But which other ’80s artists deserve a nod? Who should be in the Class of 2027? That’s an eternal question, of course, so today I am re-running this vintage Totally ’80s podcast episode featuring an expert panel of special guests, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Lol Tolhurst of the Cure (Class of 2019) and Gina Schock of the Go-Go’s (Class of 2021). Like the Go-Go’s’ T-shirt says, “It’s about fucking time!”

A decade ago, James Graham was on a high. After almost breaking up Scottish post-punk band, the Twilight Sad, a few frustrated years earlier, he and core member Andy MacFarlane had formed an unlikely bond with one of their idols, Robert Smith of the Cure, who turned out to be a Twilight Sad superfan. (Smith paid them the ultimate compliment by covering one of their songs, “There’s a Girl in the Corner.”) Thanks to the unwavering encouragement from the alt-rock legend that Graham now jokingly calls their “publicist, booking agent, all of the above,” the Twilight Sad suddenly had a new lease on life, touring America for the first time in 2016 when Smith personally invited them to be the Cure’s opener. In 2023, they even got to play three nights at the hallowed Hollywood Bowl as the Cure’s support.

But these professional triumphs also served as unfortunate bookends for a tumultuous time in Graham’s personal life. In 2016, his mother and “best friend” was diagnosed with early-onset frontotemporal dementia, and in the middle of the 2023 Cure tour, as his mother’s physical health deteriorated, so did Graham’s mental health, forcing him to quit and return home.

“We were supporting the Cure in South America, and I just woke up one day and I basically couldn’t move. My body just told me, ‘Well, you’re not doing this anymore,’” Graham recalls. “Luckily enough, I was surrounded by some good people. Robert was very much one of those people who told me, ‘You need to get better. This for you doesn’t matter right now. The most important thing is you need to go and get well and be ready for these opportunities again someday.’” Graham’s mother passed away two months later, right when Graham, who was nearing his 40th birthday, was also adjusting to becoming a new parent himself.

The Twilight Sad’s brilliant and gripping sixth album, It’s the Long Goodbye, was actually 80 percent complete by 2023. But considering everything that has transpired since 2019’s It Won’t Be Like This All the Time (the Twilight Sad’s lineup has also now been slimmed down to just Graham and McFarlane, with Arab Strap’s David Jeans currently on drums and Mogwai’s Alex Mackay on bass, plus of course some of this record was remotely written during COVID-19 lockdown), it is, understandably, only coming out now — fatefully, just three days after Graham’s mother’s birthday.

This seven-year gap is the biggest in the Twilight Sad’s discography, but it has been well worth the wait, as It’s the Long Goodbye is the sort of deeply personal, vulnerable, and fearless mid-life work than could only be borne from years of life, love, and loss. “It was a conscious decision to go, ‘If I’m doing this, then it has to be as honest as possible. There’s no hiding behind anything this time,’” Graham explains. “Not that I was hiding before, but I enjoyed the play with metaphors. It was like a bit of a shield, just so that it wasn’t giving away too much. But with this one, it was like, ‘If you’re going to do this, it has to be all on the table, warts and all.’ Because that’s what this is. This experience has been truly horrific and also enlightening and real-life, no bullshit.”

And in some ways, It’s the Long Goodbye (which features Smith on “Dead Flowers,” “Back to Fourteen,” and the especially gut-punching single “Waiting for the Phone Call”) even serves an unintentional companion piece to the Cure’s own recent grief-driven comeback album, Songs of a Lost World, which “holds a really special place” in Graham’s heart because he got to hear many of its songs previewed on the 2023 Cure/Twilight Sad tour.

In the extended video above and edited Q&A below, Graham opens up about his struggles with anxiety and depression, fatherhood, the influence that strong women like his mom had on his life and art, Smith’s contributions to the new Twilight Sad album, the pursuit of happiness, and why men tend to bottle up their emotions. “Men don’t talk about their feelings as much. I’m going to talk about my feelings whether you fucking like it or not,” he quips. And in this compelling interview, he does just that.

LYNDSANITY: There is a lot to unpack with this album, so I’ll be asking some tough questions. I hope that’s OK.

JAMES GRAHAM: Yeah, that’s totally fine. Feel free to ask whatever. I’m here to be as open and as honest as I possibly can be. The record means a lot, and there’s a lot that’s went into it. So, maybe I need some Kleenex…

Well, I don’t want to make you cry!

No, crying’s a good thing! We need to go over that stigma!

Well, maybe some people who listen to It’s the Long Goodbye will cry too, because even though it’s about some very personal things that happened to you, I think it will be relatable for a lot of people.

I hope so. I hope so.

I know that this album was partially inspired by your mother’s health issues, and then her passing and the grief you were processing at the time. And that all began over a decade ago, and then you started making the record started seven years ago, and then COVID also happened. So, this is the longest gap between Twilight Sad records, and a lot has happened since 2019.

Yeah, I think it would’ve been a long time anyway, but COVID as well added its own pressures and things for everybody. Whatever situation you were in, we all had to deal with it. So yeah, I lost my mother two years ago to early-onset dementia. … She was in her sixties when it kind of came on. It was the part in life where I was just about to become a father myself, and there was so much excitement and things on the horizon that we were all really looking forward to as a family. But she got diagnosed in 2016/2017, shortly after we’d finished our first tour with the Cure in America, and for seven years she deteriorated. It’s an absolutely horrible disease that basically strips a person of everything they are. And I was watching my sons grow and her fade at the same time, and at one point it felt like they met in the middle, if you know what I mean. And I found that it was too much. I got really [mentally] ill trying to cope with all the things like fatherhood, losing the person that brought me into the world, the pandemic. I’m an anxious person anyway, and I’ve dealt with depression in my life as well, and have managed to keep a lid on it. And music was a way of getting my feelings out. It was a cathartic thing for me. I was so lucky that I found a friend in Andy that was giving me the platform to be able to release my emotions and feelings, instead of bottling them up inside.

I think a lot of the things that led to my illness was I was bottling things up. I was doing the “just get on with it” thing, and that was against everything that I’d told everybody to do and people that liked our music. I was always saying, “Talk about these things,” and I didn’t even listen to myself. And yeah, I got really ill. And then my mom passed on. We were supporting the Cure in South America, and I just woke up one day and I basically couldn’t move. My body just told me, “Well, you’re not doing this anymore.” It told me that I needed to stop.

The Twilight Sad today (photo: Abbey Raymonde)

It’s so interesting that you can think you’re fine, but the body will tell you you’re not. Your emotional state will manifest in physical ways.

Yeah. It’d never happened to me before. I’ve dealt with all those kind of things before: anxiety, depression. It’s just part of my makeup, and I understand that now more than ever. But yeah, my body told me, “No, this isn’t happening anymore.” And luckily enough, I was surrounded by some good people. Robert was very much one of those people who told me, “You need to get better. This for you doesn’t matter right now. The most important thing is you need to go and get well and be ready for these opportunities again someday.” I mean, for him to do that was … he’s not just the person that I look up to as a musician, a songwriter, everything, but on a truly human level, that was a really important thing to be told.

The Cure recently released Songs of Lost World, and that album was informed by what Robert was going through, like deaths in his own family. I don’t know if you two bonded over that or talked about it, or if he gave you any advice, or if even the fact that he was working on a grief album of sorts inspired what you were doing with your own music.

