record was probably over a year ago.

- So if that's not important to you then have you got any yardstick by which you measure your success; whether you determine whether something's successful or not?

Robert : It's difficult. I never think of what we're doing in terms of success. I've only measured what we do by what I think of it if I stood outside of it and looked at it. I always think that every facet of what we do, what we look like, how I conduct myself, how I'm perceived generally and what the group does, what we sound like, the whole thing, I always sit there and look at it in a very broad way and think, "If I was outside this would I want to be in The Cure, would I think The Cure was a good group, do I think that we're doing good stuff?" and it's just that. I compare us to people that I like; our contemporaries that I admire. I think, "Are we as good as that?" I never think, "Oh, grief, we're not in the top ten", because I look at the top ten and I think I'd seriously rather hang myself than be there if I had to be like the people that are in the top ten. It's a different way of gauging what we do. I'm aware of us being successful and it would have to please you and I would be lying shamefacedly if I said it didn't because it means we're doing something that's being heard by more people. But I still feel that I'd rather The Cure did something and it was liked for reasons that I'd like. I'd rather have a smaller audience that we meant more to than a big audience we meant nothing to. That's part of my nature which is why we've always been slightly outside of the mainstream. I think we always will be even if we sold 10 million records I still don't think we'd ever be accepted as a mainstream group.

- In `Torture', what actually happens to the person there? It goes from something light like `Catch' then boom, you're at it again in `Torture'.

Robert : It's a sort of bondage song I think really.

- It sounds like an S & M (sadism and masochism) tale?

Robert : Yeah, it is a bit. We'd better not go into that too deeply. That reflects just another bizarre facet of the group. One that will probably be brought to light as this year drags on. I've written all of the words on the record but on a few of the songs I've taken phrases or senses. I've asked the others for bits of words so that I can get ... I realise that the record does reflect a group much more now. In the past I've often said that and really felt that a lot of it is just me because I've been writing the music and writing the words and doing the interviews and the group line-up has changed from time to time and there's never been that sort of stability where I can honestly say, "This is a group", but with this record it is as much the others as it is me. I couldn't expect to have an entire album of words which they disagreed with or weren't happy with. I could have I suppose but it would have been a bit pointless; they wouldn't have felt as happy with it. Some of the songs reflect what the others think as well but I've actually written them because I suppose I'm more adept at writing them than they are.

- Do you find it easy to write then?

Robert : I did for this record. I don't normally and never in the past. Beyond a certain point I reach a sort of . . . I get stuck, but this time I didn't at all. In fact I wrote more songs than we had recorded. I wrote 27. I wrote for two songs that we never got around to recording. I don't know why. It all sort of came tumbling out, it was quite odd. I think `In Between Days' and `Close to Me' and it's a long time. It's like two years and a lot of things have happened to me and a lot of things are stored up inside me. I've also been writing in that time as well so it wasn't like I sat down and wrote the entire album in a day. I tend to write ... I've just got into the habit of writing all the time. Most of it's awful but even if I come up with one page out of a hundred that I like it makes it worthwhile.

- The track `if Only Tonight We Could Sleep', it sounds as if you're an insomniac - are you a nocturnal creature?

Robert: Yeah; I am more and more. I never go to bed before five anymore; I just can't sleep before five. I've always prefered the night time ever since I was about fifteen years old, just because it was much quieter - there's less going on. It's just easier to sort of sit and do things particularly as I don't really like sunlight very much. Don't know, I do prefer the night though. But not because it's much more mysterious or anything, it's really because it's quieter, and I prefer it.

- There haven't been too many sitar sounds on a Cure record before, have there?

Robert : No.

- Who's idea was it to put them on?

Robert: I guess it's just an under-used sound. It's only because we've got this keyboard that had a really good sitar sound in it, that we decided to use it, and I've been listening to Ravi Shankar recently. Someone said "Ah; it's very Sixty, very like 1967", but it isn't, it's very like Fourteenth Century India. I feel, more than Sixty Seven.

- You weren't able to get a real sitar player in it?

