The Cure in Belo Horizonte. Can you believe it? I pinch myself at the hall of Real Palace hotel, where the band is passing through just now, coming from Rio de Janeiro. I’m sitting beside the photographer Fabiana Figueiredo, waiting for the journalist Jean-Yves de Neufville, from Bizz Magazine, to try something apparently impossible – an interview with Laurence Tolhurst and Simon Gallup for Gass.

From the start I’ve already given up on any attempt to contact Robert Smith. An obvious reason: as the guitarist is the most known member of The Cure, he certainly would be relentlessly stalked by fans, journalists, groupies and curious people, interested only in annoying any celebrity that may arrive in Brazil. My guess was correct. So I didn’t hesitate to choose my other targets: Simon is know as "Mad Bob’s" best friend and Laurence is the only original member left, with many stories to tell. Now the only essential thing missing is this – that I can manage to talk to them.

It’s almost 10pm when Jean-Yves introduces me to Robert Stephenson, Fiction’s public relations, a talkative and kind Irish guy. He gets interested when I say that I edit a fanzine and I promptly give him some numbers. In a second he disappears into the restaurant with my "gift". And seconds later, by the restaurant door, I have a pleasant sight: all the Cure members, but Robert (which stayed all night locked in his room), were having a cheerful dinner, seeing Gass with notable curiosity. I cross my fingers.

Meanwhile, Fabiana was spending her time between the loo and the pharmacy, suffering from headache, cold sweat and low blood pressure... The minutes crawl like centuries until I see Laurence leaving the restaurant to look for me. It was time.

We sat at the bar, by red wine, and I see myself in front of Laurence "Lol" Tolhurst, multi instrumentist and a kind of guardian of all that the band represents. As the interview goes on, his vivid, sensible and very calm personality shows, a constant reference for his band mates. With short hair, expressive gestures and a controlled voice, Lol also proved to have a strong liver, drinking not only the wine, but one caipirinha and some beers along the chat.

Simon Gallup only joined us a little later. At first sight, he may seem irreverent and funny, but he must be the most shy of the band. He stuttered and maintained his head down to answer me, moving with discomfort on his chair looking for appropriate words.

I started the interview around midnight (hello, goths!) and it ended around 2am. Both of them were very gentle, trying whenever possible to make clear their points of view. My final impression was the integrity and true pleasure about their work. I was surprised by their open souls, their accessibility, and most of all, the respect they had with Gass. Laurence even discussed with me later about the role of the alternative press in Brazil and in Europe. It’s a pity that some local pop stars wannabes weren’t able to listen to these two experienced MUSICIANS at the top of their careers speaking with so much integrity and simplicity. I won’t forget this chat so soon.

Arthur G. Couto Duarte

(Brazil 1)

Gass: When and how did you meet? I’ve heard that you, Michael Dempsey and Robert Smith were in a previous group called Malice.

Lol: This was our first name; we went to school together, on the same class. We got a show at the school and we didn’t even have a name. Then this name came to our heads, but only for this show. No one would have come to see us if we had kept this name...

G: How the name "The Cure" was chosen and who were the first members?

(Brazil 2)

L: When we chose this name, the band was known as "The Easycure", a reference to a verse of a song that I had written. We thought it was a good name. The group had myself, Robert, Michael and Porl Thompson. Then Porl left, and we decided to rename the group, taking out the "the easy"... It was in 1976 or 77, very early on.

G: Your first record, "Three Imaginary Boys", was released only in 1979...

L: Yeah, I guess.

G: When the band recorded "17 Seconds", Michael was replaced by Mattieu Hartley. Why did he leave?

L: We had just made the first LP and there were already some ideas for the second one, but they didn’t seem to interest Michael a lot. I still see him once in a while; he looks happy. ...I think that there was a personality shock between him and Robert. They didn’t have much in common; Michael’s participation was mainly because he was there at the right time and also because he was the only guy we know that wanted to do something with us. No hard feelings though, he just didn’t want to see himself in that place anymore.