Well, we’d started the album already. Obviously, it took seven years. I had to make sure that when I wrote the songs, when Andy gave me the music, that I only wrote when I was able to find a space in my life and my head to be able to get out what I needed to. But especially on the Cure tours that we did, the most recent ones before the new Cure record, I got to watch those songs being performed live for the first time, practiced onstage for the first time, soundchecked for the first time. And I made sure that I was there watching, because I am a massive fan, and I thought it would be really disingenuous to any other fans out there to have been given the opportunity to be there and [not] really experience that. So, I made a real promise to myself that this isn’t just about going along for have a fun time. We did have a fun time, but it’s a learning experience. I wanted to take away so much from that tour. But just to be able to see Robert up there on the stage pouring his heart out as a person, not “Robert Smith of the Cure” … that was kind of stripped away at points during those songs. I felt there was a real human connection, and the fact that he was being so honest through his music was truly inspiring. I was in the middle of having to deal with my mom’s disease whilst we were on that tour, and [Twilight Sad] songs like “Waiting for the Phone Call” were kind of in my head when I was away, every day waking up going, “Am I going to get that phone call to come back home?” And it wasn’t the coming back home that was the problem — it was just knowing what I would have to go home to. But to see Robert up on that stage was inspiring to me.

Sort of tied into why I was asking about Songs of a Lost World is some of the Cure’s lyrics are very obtuse or full of imagery, but Songs of a Lost World has some of the most direct, literal lyrics Robert has ever written. And I feel that is the case with It’s the Long Goodbye, too. Was that a conscious decision on your part, or did the songs just kind of come out that way?

It was a conscious decision, because it was a case of, if I was going to do this again, I needed to prove to myself to be able to do it. And “Waiting for the Phone Call” is a pretty universal thing now, I’m finding. We all at some point in our life are in that situation. … So, I’d say that yeah, it was a conscious decision to go, “If I’m doing this, then it has to be as honest as possible. There’s no hiding behind anything this time.” Not that I was hiding before, but I enjoyed the play with metaphors. It was like a bit of a shield, just so that it wasn’t giving away too much. But with this one, it was like, “If you’re going to do this, it has to be all on the table, warts and all.” Because that’s what this is. This experience has been truly horrific and also enlightening and real-life, no bullshit.

When you’re hit with things like that in your life and you step away from all the band and things like that, when you come to a point where you’re losing somebody that you really love, nothing else matters. So, it was like, this is how this has to happen. It can’t be shrouded in mystery. This is what it is, because ultimately I’m reaching out in a way to see if anybody feels the same way as me. And I’m finding that people are connecting with this record. Death is a thing that we don’t talk about a lot. I feel the Mexican culture does talk about it and embraces their loved ones that they’ve lost, and I think that’s such a beautiful thing. I think in our culture, people are scared to upset people or talk about something that might hurt, but getting to the other side of that hurt is a relief and a weight off your shoulders. I was always conscious of that, but a lot of the times when writing songs, I wasn’t in a good place and things were hazy, so what came out, came out. Looking back now, I can genuinely start to understand why I was feeling the way I was. At the time, life didn’t have any reasons for me or didn’t make sense. Life just didn’t make sense to me. But I was a father as well, and I had to get up every morning and be there for my family, and that was more important than this record or anything else that I do. That was what pulled me through it, really: Andy’s music and my family. And I have this body of work now that shows that it was a real thing.

Which tracks on It’s the Long Goodbye embody that newfound clarity most for you?

There were certain songs like “Dead Flowers.” I have been listening to the record a lot, to [prepare to] talk to people about it and perform it at some point, and every so often a light bulb kind of goes on, like, “Yeah, I knew you were feeling this way, but you’ve managed to subconsciously talk to yourself, in a way that your future self can look back and go, ‘I understand why you felt completely lost at the same time.’” It’s quite weird on reflection, looking at the record now. There’s a lot of strange coincidences. This record was, first of all, meant to come out possibly in the start of [2026], but it got pushed back a few times and then it just happened to land on [March 27], and the 30th is my mom’s birthday — which wasn’t planned. I only literally realized it maybe about three weeks ago. I hadn’t orchestrated that. The universe seemed to have decided that that’s when it should happen, and so many other things like that have been happening to me. I don’t know what I believe in, but something weird is happening as far as coincidences. When we booked the studio to go to the studio to record, we booked it in London and [Andy] booked a studio [Battery Studios] that he thought was really good. And we were talking to Robert one night and he was like, “Oh yeah, that’s where we recorded [the Cure’s] first two or three records” … And we were with [producer] Mike Hedges, who’d recorded those records as well with them, and it was just like, “Whoa. This is just a lot of universe stuff happening.”

They say don’t meet your heroes, but you met Robert, and suffice to say, it went extremely well. I can’t even imagine how thrilling it would be to have one of your favorite artists from your youth, one of your main influences, not only like your band, and not only eventually cover one of your songs and bring you on tour, but also appear on your own records and become a real friend. That’s the most ringing endorsement I can imagine. Is there still some fanboyish part of you that’s pinching yourself over all this?

The surrealness is fading a bit. It has a lot more since we’ve got even working together. I mean, watching him every night play three hours of just some of the best songs of all time, and just afterwards talking about the gig with him like a couple of friends in a bar around the corner, I feel extremely lucky. And I’ve wrestled with this in my head as well. It’s just like, “Why us? Why?” As a band, we’ve never been pushed in front of the global media or whatever. We’ve kind of existed in our own world, and you don’t know who’s looking or if anybody will notice you. You certainly don’t expect Robert Smith to notice you, because you’re constantly working, trying to make it work. And for that to happen, it was … yeah, I honestly feel, why us? I see so many other bands that also deserve to be championed, but he saw something in us. He saw through the music as well. He could see the way that we care about our artwork. We care about everything to do with it. And he saw that we didn’t want to become rock stars or anything like that. He could see that we were doing it because it was something we loved doing. And to have been given the opportunity to share our music around the world and introduce our music to different people, it’s still pretty magical and pretty unbelievable in many ways. When we’re with each other and hanging out and playing, it doesn’t feel that way. It just feels like friends playing a gig. But when you step back and actually have to look at the big picture — speechless.

Have you ever outright asked Robert what was it about your band that captivated him? He really has gone out on a limb for you guys. He’s practically a Twilight Sad publicist at this point.

Publicist, booking agent, all of the above! Yeah, he tells us. There was an interview [that Smith did] recently … and all the things that I would hope to find in a band that I loved, he said about our band, which is just amazing. That is the dream. There’s nobody that’s given me enough confidence to be myself other than Robert, besides Andy and the band. Andy and Robert have such a great relationship as well. Robert says that Andy and I combined are like him. We are quite ying and yang in some ways, Andy and I, but because Robert sees music from Andy’s point of view, and he sees it from my point of view as well, he gets both of us. Having the connection with Robert has given us the confidence to push ourselves musically as well. This album was always going to be what it is, but I wanted to make him proud. I wanted to show him that all his hard work and belief was merited, all the opportunities that he’d given us, everything. I wanted to show him that it’s through hard work and doing what we believe in, that’s the gratitude. He’s been a big part of why we’re still doing this, and I’ve realized I need it in some way, and I think he can see that within me as well. So yeah, there’s lots of things he has told us, and that’s enough. He’s done so much. I am constantly just like, “Are you not fed up with us yet?”

I assume Robert is proud of this new album. And I assume he was one of the first people outside of the band to hear It’s the Long Goodbye in its entirety.