Robert: Well I've got a sitar, but I can't play it very well, and we didn't really want to get anyone in from the outside to play on anything. We did have this two bits of Sax on it, but that was just by chance, that was just because I was drunk in a bar and this bloke happened to be playing and I invited him back to the studio to play in the record - I didn't remember very much about it the next day, but it sounds really good.

- What tracks were they?

Robert :`Hey You' and 'Icing Sugar'. It was just when we were in Nassau, this bloke was just wailing away. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a good idea, I shouldn't say that.

- What's the story behind `How Beautiful You Are', because that line, "the weary man with greyish eyes" and all that?

Robert : That's the literary one on the record. It's from a Baudelaire short story. Someone gave me a book of Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine short stories and poems, and I read through them all and one just really struck me - because I'd actually written a song like that, round the time we were doing `Faith' about how you think that you really know someone, and you really love someone, and suddenly discover that they can react to something you find very important, and they react in a totally different way, and you can't believe that it's the same person. I had a set of words that had that sort of idea in it and when I read the story I thought - it's the same with anything, nothing's new, it's all like different ways of - I always feel it reflects in the very basic emotions. I don't think I've ever discovered anything that someone hasn't discovered before. But everything's rediscovery anyway. So it was just like putting the idea, once I'd read it I thought it's really a good idea actually having it so that you take it down to one incident. I tried doing it into a very general sense of not understanding someone, but then I thought I should actually take one particular incident and write a song - that was about the most difficult song to write because I wanted to get it just right, so that it sounded like a song rather than just a literary exercise. But I think it's turned out really good that one, I'm pleased with it.

- Is writing to you like real self discipline, do you have to work and work at it?

Robert : No, I write and I write really fast. If I can't think what I want to put into some of it, but I know the idea I just write in the side, in the margin, what idea I want, but I never bother stopping the flow to worry about rhyming. Then I'll read it back and I'll drop in words, but a lot is very haphazard, I mean that sounds as if I do it in a very cultured, very skillful manner but I don't at all, but quite often I'll go out and start singing with a gap in a song, and I'll just sing or repeat a couple of lines or I'll think "Ah, this is it" and I'll stop the tape and put it in. There's all different ways - the other times I'll just have a page of lines and I just pick them at random, my first pass at singing a vocal, and I just see what sounds best, then I build the song up from that. I think "That sounds like a good chorus", depending again what I want to convey in the song. If it's a specific then I spend much more time deliberating over the correct choice of words, if it's more like a mood you can get away with a lot more. On this record some of the writing is some of the best writing I've done because it does actually convey very specific things; whereas in the past if I've been a bit lazy I've thought "Oh well". I've also in the past written quite obscure songs which I've never really bothered if people understand, whereas in this one I've been a bit more careful about what I'm conveying and I realise that there's not that much ambiguity in a lot of the songs that we've done this time - it's very obvious what they're about.

- Like `Snake Pit' for instance. Is there a particular location?

Robert : Yeah, there was a particular incident that happened quite a while ago that had stuck in my mind. With a lot of those songs, say like `Hot, Hot, Hot' - I sit there and I'll think (not when we're doing the album but at any time and just when you have a revere) I think of something that I haven't thought about in years, and I just make a note of the actual incident so that when I come to write, I just think to myself "What did I feel then?" because it's like things which I experienced when I was younger that I'm probably not as aware of now, I'm not exposed to as much. We were far less closeted than we are now, I'm very aware of it, and in a lot of cases I'm drawing on experiences that happened before The Cure started to become successful, because it's a very false environment that I spend a lot of my time in, and I don't really want to write songs about being in hotel rooms or going on planes - it's very tedious so like last year I purposely took a couple of months away and that's why I didn't do much live work and people say "Why didn't you play?" and things like this, but if I didn't experience things outside of the group, there would be absolutely nothing for us to do that would be new - for me there would be nothing fresh and I'd get very tired of it very quickly. Given the choice between the real life and this I'd rather take the real life - I'd rather have both.

- Where did you go?