G: Your records from the early 80’s have a sombre atmosphere, a ghostly feeling. How did you feel back then, what did you want to express on Faith’s and Pornography’s lyrics?

L: When we recorded those albums, we weren’t going through a good situation, like when we started to record "Faith", we had decided it would be up, poppier, but a lot of things "conspired" against us. My mother died during the recording sessions; Robert’s grandma too... we would compose things, they started out happy, but ended up like we were feeling, turning into sad songs.

But I think that some of the tracks from Pornography sound angrier than properly sad, not depressive either, but mostly hurt. When we make an album, the lyrics and music end up like small life diaries; we always put down our feelings, our emotions. We avoid transposing this circle because otherwise I think we would be acting like politicians.

G: When one reads the lyrics from these albums, the feeling of pain is clear, and I’m pleased to hear that it wasn’t premeditate...

L: Definitively not! It all happened naturally, and that’s why, by the end of the Pornography Tour, we thought to give the band a break. This record truly represents that time of our lives as individuals. As the time passed, we were reaching the conclusion to leave the way it was – the most chaotic as possible. At that time, none of the record company’s executives even bother to come to the studio: there was too much insanity! We seldom saw the light of day, spent whole days recording, recording... But Faith sounded that way because the feeling of loss around us, the feeling of death. Two songs we composed weren’t even included in the album because we thought they were too much optimistic and we didn’t feel that way at all! The recording sessions happened in a mood of total insanity. We didn’t sleep, we didn’t talk to anyone else. It was obvious it would come that way.

G: After Pornography, the group was reduced to you and Robert, making a more accessible work, more pop, like the singles The Walk, The Lovecats... How and why these changes happened?

L: We had decided that The Cure wouldn’t be so restrict after Pornography. In our minds, we asked ourselves "what do we like?". Our whole life we’ve been listening to pop songs and we came to the conclusion that the moment was perfect to change the image the people had about us. This was because we were getting to the point that you could only like The Cure if you were a tormented person, with dark ideas. We wanted to see if the people would be able to accept us as human beings. The people and lots of critics kept on putting labels on us and that’s why we decided to change.

G: Was this also for personal fun?

L: Yes, we wanted to give ourselves a break. If you don’t like what you do, if you feel bad about what you do, that’s no reason to do it. Many bands spend years and years playing and not liking what they do. They can even thing "yeah, we do it well", but they don’t have the guts, or don’t want to change the people’s perception about them. We always tried to have fun and there’s no way to get this if you do the same thing day, every year, and I think it works for anybody. This was the other reason to change, we wanted to end that Cure image.

G: It was somehow the way to get sanity back.

(Brazil 3)

L: Yes, because at that time we were under the risk of taking ourselves too seriously. Lots of people put us on a pedestal and if you don’t balance it with a bit of humanity, you’ll never be able to do something truthful. Honesty is a word somehow tricky, but it’s what we seek: to be honest to ourselves and the others. I think that’s why people like The Cure, they know we don’t underestimate them; lots of bands seem to do so, like the fact that you’re in a band make you different from the others. It doesn’t. Everything is like if you were the voice of lots of people that feel the same way. That simple.

(Brazil 4)

G: (To Simon) You were in the band almost from the beginning, but around 82 you left. I remember reading an article in The Face magazine telling that you had left "underhand"...

S: Yeah, I felt fired from the band. You can say it was underhand, but ever since Robert, Lol and I, we’ve been talking about what was going on then... Today I admit I wasn’t a person easy to have around. It was a time of much grief but I wasn’t in my best, psychologically speaking...

The long tours also had to do with it; everything was too much intense, I used to play those songs really believing them and that affected me. Today, looking back, I’d probably hate myself, I was a hateful person. If I could find today the person I was, I would despise him. I was shit.

L: ...This happens when we get older and the important thing is that we are here today, together as friends.

S: ...Rarely someone leaves a group then comes back.