He had the demos. When we started, we gave him all the demos. We met up in London with Robert and Mike Hedges one night, just for fun, really. … We played some acoustic songs for them, which was nerve-wracking, and then Robert said, “Get the demos on, let’s start listening to them,” and pulled out a massive notepad and had notes on everything! It was absolutely one of the most nerve-wracking things you can imagine, sitting in front of two of your idols with brand-new songs, going, “What do you think?” But Robert had so many suggestions. And it was always suggestions. It was never, “Do this, do that, do this.” He was like, “Try this, try that, see if that works. I like this, I like that.” And that put us to work. Instead of being told what to do, it made us go away with that idea and do the work. And he does that quite a lot with us. He plants little seeds with us. It’s our own thing, it’s us that’s doing it, but I can see that he’s gently nudging us in the right direction.

Was there any one really awesome thing he suggested that was really important to this record?

Two things spring to mind right away when you ask that question. The first one is on “Back to the Fourteen,” he introduced a melody. The song was good and I was happy with it, but he just put this really simple, beautiful melody in, and it was like the cherry on top. It was like, “Oh, that’s perfect. Beautiful.” Something that you didn’t know you needed that now you can’t live without, that kind of thing. And then on the last song on the album [“TV People Still Throwing TVs at People”], he added so much. He just told us to let it breathe, because it wasn’t as long as it was and it was more direct, whereas now it gradually builds and introduces some of the melodies that are going to come later in the song. He really helped that song breathe. And now that I listen to it, that song wouldn’t be what it is without his advice.

This is a question I would ask of Robert as well: There’s a cliché that artists make their best music when they’re in a dark place and struggling, and if they’re in a good place in personal life, their art becomes boring. Is that all true for you, or do you believe that in general?

It’s a good question, because when you’re younger and starting a band, you make the first record and you’re like, “I made it for a reason. There was something to write about.” And then you’re like, “What’s next?” And that thought sometimes popped into my head. I’d be like, “Maybe something bad needs to happen to me, so that I can write another record.” But I got really fed up with that quite quickly. As I started to write more records and genuinely be in an OK place, obviously there’s darkness and light in everybody’s life, but I didn’t have to go searching for it. Life really does bring it to you. I’ve got so many things that I’m so grateful for in my life. I’ve got a beautiful family. I’ve got a wife, my partner, who’s just been there for me, and our lives are fantastic together. But life just slaps you around the face sometimes. I always thought you might have to go searching for that stuff. Somebody once said to me, “Oh, people really like to come and watch you suffer,” and I was like, “Yeah, I suppose so.” But to feel like something bad needs to happen for you to make a record, I don’t believe that anymore.

Obviously, It’s the Long Goodbye is an extremely personal record, inspired by some very specific things that happened in your life. How do you make an album like that relatable and universal, so it’s not just like fans are listening to your audio diaries or therapy sessions?

I just think the themes that I’m talking about this time, everybody does go through it at some point in life. A lot of [journalists] have told me about their situations, and that’s why they’ve connected to this record. That’s why they’ve asked to speak to me. That’s amazing for them to be brave enough to want to put themselves into a situation to talk to me about that kind of thing. It’s given me a bit more faith and humanity, because it’s pretty hard to find that right now. Those little moments of connection with people and conversation is more important than ever. I don’t know, I think we need to listen to each other more instead of talking at each other.

It’s also only been somewhat recent that celebrities and artists have been open discussing their mental health.

Well, the conversation has to be open somehow. And music is the thing that connects so many people, so if it can be the starting point for a conversation in any walk of life, then it’s a good thing. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts with artists that I know that have been through something similar, as far as the mental health side of my story. Matt Berringer from the National and Alan [Sparhawk] from Low did a really good conversation. Matt Berringer and David Letterman did a YouTube thing. And as they were speaking, I was like, “Oh, thank God” —  or thank somebody whoever’s up there — “I’m not alone.” I could hear people that do the same job as me, and they were talking about the exact same feelings and how they’ve managed to get out of it. So, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration, as far as my own health, from people that have opened up about it. And I know the effects of speaking out, from being the person that’s been listening instead of talking about it.

Have you ever had a feeling of almost like guilt, though? A lot of people would see a musician who’s supposedly living the dream, making music and touring the world, and might be like, “Shut up, suck it up. Your life is great. I work at McDonald’s. I have a much tougher life. What are you whining about?” Have you experienced any of that?

Well, where I grew up, men don’t talk about their feelings as much. I always felt that I was different from that and never really felt part of that. I was in many workplaces — I worked on building sites, kitchens, catering, offices, I’ve done everything — and the attitude was the same in those industries, and it was just it felt unhealthy. I think it’s just very much a man thing as well: that it’s a sign of weakness, perhaps, to show your emotions. I want to be the antithesis of that, because that’s not the way to live your life. It actually puts you in a darker place than actually talking about it. I think that was my worry of putting my feelings and emotions out in the world. That’s why I’m quite apprehensive about putting the record out, because I am a worrier. I’m very anxious. But I just think this is what I do. … I don’t want to bother anybody or hurt anybody or annoy anybody, but at the same time, I’m going to talk about my feelings whether you fucking like it or not.

I feel that men like Robert Smith and some of his post-punk peers, like Morrissey and Ian Curtis or Tears for Fears, might have given young boys, maybe even yourself, the permission to be more emotionally expressive. Like, they made it cool to be sad, or to cry, or admit to being insecure.

A hundred percent, without a doubt. And I think that’s something that we touched on earlier about: why does Robert connect with [the Twilight Sad]? There’s those reasons as well, a connection in being that type of person that’s not afraid to do that. I’m afraid to do loads of things, honestly. I’m so afraid of life in general. But I’m not afraid to do this. I don’t know where that comes from. It’s just amalgamation of all my experiences and the people that have come out in and out of my life. I’ve had very strong female characters, leaders, in my life. My grandmother was such an important person in my life. My mother was my best friend. And I was the only boy in my class in school; I was with five other girls in my class. I think within that, there was learning the lessons of sensitivity and strength in ways not through the male gaze, if that makes sense. And that’s been a big part of my makeup as well. I don’t enjoy lads, lads, lads and all that. It’s not how I work. My best friends, apart from Andy, have been women — like, my wife as well is my best friend. So, I think I had that in my makeup and my DNA, because of the people that were around me. But then when I heard these [male artists] being truthful and honest and the heartfelt and talking about those things, it was completely transformational and inspirational. Without those records and those inspirational people, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing here, talking to you.

I’m so glad you are talking with me! I have two last questions — one serious, and one not-so-serious. The serious one is: How your mental health these days, after emerging from all this darkness?

Better. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this if I didn’t feel that I was on a forward trajectory. I’m feeling a lot more hopeful. I can see things that I’m excited and happy about. My kids give me a life and just make me so happy and test me so much. It’s been the biggest test of my life. I go for walks early in the morning and listen to my favorite records on those walks, because I realize if I sit in the house and let things stew, those [negative] feelings will come back and it’ll be history repeating itself. I want to be a happy person. I want to enjoy my life. I’m so fed up with being so worried about everything and scared of everything. I want to be very present every day, instead of thinking two steps ahead of myself. So, it’s a learning process. With the tools that I’ve got now, if those feelings start to come again, I know how to fight them. I know the things that are bad for me and good for me, and I feel like I’m doing the right things. These conversations have been great for me. I’ve been coming off interviews, and I’ll come off this interview as well, feeling lighter and better about things. And the fact that you’ve so kindly asked me these questions and you’re interested in what we’ve done is a positive thing, and I need to remind myself of that — not [remind myself of] when I was not feeling great, which is putting it pretty mildly, but I think I’ve been testing myself, because of all the buildup to the album and the thought of it being out there. And I’ve known how to deal with it this time, compared to when I was in the middle of just the unknown of my mum, the unknown of my own health. I really feel like I’m beginning to move forward with my life now. I know there’s going to be a few bumps in the road, but I think I’m more equipped to deal with them than I was. I’m stronger than I thought I was.