Robert : Just around England. I just went off and saw the Lake District again; went to Wales; just to have time to just sit and be normal really.

- So what is the incident or the location to go on `Snake Pit'?

Robert : That happened on someone's birthday a few years ago. It was in a terrible sort of disco. It's literal, I was just taken somewhere in a car full of girls and it was really just a dreadful sort of experience ... I shouldn't say anything much further.

- Your voice seems to be quite strong on the album. Did you have to practise a lot for that or had you done some touring before you actually did the vocals on the album?

Robert : No, I hadn't done any singing. We finished the film in Orange in the end of August and we went straight to the album. I think it's a lot more mental, my singing, I mean it's more of a mental approach than the physical thing. I think I've always could've sung like this, but in the past it hasn't suited me to - right through `Seventeen Seconds', `Faith' and `Pornography', the songs were sung (as I sang them) they were very very plain and simple and I didn't ever need to, I never felt the need to affect my voice in any way. Since `The Top' I've experimented more with how I can sound. On this one I've gone quite peculiar on something like `Hot Hot Hot' - it's almost like gospel.

- It's almost as if you're consciously trying...

Robert : Yes I am doing it but I never practise it. I go out and I just do it and then I come back in and if the general consensus from the looks on people's faces in the control room is like beaming and happy then I think that I'd better listen to it back. If they're all very sullen then I think "Maybe this isn't good work", but `Hot Hot Hot' was the most revolutionary departure really from anything I've sung before.

- 'Hot Hot Hot' is the first really funky number for The Cure, isn't it?

Robert : Yes, it's pure Chic.

- Had you been listening to a lot of black music before you decided to do that one?

Robert: No, a lot of these songs were, and a lot of what we do involves things like `Hot Hot Hot' and if we're doing the soundcheck or if we're in the studio, or where ever we are, particularly now that Boris is playing the drums, and he can play any kind of rhythm, any kind of beat, a salsa or just anything - but he'll start playing something, and everyone just joins in, and `Hot Hot Hot' was just one of those things. It was just like a bass-line that I'd had and I was thinking "This is a really typical sort of funk bass" and I was just playing it to Simon and Boris just joined in on the drums and I thought "This will be really funny if we turned this into a song" so Porl came out and started playing chickenpicking guitar and with half an hour we had the song. Again it was really spontaneous.

It's just the sort of things I mean in the past, because I would've had a much more precise idea of what the record was supposed to be like, there was never any room to do things like that - which is good; the records have always had a reason behind them, this one was really to catch what the group's like, so things like that, if it sounded good and it works, then it was going to go on the record because there was no reason for it not to go on. And obviously we didn't sit down and think, "We should do a funk song", because if we thought like that we would never actually do anything. The only thing that is like that is Country and Western, and Porl would always come and say "Oh, I've got this great Country and Western lick" knowing that I'm going to get extremely upset.

- So what's the song actually about - were you going more for the feel there or were you actually trying to say something - because all this business about lightning striking?

Robert : Yes, lightning striking is just a veiled term for relevation. Again I shouldn't say too much about it - you sort of read into it what you want really. It just seemed like an exciting phrase rather than saying "The first time I realised that ..." It is a phrase to struck by lightning when you suddenly realise something.

- A lot of the songs that are on the album, including `One More Time', they've all got quite long musical introductions to them before you actually hear some vocals on it - did it work out that because you had more input from the rest of the group that it turned out to be a more musical album?

Robert : Yes, certainly with the slow ones; they could've been, virtually all of them could have been longer: they did quite a lot of them and decided at the time that they were going to be short, because it would have turned into, it was in danger of rambling too much - I didn't know how many slow songs were going to go on, and how many fast, and I thought that if the balance tips towards five or six very long, very slow pieces, the record isn't going to be a very fair reflection of what we're doing. But when we were going through the - we were actually just playing them before we started recording - they were very very long, something like `One More Time' we'd play for half an hour, so that you would know all the bits you could do in them, and all the little tunes that there might be in it. So it's quite hard when you've got songs like that to decide how long they should be, because I was always doing the vocals after that.