G: During the time you were out, did you get to see any Cure shows?

S: Before coming in for the first time, I used to see them play every Sunday night. They were the best band of the place we lived. When I was out of The Cure, I went to see them at Hammersmith Odeon and I really felt bad not to be in the band. They were really good. That was the first time they played in a big venue. In a way, it was good to be in the crowd. There was another guy in my place (Phil Thornalley). He was a good musician, but he didn’t seem quite the "Cure kind"; he was more like Duran Duran...

G: By the same time, Robert joined Siouxsie And The Banshees and made The Glove with Steve Severin. Did you fear the group coming to an end?

L: That never worried me. The main reason was that we never pursued success as a goal. We started to help ourselves, to help our feelings more than anything else. The music was the only way of expression for us. We grew in a small town near London that is very rigid, very apathetic. The local kids always complain about everything but never actually do something to change. We started The Cure to escape from that syndrome. So, by the time Robert was with the Banshees, I always knew, deep in my heart, that he still wanted to have his own band, because they weren’t his group, they had their own previous story. On the other hand, I went out to produce other bands’ records. This was good for The Cure, because if we kept going that way, we wouldn’t have new ideas, we were too tired, facing a dead end.

So time passed and we thought "ok, let’s begin again taking a good look at The Cure". And it was thrilling, we kept smiling, it was something new, refreshing and this is something to be preserved. Otherwise it’s not worth. We even could be more successful than now, early on, but we did things our own way.

G: You mentioned working as a producer around 82-83, and I remember your work with And Also The Trees. Does it please you?

L: Yeah, sometimes.

G: Would you like to produce new groups?

L: It was good to work with the Trees; my help was mostly in the studio, showing them how things work, because I didn’t want to give them too many suggestions and change their original ideas. I gave my opinions about some songs, played some instruments, did a lot of stuff but always concerned not to change their work. I wanted to be the one to catalyze, so they could say "ahh, I see it now" ...I can see myself doing it again, but I don’t have much time left, besides, there aren’t many groups around that I like.

G: What do you think about this African trend with Stewart Copeland (Police) and Paul Simon...

S: It’s all a fake. African music always existed, all the countries of the world have their own music. In England, five years ago, it was cool to like this kind of stuff... African music has existed since Irish folk songs, England’s folk songs, even before.

G: Couldn’t this attention to African music be a way for European musicians get fresh ideas?

S: I really don’t know, this may be Paul Simon’s case, as he says. But there are people that work with ethnical music in a very interesting way, like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush with her Irish sound. That’s not fake, they are really interested in that particular sound, but Paul Simon, frankly, I think he’s horrible.

G: The album The Top was released in Brazil to match your tour (87). Since it was recorded three years ago, how do you see it today?

L: The Top was very disconnected. It was our first album after Pornography and we hadn’t the band as connected as now. Everybody was there but Boris, that came in two years ago. He got totally adapted, he has the same ideas, same personality and plays well – which helps – but if wasn’t for his ideas and personality, he wouldn’t be playing with us. Well, when we recorded, we still hadn’t this connection. Andy Anderson was still with us; he was a nice guy, but his personality wasn’t quite like ours, and when he left I think he was relieved.

I think it all shows up in the album, it doesn’t sound very uniform. It’s not a good portrait of the band like the new album is (Kiss Me), where everybody brought ideas resulting in a diverse album, more complete. Sometimes, like when we were recording The Top, it was difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel and realize that there are many ways to make a record.

G: With The Top one can see a growing interest in psychedelia, even from the sleeve. Where does it come from?

(Brazil 5)

L: Psychedelia doesn’t mean a lot to me and I think it’s the same for Robert and Simon. We had access to this type of music though our older brothers. They lived this, so our influence was subliminal. I don’t think rock must be about plagiarism, but let’s say derivative, because you hear something today and it only goes out of your mind 10 years from now...