I’m so happy to hear that! And I’m so happy that you enjoyed this interview, because I did too. OK, and my not-serious question is, from one Cure fan to another: What’s your favorite Cure album? I just want to know from my own curiosity, no pun intended.

I think it’s Disintegration. I know that that’s the easy one to say, but it is a fucking great record. I mean, any album with “Plainsong” and “Pictures of You” … but I was listening to Faith the other day, and I love the coldness of that. The Head on the Door is also beautiful.

There’s no wrong answer, I guess!

Yeah, there isn’t, but I just know it’s quite the obvious answer when somebody says Disintegration. To be honest though, the last one [Songs of a Lost World] has a place with me for many reasons, apart from just the music. That was an overall experience for me. I probably will say that that’s the record that’s affected me the most, because I was quite present and watching it happen, in a way. That holds a really special place in my heart.

When Lol Tolhurst x Budgie — the Jacknife Lee-produced supergroup helmed by the post-punk drumming legends respectively known for their work in the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees — take the stage at Pasadena’s Cruel World festival this weekend, it’ll be a full-circle moment for them in more ways than one. And it will be a moment nearly a half-century in the making.

“I only remember this because there was photographic evidence — I think it was outside Morgan Studios or Battery Studios in Willesden, in London,” Tolhurst vaguely recalls of his fateful first meeting with Budgie back in 1979. “[The Cure] got asked to open for the Banshees on the Join Hands tour, so we all met up for a sort of get-together. And there’s a picture of me, Budgie, [the Cure's then-bassist] Michael [Dempsey], Sioux, Robert [Smith], and [Banshees bassist] Steve Severin, all sitting on the back of this truck.”

The Banshees’ original recording lineup had just imploded only a few dates into Join Hands tour, on that album’s actual release date. Guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris abruptly quit after the band got into an altercation at a record store event in Aberdeen, skipping out on the Banshees’ soundcheck that night at Aberdeen’s Capitol Theatre. “They were seen running for the train with guitar in hand. They left their tour passes pinned to the pillows of their Holiday Inn hotel room beds,” Budgie chuckles. “The tour went on hold that night, and it kind of goes down in history that Siouxsie and Severin had to announce they had no band, and the Cure came back onstage to join them.”

Smith stepped in as the Banshees’ guitarist to help the band perform an extended version of “The Lord’s Prayer” that disastrous Aberdeen evening, and after that bizarre gig, the future of the Banshees was in doubt. That’s when Budgie, who’d just finished drumming on the Slits’ Cut album, received a last-minute invitation to be Morris’s possible replacement. He’d been recommended by admirer and fellow drummer Paul Cook, of the Sex Pistols, who was roommates with Nils Stevenson, the Banshees’ manager at the time. “[Cook] had just heard the Slits album and said, ‘Hey, the drumming’s good. Give this guy a call.’ I got the call and my first response was, ‘Well, that’s crazy. Which band is this for again? Siouxsie and the Banshees? But they’re on tour — the ads are in all the papers!’ And [Stevenson] just went, ‘Well, yeah. So… can you do it?”

Budgie traveled to London for the audition, stumbling upon a scene that he describes as some sort of awesomely Goth version of The X Factor, “with a lot of unlikely characters in the rehearsal room and the Cure sitting in front of us with scorecards.” Budgie, who is now considered one of the greatest and most unique drummers of his generation, of course received high scores that day. And as he recalls, “less than seven days sitting in the rehearsal room just once,” he was on the road with the retooled Banshees and opening act the Cure.

Also among the unlikely characters present at Budgie’s Banshees audition that day were nightclub impresario/Visage frontman Steve Strange and future Adam and the Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni; the latter had been a member of the Banshees’ earliest lineup, playing a 20-minute “Lord’s Prayer” improv with them at their debut gig at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976. Pirroni didn’t rejoin the Banshees once McKay quit; Budgie recalls that on the same day that he successfully auditioned to be Siouxsie’s new drummer, “Severin turned to Robert [Smith] and said, ‘Fancy playing guitar with us? Please do!’” And Smith accepted. But in an alternate alt-rock universe, Tolhurst might have actually ended up in a band with Pirroni.

“Here’s a little-known fact: I was nearly in Adam and the Ants,” reveals Tolhurst, who, in another full-circle development, will now be playing Cruel World this weekend on a bill that includes Adam Ant. “I met Adam… we used to see him around town, and at the Hammersmith Odeon one night he said to me, ‘I’m going to do a new version of the Ants [with Pirroni]. I need two drummers. Are you interested?’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much, but I have this band the Cure that I’m doing, and it’s fine.’ So, I avoided narrowly having to wear the stripey makeup!”

Smith also stayed committed to the Cure, after Join Hands tour wrapped, but Budgie became a permanent Banshee, and eventually became romantically involved with Sioux and married her in 1991. And the Cure/Banshees connections continued over the years. Smith played with Siouxsie and the Banshees again from 1982 to 1984, appearing on their Hyæna LP, and he and Severin recorded as the short-lived side-project the Glove with lead vocals by Jeanette Landray, a dancer who’d choreographed Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Slowdive” video.

“Jeanette and I were actually a couple back in Liverpool. She came down to London with me,” Budgie reveals. “That whole ["Slowdive"] dance routine with the eye makeup and the canes, that was Jeanette’s choreography. She put us through our paces at the dance center in Floral Street, in Covent Garden at Pineapple Dance Studios, places like that. So, that was a strange one, because it was very close to home. I don’t know why [Smith and Severin] chose Jeanette [for the Glove], because she was a dancer, not a singer. … It was strange. Siouxsie and I were over in Hawaii doing Feast [the debut LP by the Creatures, Sioux and Budgie's own side duo], and we heard that Robert and Steve had gotten together. It was all kind of weird. And we came back with a finished album, and they were still at it.”

It’s surprising, given this long and convoluted history of bandmate-borrowing, that it took so long for Tolhurst and Budgie to join hands in their own Ants-like double-drummer project, far from London, in sunny California. It wasn’t until November 2023 that they dropped their debut album, Los Angeles(credited to Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee). And it turns out that in yet another alternate alt-rock universe, it could have been a triple-drummer project, boasting yet another Cruel World festival legend.

Tolhurst, Budgie, and fellow iconic post-punk percussionist Kevin Haskins were brought together in 2019 by fellow drummer and “The Trap Set” podcaster Joe Wong, and, as Tolhurst explains, “Initially, [the Los Angeles album] was the three of us; we sort of hung out and we did some stuff. But then Kevin had to leave. He was getting emails from Mr. Murphy.” (Tolhurst is referring to Peter Murphy of Haskins’s own seminal on/off Goth band, Bauhaus, who played the first Cruel World festival in 2022. Haskins played there in 2023 as a member of Love and Rockets, and returns this year with Tones on Tail.)