I would just be doing rough guide vocals and I'd never know how emotional I was going to get and whether the intro should be longer or whether I should come in hard to the start of the song and have a long outro - it's difficult to know those sorts of things, a lot of it's just gambling really, I think it worked. I think that `One More Time', if we were to redo it, would be longer - It's the only song on the record that I would make longer. Something like `Icing Sugar' which is just mental, it's one of Simon's songs and Boris - it's just drums and like weird stuff, that was originally eight minutes long, I mean it had everything on it, like percussion and birdsong and thunder -- it was just one of those things that we had an enormous big slab of it and everyone just put on it what they wanted and then it was then edited together to form a complete song.

- 'Like Cockatoos', is that another literary one?

Robert : The title obviously comes from the Patrick White book, but the song has nothing to do with, and has no relevance to the book at all, but the sound on the beginning of it was actually supposed to be a string section on the emulator and I just played through the different sounds and thought "that sounds like, if you imagine, like a big flock of birds taking off" and I thought to myself "It's like cockatoos" and so to recognise the songs, because they never have proper titles all the time we're going through it - like `Hot Hot Hot, was `That Chic One' or the `Funk One' - so that it doesn't influence me to what the contents of the words can be finally, because if you give them a title straight away then you start always to think under that title. So that one became `Like Cockatoos', because it was the one that had that sound like the cockatoos - but it's actually nothing to do with the book. But anyone who knows about The Cure knows that I have great fun with all Patrick White's literature. it's influenced me in the past lyrically in a couple of songs, but not really on this record. The only literary one on this record is `How Beautiful You Are' - there isn't really anything else, because I didn't actually read anything else which inspired me to write, everything else just comes from direct experience, which is unusual, because there's usually two songs that are nicked.

- The `Perfect Girl', was that written for anybody?

Robert : Yeah ... Who ever's listening.

- So, do you often write songs specifically for people or is that like a new departure for you'?

Robert : I always have specifics in mind, even if I'm writing very general mood songs, I always know exactly what - I mean it would be impossible otherwise to write a song - well it wouldn't be impossible but it would be very weak. I think, to just sit down and put together a bunch of words for the sake of it, it would be awful. I always know who I'm writing about, I'm the only person that knows - I would never tell, I mean the rest of the group don't know either. I would never say because I think it would take away some of the mystery of the song, I also think it could mean a lot of trouble, I think as well, if everyone knew exactly what all the songs were about. So I always think that when I write songs that they have specific people in mind or specific events that those people or the people that were present at the time know, and no one else is going to, but the other good thing about not saying exactly what they're about is that they can appeal to other people because they're not pinned down.

- You've been with the same girl for, what, fourteen years?

Robert: Yeah, fifteen now, I think.

- Are you married to her?

Robert : No - it's just a friendship.

- Does she criticise your work?

Robert : Oh Yeah.

- Do you take any notice of it?

Robert : Yeah, a lot - particularly lyrically, she doesn't really musically, because she doesn't write music, so I wouldn't take much notice. But lyrically she's very critical, yes. She often says "You shouldn't sing that, it sounds stupid" and I either agree or disagree. She doesn't ever impose herself, I generally have to ask her opinion because she knows how much it all means. She does contribute - Simon has been going out with the same girl for twelve or thirteen years, and I've known her for that long as well, and she sort of says...

When I was doing vocals for this record we had what we called `The Panel', which was Simon, Mary and Carol, and they were the three people that out of everyone I would pay the most attention to when I asked, if I was doing a song like `One More Time' or `1000 Hours' if it sounded convincing. I was singing it and I was being very involved in what I was singing and I wouldn't want a lot of people there. I would always want those three there, and Dave who's our engineer and I'd go in and say "Does this sound right?" and if they didn't think it sounded right, even though I knew that I was singing it right from the bottom of my heart - I thought that if it doesn't sound right to them, then it's never going to sound right to anyone else. I take notice of the others in the group like Boris, particularly for a lot of the structure of songs and the tempo, so everyone within The Cure setup has their own particular role to play. I'm not isolated to the degree where I take no notice, as Mary has known me for so long, she's obviously got more of an inside to what I'm trying to do anyway.