G: Groups like Siouxsie and Echo, among others, normally play covers at their shows. Have you ever thought about this?

S: We did one, Foxy Lady, from Jimi Hendrix, in the first record... but I think we don’t need covers. Most of the time, I believe that when a group does this because they can’t compose good material. This may sound very arrogant, but that’s what I truly think.

G: The Top was the first record produced by Dave Allen. What do you say about his work?

L: We knew him through our manager, that told us he had a way to work similar to ours. Dave works like video director Tim Pope, he’s very irreverent and doesn’t take rock too seriously. If he wasn’t producing he could even be playing with us, because we get on with him as a person. By the way, this is how we work. We know the people around us that came to Brazil for a long time, and they remain because we have a good relationship more than abilities. I’m not saying that Dave and Tim aren’t talented, but if we hadn’t this kind of relationship, nothing would have happened.

G: From Inbetween Days, The Cure has reached a bigger audience; here in Brazil there were sold more than 200,000 copies of Standing On A Beach, which is very significant for our standards. How do you deal with success?

L: It’s hard to live with this sensation of success, because we are actually the last people to know. It’s hard to imagine that we are successful here, but it was good for us to come here after 10 years of playing to different audiences. Deep inside I know people here like us. When one is in London or New York, one can only wonder how things are abroad, but you have to go and see with your own eyes how things really are. It’s difficult to measure the success based only in numbers, but you can go to these places and see the audience reaction. I must say, after our first concert here (Porto Alegre), that people like us, and that’s great.

G: A lot of people misunderstood the sleeve of Standing On A Beach. I saw it as a kind of provocation...

L: Well, it wasn’t quite like this. The elder man of the photo even died some weeks after the shooting. Funny... curse. The album title comes from a line of Killing An Arab, so, in order to mess things a bit more, we had this idea to bring a guy and put him at a beach, but he had to be a typical Englishman. Before the LP was released, the song was already getting some problems in the USA; the people got wrong the meaning of the song. So we thought to play with a little bit of malice – and we did the cover that way.

G: How is the album creation process?

S: It changes from one record to the other. The last, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, was recorded in about three months. One day, after each one of us had developed our own ideas, we got together to play all the songs. Then we voted for the best ones. And as we played them already at the studio, they were changed and got transformed.

G: Who usually "begin" your songs? How do they come up?

S: It may vary. Some come from the drums; a lot of the songs in Faith started this way, and the other instruments got in along the beat. Other ones had bass riffs; but we have the "classical" way – someone gets a guitar, plays two or three chords, but this process is always different... Sometimes the very lyrics suggest how the music is going to be, like in A Forest.

G: Have you ever felt like using a fretless bass?

S: We did, on the new album, for Catch. Actually, it’s played with two basses, one with and other without frets and they got mixed together in the end.

G: As a bassist, do you admire any musician?

S: Well, as a bassist, I don’t think it’s a very good instrument to play, unless you are in The Cure... I never considered myself a real bass player because if I had to play in another group I wouldn’t know what to do. I only know how to in The Cure. I confess I admire other musicians like Keith Richards, but no bassist in particular.

L: And Jean-Jacques Burnel... (from The Stranglers)

S: Yeah, he was the first bassist to stand out from a group, because until him everybody was similar to Bill Wyman – they didn’t move from their place, playing boom-boom-boom. When I saw and heard The Stranglers, Jean made a impression on me from the start. He’s a very good musician, he’s got attitude on the stage and I think he’s the best in the band. Sometimes I think he gets funny, but most of the time he’s really good.

G: Which are The Cure’s plans for the future?

L: Well, this year is busy. A film will be released; I don’t know the people’s reaction to it, whether they will like it or not, because it’s a very straight-forward piece of work. It’s only a show and to watch it you really have to like The Cure. It’s two hours long and it resembles Live At Pompeii, from Pink Floyd, a bit. There are a lot of similarities, of course not from the technical point of view, as the two are more than 15 years apart, but from the point of view of conception.