Tolhurst and Budgie then decided to shelve their early recordings with Haskins, which were produced by longtime NIN collaborator Danny Lohner and partially recorded in the home studio of Tolhurst’s ’80s drummer pal Tommy Lee. “It kind of sounded like what you would expect a record by the Cure guy, the Banshees guy, and the Bauhaus guy, produced by the guy from Nine Inch Nails, to sound like,” Tolhurst says drily, while Budgie describes that still-unreleased material as “very Goth” and an “amalgamation of early Cure and Creatures… very spirit-of-’77.”

Instead, Tolhurst and Budgie looked to the future. They started their own podcast, “Curious Creatures,” and started over as a musical duo in U2 producer Jacknife Lee’s Topanga Canyon studio, which Budgie calls “a very special place, a real crow’s-nest hideaway with fairy lights.” Eventually they were working with a “wishlist” of all-stars like the Edge, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, Starcrawler’s Arrow de Wilde, IDLES’ Mark Bowen, and harpist Mary Lattimore.

It remains to be seen if Lol Tolhurst x Budgie’s Cruel World set will feature any of those special guests, but Tolhurst envisions “two different versions” of the live band: “the all-star version, which is, like, let’s get as many people as we can, and then what we call the ‘suitcase version,’ which is just me and Budgie and a few suitcases.” After a May 9 pre-Cruel World warmup club gig at the Casbah in San Diego, Tolhurst, Budgie, and their suitcases will officially hit the road May 20, opening for the Miki Berenyi Trio — a tour that kicks off, of course, in Los Angeles.

L.A. has been Tolhurst’s home for 30 years, and he and Budgie both individually visited the city of reinvention during rough times when, as Budgie puts it, “life as I knew it had come to an abrupt halt.” (Tolhurst had been dismissed from the Cure and was separating from his first wife; Budgie’s marriage to Sioux was ending.) “Los Angeles was a kind of savior, in a way,” Budgie, who is now remarried and resides in Berlin, recalls. “You could just disappear, almost.”

“L.A.’s contradictions is the reason I stayed, because when I first came here, a lot of people said, ‘If you go there, either you’re going to get discovered or you’re going to get destroyed.’ And neither of those things happened to me. I found acceptance and I found love and a lot of understanding. I was able to reinvent myself quite a bit,” Tolhurst muses. “And so, listening to [our Los Angeles album], it just makes me feel like that’s part of the journey. When I arrived here, I was probably the same guy that was making the Cure-type, Banshees-type, Bauhaus-type music. And now fast-forward and you come out this other end, and it’s this supersonic version of everything you’ve ever thought. Yes, it sounds like Budgie — it can’t not sound like Budgie playing the drums — and it sounds like me, but it also sounds completely different.

“This was really the culmination of a lot of things in our lives, and it’s worked out really well because we’ve been through very similar things,” Tolhurst concludes. “So, it felt really spiritual, really strong, really good to do it — before we get too ancient and can’t pick up some sticks.”

Lol x Budgie perform at L.A.’s third annual Cruel World festival Saturday, May 11, at 4:05 p.m. on the Outsiders Stage. Other acts on the bill, besides the above-mentioned Adam Ant and Tones on Tail, include Duran Duran, Ministry, Simple Minds, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Heaven 17, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, and the Mission U.K.

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The Cure, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this week with a mega-concert in London’s Hyde Park, was “alternative” before some marketing think-thank coined that term — truly alternative, in the genuine sense of the term. And yet, despite releasing many willfully anti-commercial albums, group leader Robert Smith has become one of music’s most enduring, if unlikely, rock stars, earning the undying loyalty of an ’80s generation that found salvation in his anguished elegies over the past four decades.

The Cure’s ascendance from moody post-punks to bona fide stadium rockers may seem like one of rock ‘n’ roll most strangest success stories, but in this never-seen 2005 interview with Smith, longtime bassist Simon Gallup, and current drummer Jason Cooper, Smith explains it was all part of a great masterplan — launched by 1982’s uncharacteristically synthy Eurodisco single, “Let’s Go to Bed.”

“I think after the Pornography album, we went sort of pop-weird for a while,” Smith chuckles, acknowledging that the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds/Faith/Pornography trilogy “cemented our reputation, I suppose, for being ‘dismal, doomy, and gloomy.’” But the band had already demonstrated their pop chops on their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, which — contrary to Smith’s claim that that era featured “the worst stuff” in the Cure discography — included future classics and setlist staples like “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” and “Fire in Cairo.”

Says Smith: “That’s the weird misconception about the group, is that we went from being kind of dark and gloomy to being a pop group in the ‘80s. But… there was a tradition already in place for me of like wanting to have that pop side. I didn’t want to let it go, but it came to the fore again after we did Pornography, because it wasn’t really anywhere else to go with that lineup. … I thought the Cure should become something else.”

It was then that the Cure temporarily reinvented itself as the new wave duo of Smith and band co-founder Lol Tolhurst (“There was this short period when the Cure was me and this funny-looking bloke who used to dance around behind me”), and Smith set his sights on world domination.

“The only way that I could get Cure music played on the radio was to make something that was radio-friendly. So ‘Let’s Go to Bed’ was entirely designed [to do that]. It was the only time we’ve ever done it, to get us played on the radio, particularly in America. And it worked!”

And so, just as that catchy single’s “through the right doorway” line prophesied, “Suddenly the door opened a chink, and we put our big feet into it and pulled it open,” Smith confesses. “The good side of it was that we didn’t go into it thinking, ‘We’re going to be a really successful pop group!’ The B-sides were always really dark, and we used [‘Let’s Go to Bed’] to introduce people to the other side of the band. So, there was a kind of plan in place.”

The Cure dramatically reversed course again with the malevolent psychedelia of 1984’s The Top, before toying with MTV (or at least 120 Minutes) success again with 1985’s The Head on the Door and its double-album follow-up, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. Ironically, when the band released its epic eighth studio effort, 1989’s magnificently melancholy magnum opus Disintegration, Smith considered it an unofficial companion to the dark and brutal Pornography and a concerted effort to return to the more claustrophobically depressing — and presumably less commercial — sound of the Cure’s earlier material. And yet Disintegration yielded the band’s first and only U.S. top 10 single, “Lovesong,” which was later covered by Adele, 311, and American Idol winner Candice Glover. Kyle from South Park even rightfully declared Disintegration “THE BEST ALBUM EVER!” The Cure have been headlining amphitheaters and arenas ever since — even though they haven’t released a studio album since 2008’s 4:13 Dream — without ever really “selling out.”

And yet, despite the band’s many stylistic switch-ups throughout the years, the Cure is still primarily known as the godfathers of Goth. Smith balks at that label. “We were never really part of the Goth scene,” he insists. “It emerged around about the time of Pornography, possibly just before 1981, 1982. I used to go to a place called the Bat Cave in London, with bands like Specimen and Alien Sex Fiend — they started the Goth scene, and the Banshees, I suppose. But we weren’t ever part of it. We didn’t look the part. If you look back at pictures of us around that time, we never looked like Goths! It used to really bug me, like I wanted nothing to do with it, but obviously we were embraced to a degree and have been down the years by a certain part of the Goth scene. We’re sort of part of the culture. But we’re tolerated, I think, more than embraced most of the time, because we dare to do other things. It’s always a problem if you step outside of a genre — then you’re kind of like barred. You’re not allowed to be a member of that club, which has never really interested us.”