- 'Shiver and Shake' - that's a pretty angry song. Do you have to be in a certain type of mood to write lyrics like that?

Robert : Yeah, it's a peculiar song actually to do, that was the one song it took me - I had about twenty goes probably, singing that - everyday I would sort of half -heartedly have a go and it was only on one particular day near the end of recording when something happened and I thought, "Right" and we were doing something else, and I had a phonecall and I thought "Right, this is the moment" and I just said "Quick, put on the tape for `Shiver and Shake" and I just went and sang it one one go. I like that vocal, because you can tell it's just done, and it's really raw - it's good, and it also just breaks up and I don't quite hit the notes, I like it when I do vocals like that. Some of the others I took like quite a lot of time on, like working out what or how I should sing it, like "All I Want' - I thought that through quite a few times to get it all in the right place, but with `Shiver and Shake' it was all just a rant really, it was good fun - once I'd done it I knew that that was the one song that even if it hadn't sounded right, if I'd vocally been flat it would've had to stay on because it captured exactly what the song was supposed to. But I actually wrote the words to it quite early last year, I had the words for a long time.

- To write lyrics generally, do you need to be in a particular mood, or do you work best under pressure?

Robert: No, I don't - I work worst under the manufactured pressure that you generally find in a recording studio. In the past I've gone in with less words than I've needed and I've ended up writing words that when I look back I can see the songs that didn't have enough time spent on them, or that were written under pressure. But with this, I'd say that out of twenty five or twenty seven songs, probably about fourteen or fifteen sets of lyrics were virtually - I never finish a set of words until it's actually sung as I'm changing it all the time even when I'm out singing, but a lot of the basic ideas other than a few lines were already there, so I knew I had more than enough to do a single album, which is all I envisaged doing when we went into the studio anyway, so there was no problem to continue writing once we were there, because recording it at Miraval, which was like a vineyard, more than a studio really, it was just ...

- Whereabouts is that, it's in France isn't it?

Robert : Yes it's in Provence, it was just so different to where we've recorded before. We've always recorded in London, or around London, and it was just so glorious to get up and walk outside and it was autumn, and you could walk or sit in the middle of a field and finish off a set of words, and there would be nothing to intrude - no traffic and no people, and no phones - it was just perfect, perfect isolation, really. I lived for a month, which is like the record, which is the first time I've been allowed to do that, because always you come out of the studio and you either get into a cab, and you see the real world, and it's raining and there's people going to work, or whatever and it breaks the atmosphere, whereas with this, all or the only reason why we were there for a month was to make the record, and as we'd demo-ed virtually everything in a little eight track studio for two weeks, so we knew what was going to work and we knew that it was going to be good, so the atmosphere was really perfect, so there was a lack of pressure which made it such a good record.

- The last track on the album is `Fight' - it's a pretty positive song isn't it?

Robert : Yeah, which is why we stuck it at the end - that's the most unusual song on the record, I think, from The Cure point of view, from the historical point of view, because we've never really done a positive song like that - lyrically as positive as that - where I'm actually saying "Do something about it". It's usually like the songs you're either being cornered or forced to do something - this is almost anthemic. There's like a pride involved which I felt when we were making the record, and we were there, and I was thinking it's so good that after all this time, we're still doing things that are so much better than before; it's disproving historically what happens to groups, how they're supposed to dry off, get worse, get very flabby and lose touch and all the other things that do happen to 99% of the groups after the first week it appears, but after the first two records, and I just really felt pleased and I just translated it into when I was starting, of how I felt, which is the same as how I feel now - sort of not believing in other people's criticism, and actually doing something about it.

The reason why the group started was for very positive reasons - it was to react against the dross, and that's the reason why the group still continues. I haven't heard a record that's as good as this, recently, there've been a few like Kate Bush's album's as good as this - it sounds dreadfully big headed doesn't it, but just from my point of view from what I like --- if I was looking at the group from an outsiders point of view, I think it's the best thing we've done, but I thought there had to be a song in it that translates the pride in it. But it was funny singing it, there was a very strange as well. It kind of surges into this `rise up and Fight' sort of chorus. I can just see them punching the air now.

- I believe you've also filmed a concert in Orange which is coming out soon called `The Cure in Orange'-- - why did you want to do a concert film?

Robert : Again, it was all part of the retrospective air that was about everything last year, and the group had reached the point where we'd played in America, and I thought we'd reached the point with the songs we were playing and the line-up as it was, and just the show, that it had to end last year and I thought that it would be really nice just to capture it. Initially it was just for our own benefit - we were going to film it like a video and say "That was me" and we thought about it and thought how we could do it and we got Tim Pap interested - he'd never made a full length film, and the more we talked about it the more we found that it would be easier to do, because we were presenting ourselves on stage anyway, with the light show. We were playing the songs - it was all there, it wasn't as if we had to do anything. Once we roped Tim in and got him interested, he just sort of took the whole thing over. I mean it's really his film.

- It's his first feature film isn't it?

Robert .- Yeah, it's his perspective on us playing in a concert. He felt that over the past four years he's made The Cure too small, he's very worried about putting us always onto a small screen, and only showing one side visually - of what we are - he's always taken the more humourous side to what we do, and he wanted to redress the balance by making a film which was, I mean it looks enormous, the place was picked especially - he went down there and said there were these old amphitheatres in the south of France and they would look really perfect to play there, so it's his film, he's directing it - all we did is we just played the concert, and he was supposed to capture it. But the thing is he was also on stage - it's not a film of a concert it's far more than that there's a lot of surprising things in it which .. .. It's unlike anything that anyone has seen before, but as it would be, with Tim doing it. But then again, it's like when we go out and play concerts this year, it'll be a completely new batch of songs; it will be a different line-up, we're going to have a sixth member.

- Who's that going to be?

Robert : I'm not allowed to say yet, because he's with another group at the moment and we're stealing him.

- Is he well known?

Robert : No, the group is though.

- So how important do you think your image is these days?

Robert : I think the group image is really important. I never think of me having an image. If I know that I can cut my hair off like I did last year, I know that it matters as little to me as it always has. I look how I choose to look, it has nothing really to do with being in a group. I've got my hair back almost to what it was like this time last year cos I feel like it. I think it looks better on me than short hair. The actual image of the group we think about, because obviously with five, and there's soon going to be six, it's more difficult to have a coherent image rather than . . . I wouldn't like the group to be seen as five people. Even though there are five people involved I'd much prefer to look at the group as a unified front, like an us against them sort of idea.

But I think it's far less a visual thing, The Cure's image, than how we do things. The image is built up as much through what we don't do rather than what we do do. It certainly has nothing to do with us all wearing the same shirts. It goes much deeper than that. We've always had a very proud and very obstinate attitude to what we do in that we do it for ourselves and we do it for people like us who are going to like it so we never feel like anyone's doing us any favours by allowing us to be played on the radio. We think that we should be played on the radio and seen all the time. When people know that, they know what we're like and they know we're very dismissive of the whole thing, the very unimportant side of being in a group. That's the sort of image that I worry about. It would be awful if we went soft. The whole thing would fall to pieces I think.

- Does your self-confidence increase with success?

Robert : I've always had confidence in what I've done because I know that by the time it gets to the point where other people can get their hands on it or can listen to it, I've already agonised about it so much that I know it's right. It's right for me. In that sense I'm very selfish about everything that we do. I've always been self confident. You can be quiet and self confident, and I'm not a very extrovert person in public. I mean I am in the videos and I am on stage, I must be to even walk out on stage but I don't seek attention. I'm quietly confident (laughs). How very cliched, very hackneyed!

- Do you feel any sense of responsibility to set an example to young fans?