“At one point we were also the ‘godfathers of shoegazing,’ which was another sort of quick trend that went,” Gallup adds.

“When that comes back, we will reclaim our rightful place,” Smith jokes, adding more seriously: “When we’re pigeonholed to any kind of genre, we don’t really pay that much attention to it, because Cure fans do like a lot of different styles of music. I mean, predominantly they wear dark-colored clothes, but that’s kind of it. There is a part of the audience which is a very hardcore kind of Goth crowd, but we would never have been as successful as we’ve been if we’d stuck to this narrow idea of what we should be doing. So, it’s really been driven by the desire to do whatever we want. In a funny way, it’s a very selfish sort of reason as to why we’re still going.”

The “Gothic” tag has probably stuck over the years thank to Smith’s lyrics – this is a man, after all, who proclaimed “It doesn’t matter if we all die” on Pornography’s “One Hundred Years,” and has penned songs with titles “The Funeral Party,” “Torture,” and “Piggy in the Mirror,” to name but a few.

“It has been difficult, the fact that I’m still around and that I do enjoy what I do so much — it does sit uneasily at times with some of the words I write. I’m very aware of that,” Smith says. “But the fact remains that I do struggle with the futility of existence. It’s as bald a fact as that. Because I don’t have faith in anything other. And so, from time to time, that is overwhelming.

“It’s angst, basically, and it’s always qualified with teenage angst in that some way, as if magically when you get to 20, it becomes ‘What was I worried about? Life means this!’” says Smith, who was 46 years old at the time of this interview, and is now nearing 60. “But in my darker hours, I still am kind of haunted by the same things: It’s that sense of hopelessness and not ever actually achieving anything, and just kind of drifting through space and time. So, there is that weird dichotomy and paradox between the fact that I’m going out and really enjoying [performing], but I’m singing very downbeat songs. But I think people understand. People get it. I think the people who don’t get it aren’t going to get what we do.”

Smith has been the Cure’s only constant member (“There have been different bands called the Cure… four-and-a half lineups,” he says), with a dozen other musicians rotating in and out since 1978. And Smith seems to prefer it that way. “There are one or two bands who have been around as long as us who’ve kept basically the same lineup, and I find that weird — unimaginable, actually,” he admits. “I couldn’t bear it. … There can be too much shared experience. You get like older married couples who just eat in silence. That’s how I imagine [bands] who have been together for too long. So, it’s actually a much healthier thing to kind of evolve.”

“Don’t you think it shouldn’t be considered such an odd thing that we have done different types of music and not kept to one style?” muses Gallup, who’s lasted the longest in the lineup, playing from 1979 to 1982 and then permanently rejoining in 1985. “If you think about it, it’s more odd that so many bands have pigeonholed themselves to one style and won’t ever move out of that. I mean, that’s a really, really self-confining thing. I think that’s stranger.”

“In part, the lineup changes over the years have been driven by that desire to get a different dynamic and a different set of people playing a different kind of music,” Smith elaborates. “Thankfully, most of them have left the band voluntarily. No, wait. I wish I hadn’t said that! They haven’t, actually.”

Smith is clearly referring to Tolhurst — initially the Cure’s drummer, before moving to keyboards — who was fired from the during the making of Disintegration and later unsuccessfully sued Smith for royalties. “It’s funny, because we were talking about Lol earlier, and I actually really admired his playing when I was younger, listening to those records. I liked the fact it was a very minimal sort of sound,” says Cooper. “But as I’ve learned subsequently, that minimalism came from a disinterest to play the more complicated beats.”

“An inability,” Smith clarifies. “Looking back at the time, it got very frustrating when we got to the Pornography album — which in fact, me and Simon used to play a lot of the drums of Pornography. We used to stand there in front of Lol and bully him, and we’d take a drum each. It was very much a collaborative effort, just the drumming, but there was a really strong sense of frustration that grew through those albums at the time with how Lol couldn’t kind of step beyond. He would always do things in the same way. But again, looking back, it really saved us, the fact that he couldn’t be flamboyant, that he couldn’t throw in drum fills and that we actually stayed with a very minimal sound. Everyone was like, ‘That’s very clever!’ People thought it was like postmodern and everything. It was just based on the fact that Lol couldn’t play any better.”

Tolhurst and Smith eventually repaired their friendship, and Tolhurst did reunite with the Cure in 2011 when the band performed their first three minimal albums in their entirety at the “Reflections” concerts in Sydney, London, New York, and Los Angeles. But he won’t be there for this week’s Hyde Park celebration, nor will other past Cure members.

“There’s not really a great desire for us to do that ‘Let’s all get back together and hold hands and join in a rendition of “A Forest,”’ however marvelous it would be,” Smiths quips. “I did toy with the idea. … I thought it might be quite sweet to get everyone together. And then I started to think about the reality of it and what it would actually look and sound like onstage, and I started to sweat. So, I thought, ‘No, it’s best just left to everyone’s imagination.’ We could do some kind of puppet show or a really bad cartoon of it to commemorate it, but in real life, I don’t think it would work.”

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The Cure, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this week with a mega-concert in London’s Hyde Park, was “alternative” before some marketing think-thank coined that term — truly alternative, in the genuine sense of the term. And yet, despite releasing many willfully anti-commercial albums, group leader Robert Smith has become one of music’s most enduring, if unlikely, rock stars, earning the undying loyalty of an ’80s generation that found salvation in his anguished elegies over the past four decades.

The Cure’s ascendance from moody post-punks to bona fide stadium rockers may seem like one of rock ‘n’ roll most strangest success stories, but in this never-seen 2005 interview with Smith, longtime bassist Simon Gallup, and current drummer Jason Cooper, Smith explains it was all part of a great masterplan — launched by 1982’s uncharacteristically synthy Eurodisco single, “Let’s Go to Bed.”

“I think after the Pornography album, we went sort of pop-weird for a while,” Smith chuckles, acknowledging that the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds/Faith/Pornography trilogy “cemented our reputation, I suppose, for being ‘dismal, doomy, and gloomy.’” But the band had already demonstrated their pop chops on their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, which — contrary to Smith’s claim that that era featured “the worst stuff” in the Cure discography — included future classics and setlist staples like “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” and “Fire in Cairo.”

Says Smith: “That’s the weird misconception about the group, is that we went from being kind of dark and gloomy to being a pop group in the ‘80s. But… there was a tradition already in place for me of like wanting to have that pop side. I didn’t want to let it go, but it came to the fore again after we did Pornography, because it wasn’t really anywhere else to go with that lineup. … I thought the Cure should become something else.”

It was then that the Cure temporarily reinvented itself as the new wave duo of Smith and band co-founder Lol Tolhurst (“There was this short period when the Cure was me and this funny-looking bloke who used to dance around behind me”), and Smith set his sights on world domination.

“The only way that I could get Cure music played on the radio was to make something that was radio-friendly. So ‘Let’s Go to Bed’ was entirely designed [to do that]. It was the only time we’ve ever done it, to get us played on the radio, particularly in America. And it worked!”

And so, just as that catchy single’s “through the right doorway” line prophesied, “Suddenly the door opened a chink, and we put our big feet into it and pulled it open,” Smith confesses. “The good side of it was that we didn’t go into it thinking, ‘We’re going to be a really successful pop group!’ The B-sides were always really dark, and we used [‘Let’s Go to Bed’] to introduce people to the other side of the band. So, there was a kind of plan in place.”

The Cure dramatically reversed course again with the malevolent psychedelia of 1984’s The Top, before toying with MTV (or at least 120 Minutes) success again with 1985’s The Head on the Door and its double-album follow-up, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. Ironically, when the band released its epic eighth studio effort, 1989’s magnificently melancholy magnum opus Disintegration, Smith considered it an unofficial companion to the dark and brutal Pornography and a concerted effort to return to the more claustrophobically depressing — and presumably less commercial — sound of the Cure’s earlier material. And yet Disintegration yielded the band’s first and only U.S. top 10 single, “Lovesong,” which was later covered by Adele, 311, and American Idol winner Candice Glover. Kyle from South Park even rightfully declared Disintegration “THE BEST ALBUM EVER!” The Cure have been headlining amphitheaters and arenas ever since — even though they haven’t released a studio album since 2008’s 4:13 Dream — without ever really “selling out.”

And yet, despite the band’s many stylistic switch-ups throughout the years, the Cure is still primarily known as the godfathers of Goth. Smith balks at that label. “We were never really part of the Goth scene,” he insists. “It emerged around about the time of Pornography, possibly just before 1981, 1982. I used to go to a place called the Bat Cave in London, with bands like Specimen and Alien Sex Fiend — they started the Goth scene, and the Banshees, I suppose. But we weren’t ever part of it. We didn’t look the part. If you look back at pictures of us around that time, we never looked like Goths! It used to really bug me, like I wanted nothing to do with it, but obviously we were embraced to a degree and have been down the years by a certain part of the Goth scene. We’re sort of part of the culture. But we’re tolerated, I think, more than embraced most of the time, because we dare to do other things. It’s always a problem if you step outside of a genre — then you’re kind of like barred. You’re not allowed to be a member of that club, which has never really interested us.”

“At one point we were also the ‘godfathers of shoegazing,’ which was another sort of quick trend that went,” Gallup adds.

“When that comes back, we will reclaim our rightful place,” Smith jokes, adding more seriously: “When we’re pigeonholed to any kind of genre, we don’t really pay that much attention to it, because Cure fans do like a lot of different styles of music. I mean, predominantly they wear dark-colored clothes, but that’s kind of it. There is a part of the audience which is a very hardcore kind of Goth crowd, but we would never have been as successful as we’ve been if we’d stuck to this narrow idea of what we should be doing. So, it’s really been driven by the desire to do whatever we want. In a funny way, it’s a very selfish sort of reason as to why we’re still going.”

The “Gothic” tag has probably stuck over the years thank to Smith’s lyrics – this is a man, after all, who proclaimed “It doesn’t matter if we all die” on Pornography’s “One Hundred Years,” and has penned songs with titles “The Funeral Party,” “Torture,” and “Piggy in the Mirror,” to name but a few.

“It has been difficult, the fact that I’m still around and that I do enjoy what I do so much — it does sit uneasily at times with some of the words I write. I’m very aware of that,” Smith says. “But the fact remains that I do struggle with the futility of existence. It’s as bald a fact as that. Because I don’t have faith in anything other. And so, from time to time, that is overwhelming.

“It’s angst, basically, and it’s always qualified with teenage angst in that some way, as if magically when you get to 20, it becomes ‘What was I worried about? Life means this!’” says Smith, who was 46 years old at the time of this interview, and is now nearing 60. “But in my darker hours, I still am kind of haunted by the same things: It’s that sense of hopelessness and not ever actually achieving anything, and just kind of drifting through space and time. So, there is that weird dichotomy and paradox between the fact that I’m going out and really enjoying [performing], but I’m singing very downbeat songs. But I think people understand. People get it. I think the people who don’t get it aren’t going to get what we do.”

Smith has been the Cure’s only constant member (“There have been different bands called the Cure… four-and-a half lineups,” he says), with a dozen other musicians rotating in and out since 1978. And Smith seems to prefer it that way. “There are one or two bands who have been around as long as us who’ve kept basically the same lineup, and I find that weird — unimaginable, actually,” he admits. “I couldn’t bear it. … There can be too much shared experience. You get like older married couples who just eat in silence. That’s how I imagine [bands] who have been together for too long. So, it’s actually a much healthier thing to kind of evolve.”

“Don’t you think it shouldn’t be considered such an odd thing that we have done different types of music and not kept to one style?” muses Gallup, who’s lasted the longest in the lineup, playing from 1979 to 1982 and then permanently rejoining in 1985. “If you think about it, it’s more odd that so many bands have pigeonholed themselves to one style and won’t ever move out of that. I mean, that’s a really, really self-confining thing. I think that’s stranger.”

“In part, the lineup changes over the years have been driven by that desire to get a different dynamic and a different set of people playing a different kind of music,” Smith elaborates. “Thankfully, most of them have left the band voluntarily. No, wait. I wish I hadn’t said that! They haven’t, actually.”

Smith is clearly referring to Tolhurst — initially the Cure’s drummer, before moving to keyboards — who was fired from the during the making of Disintegration and later unsuccessfully sued Smith for royalties. “It’s funny, because we were talking about Lol earlier, and I actually really admired his playing when I was younger, listening to those records. I liked the fact it was a very minimal sort of sound,” says Cooper. “But as I’ve learned subsequently, that minimalism came from a disinterest to play the more complicated beats.”

“An inability,” Smith clarifies. “Looking back at the time, it got very frustrating when we got to the Pornography album — which in fact, me and Simon used to play a lot of the drums of Pornography. We used to stand there in front of Lol and bully him, and we’d take a drum each. It was very much a collaborative effort, just the drumming, but there was a really strong sense of frustration that grew through those albums at the time with how Lol couldn’t kind of step beyond. He would always do things in the same way. But again, looking back, it really saved us, the fact that he couldn’t be flamboyant, that he couldn’t throw in drum fills and that we actually stayed with a very minimal sound. Everyone was like, ‘That’s very clever!’ People thought it was like postmodern and everything. It was just based on the fact that Lol couldn’t play any better.”

Tolhurst and Smith eventually repaired their friendship, and Tolhurst did reunite with the Cure in 2011 when the band performed their first three minimal albums in their entirety at the “Reflections” concerts in Sydney, London, New York, and Los Angeles. But he won’t be there for this week’s Hyde Park celebration, nor will other past Cure members.

“There’s not really a great desire for us to do that ‘Let’s all get back together and hold hands and join in a rendition of “A Forest,”’ however marvelous it would be,” Smiths quips. “I did toy with the idea. … I thought it might be quite sweet to get everyone together. And then I started to think about the reality of it and what it would actually look and sound like onstage, and I started to sweat. So, I thought, ‘No, it’s best just left to everyone’s imagination.’ We could do some kind of puppet show or a really bad cartoon of it to commemorate it, but in real life, I don’t think it would work.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Entertainment.

Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst — the drummer/keyboardist who met Robert Smith at age 5 in the West Sussex suburb of Crawley and went on to co-found one of Britain’s most influential bands, the Cure — has come a long way. Twenty-seven years ago, Smith booted Tolhurst from the Cure at the height of their fame, just as they were about to release their most iconic and acclaimed album, Disintegration. Five years later, Tolhurst waged an ultimately losing battle in court against his childhood friend and bandmate over Cure royalties. His life then continued to spiral downward due to a messy divorce, the alcoholism that led to his band firing in the first place, and his struggle to figure out his place in a post-Cure world.