Robert : This is the one difficult area of us becoming popular is me having to come to terms with that people see me as someone larger than life. I can never get used to it because particularly being with Mary, I'd never think of myself as anything other than me. It's difficult when you know that everything you're doing is going to be reported on and photographed. I can't throw up in a club anymore like I used to without worrying about the consequences. I would imagine a lot of people would like us because we do what we want and we are normal. I don't really need to think about setting an example because I set an example to myself so I don't really have to worry about anyone else. I hate myself if I do something. I'll think the next day, "Why on earth did I say that, why did I do that?" Over the course of the years I've got used to thinking probably more than other people do about what I'm going to do; if it's going to affect anyone else. I never bother if it isn't. At the same time I don't feel responsible in the way of thinking, "Hey kids, this is your Uncle Robert saying don't do this..." but I haven't done anything over the last few years which I wouldn't want anyone to know about anyway so I don't have to agonise over it too much. I've always absolved myself of that sort of responsibility. I don't see why I should be forced into it just because our records are popular. That's why I don't put myself forward - I try not to.

- Does the absurdity of the whole music business and the whole thing ever strike you?

Robert : No more so than life! We never see it. We never go to anything that's `music bizzy'. The whole thing about the selling of records and the complete disregard for what they contain horrifies me, it doesn't strike me as particularly absurd. The race to be number one; the way that people conduct themselves and the emphasis being geared on sales and success and over a period of time you become so aware that no-one actually gives a toss what you're doing apart from the people that will take it home and listen to it. I always think of the link between me and the person that's going to listen to what we do or see the concert. I never ever spend any time worrying about what goes on in between. Everything's done within the whole little Cure world and then it's shipped out. We give birth to it and it's there, it's complete. All people have got to do is listen to it if they want to or experience it if they want to.

- In the videos you do it seems like Lol always draws the short straw when it comes to being tortured...

Robert : Lol drew the short straw when he dropped from his mother's womb.

- Is this a master plan to always make Lol suffer in the videos?

Robert: The reason why Lol has always been in the group is because he's always been that foil for that side of my character in particular and he's always been willing to put up with it. What you don't see is him giving it all back. He has become . . . He always has been the scapegoat, it's just that it's developed in the videos particularly because Pap sees it and draws it out. It's just natural really, he's picked on by everyone. He's like a Stan Laurel personality. Everyone picks on him. He doesn't seem to mind though. He relishes it.

- Do you believe in God?

Robert : No I don't believe in God really. In my worst moments I have belief in absolutely nothing. I think everything is as it seems.

- Don't you believe in yourself?

Robert : Most of the time I have no belief in my own existence after I die, no. Which is where a lot of the depression comes from in a lot of the songs. Everything's so hollow if you actually feel like that and you can't ever shake it. I went through a very cynical phase - there's still vestiges of it which only leaves me to believe that people have faith because they're scared and they won't accept their own finite nature. But I don't know. If you believe something it's true. I confront it all the time. Everytime I go up in an aeroplane I confront my own mortality.

- Does that bother you, flying?

Robert : Yeah. Every fibre of my being screams that I shouldn't be up there. I think you've got to. If you think that beneath your feet there's nothing, it's just survival instinct. I tingle all over. I hate flying. I wouldn't stop it though, through being scared, because that would be admitting that you were scared of your own death, which I don't really think I am.

- Can you see a finite end to it (The Cure)?

Robert : Not in real terms but in an abstract way I can see me not having to do an interview and not having to get up in the morning and play a concert. I don't think about it. I think it will present itself very naturally. I've always thought that, even when we hadn't even made the first album. I always thought the end of the group would present itself very naturally. I thought for a while in 1982 that it would stop, after `Pornography', that we wouldn't do anything else and then it tumbled into the next bit of The Cure. I think it'll be really obvious when we we should stop. I'll wake up and think, "Oh God, this isn't appealing any more". When it comes it will be easy to stop because our commitments are always... I make sure they're never made that far in advance so that it allows me the freedom to wake up and think, "I don't really want to do this much longer".

(thank you to wylKO for the scans !!)