But now, sitting with Yahoo Music at a chic health-food eatery in sunny Santa Monica, California, where he has lived since the early ‘90s, Tolhurst is a changed man: sober for more than 25 years, the proud father of musician/poet Gray Tolhurst, happily remarried, and back on good terms with Smith (with whom he reunited in 2011 for the brief “Reflections” tour comprising the Cure’s first three landmark albums). And Tolhurst reflects on all of this in his compulsively readable new memoir, Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys, which he’s here to discuss today over a very healthy, very Californian meal of grilled avocado and Tuscan kale.

Cured begins with Tolhurst’s bleak boyhood in dreary Crawley with an aloof and alcoholic father, and climaxes roughly 250 pages and three decades later in California’s Joshua Tree desert, where he experiences a post-rehab, post-Cure, mid-life-crisis epiphany. Along the way, Tolhurst is unflinchingly honest about his journey — as raw, complex, and dark as the Cure’s music itself.

The book is a fascinating chronicle not only of one man’s disintegration (no pun intended) and renewal, not only of two boys’ unique friendship, but also of an incredibly important era in music, when the Cure basically set the template for alternative rock. In true Los Angeles style, there’s already talk of Cured being adapted into a motion picture (Tolhurst suggests Robert Downey Jr. to play himself, and jokes that maybe Sean Penn could reprise his This Must Be the Place role to portray Smith). Until then, check out Tolhurst’s wide-ranging, career-spanning conversation with Yahoo Music.

YAHOO MUSIC: After hearing about the lawsuit between you and Robert Smith, I thought your book would be more bitter. But you are very kind to Robert throughout, and you definitely take responsibility for your actions. You’re also very frank about your alcoholism.

LOL TOLHURST: That’s what I wanted. First, I wanted there to be a story of a friendship, because that’s what it is. Robert is the person I’ve known the longest my whole life, because both my parents are dead now. I’ve known him longer than I’ve known anybody on this planet. I wanted it to kind of be like Patti Smith’s book with Robert Mapplethorpe [Just Kids]; I wanted to put it in that framework. But also I wanted it to be — well, “self-help” is the wrong word, but I wanted it to be a guide to growing up. I’m not ashamed; if somebody has lung cancer, you don’t go, “Oh, you should be ashamed having lung cancer,” or whatever. So no, I’m not ashamed [of the disease of addiction]. I wanted to use [the book] as a tool to help people, and that’s really why it couldn’t be a scandalous drag through the dirt. I know where the bodies are buried, but it’s not going to be in this book.

In the book, you refer to the Cure as your second family that you lost.

Probably my only family, in lots of ways, to be honest.

So you still feel that way?

My relationship with them is definitely still like a family… Every time I see Robert, the first thing that we talk about — probably the only thing that we talk about — is family, because I’ve known him for 52 years and I’m the only person he can talk to about all these other people that nobody knows anything about. I know his whole story from the very beginning. When we get together, we talk about personal stuff, not business or music. So, yes, they’re my family, no matter what.

I was surprised to read that all of you grew up in middle-class, suburban comfort, and that Robert had a particularly nice upbringing, with a happy family life. Where does all of the Cure’s angst come from?

I remember what Beavis and Butthead said: “Why does he sound like he’s crying?” [laughs] It came from being born into Crawley… We had some stability in that way, yes, but we were also growing up in a place that was very anti-anything. That was the dichotomy of living in Crawley, really — that it was the English countryside, but it was a very dangerous, kind of violent place as well. So you mix those two things, and I think there’s a lot of people who identify with that. And the fact that there were a lot of mental hospitals nearby us — we would see [the patients] there and say, “If something goes a little strange, this is how you end up.”

You’re not exactly the ambassador or spokesperson for Crawley.

They’re not going to give me the key to the city any time, that’s for certain. But Crawley shaped our ambition because we wanted to get the hell out of there, and that’s the truth of it. And it’s funny because I know the guys in Depeche Mode really well, and they lived in the same kind of “new town” on the other side of London, Basildon. It’s the same place; it even looks the same! I have this Book of Really Boring Postcards and it has Crawley and then it has Basildon, and they look the same. So I understand completely how Depeche Mode did music like that too. For us, music was our only way out. It was completely a defense against living in a place like that. We knew we were either going to be football stars — Robert had a little bit of a chance at that, because he was quite good — or we were going to form a band and get out of there. Because otherwise… I still know a couple of people who still live there, and it’s very depressing. So yeah, Crawley was a breeding ground because, if you have any intelligence, at some point you notice: “Oh my God, we could end up like that sad guy sitting at the pub.”

So your hometown was key in shaping the Cure’s sound?

I’m absolutely certain of it. A couple years ago I was looking for something on the web, and Google Maps is great, because you can go somewhere [virtually] and look down streets. I was “walking” down some streets I remember from being a child, and I wrote to Robert: “Oh my God, it’s so clear to me now, looking at these places, why we sounded like we did.” Because there’s the gray skies, the clouds and the drizzle, the overwhelming sort of dankness of the place. It’s so obvious why we created the sound that we did.

So are the Cure hometown heroes in Crawley? Not many bands or celebrities ever came from there.

You would think so, wouldn’t you? But a few years ago I was back there, and [original Cure member] Mike Dempsey — he lives like 13 miles from there — he took me on a little trip to go down memory lane, and we drove around some of the old haunts. And we went into the Rocket club, where we first played, there’s nothing of us in there.

What? It should be a Cure museum!

It should be! The only thing that hadn’t changed, though, is that it was still depressing as f—. It was Sunday evening, and everybody was sitting with their half-pints of beer, looking down at the table. It was horrible.

The other takeaway I got from your book, with regards to how your upbringing and environment affected the Cure’s sound, was how bleak everything was in the 1970s in England.

Yes, very true. With this whole Brexit thing now, people don’t remember what it was like back in the early ‘70s. And I do. I remember going to the post office with my mother and seeing the schedule up on the wall, like: “This is your electricity for this week, you get it for three days this week.” There were all these strikes. There was nothing in stores. It was very gloomy, you know? And people have forgotten that. They just sort of see Brussels interfering with them, and it’s just a knee-jerk reaction: “Oh, we gotta leave!” But I remember what it was like before we were in the European market. It’s a bit sad.

Do you predict another musical British invasion happening, in light of Brexit? Great U.K. music seems to come out of dark times.

One can hope. I think you’re right. I think oppression and gloominess definitely makes for a creative melting pot and some kind of crucible to want to do something.

I think the Cure were sort of spokesmen for middle-class, suburban teen angst. That’s my theory why you were so successful in America, the land of suburbia.

Yes, by living here [in Los Angeles], I understand fully why the Cure were very big in California. Although we grew up in a different kind of suburbia, there’s an identification people have here. Yes, [California] is this bright, sunny place, but a lot of the same characters exist. A lot of the same sort of oppressive forces are still there. And that’s what [American kids] identify with, definitely. Plus, we were pretty stylish!

What would you say it is that fans get out of the Cure’s music?

It’s not to do with the sound, per se. I think very much when we started, we made it possible for young men especially to have feelings, and not ignore their feelings. We made that possible for them, even though we didn’t know it ourselves. We made it possible for ourselves first. Therefore, that’s really the thing for me to get across — that it’s OK to be who you are and have that be your driving force, rather than all this other stuff that the world tells you it has to be.

Do you think the Cure was a precursor to emo? I do.

I think people who are into emo think that, yes. It’s like Goth. People say the Cure was a precursor to Goth, but I never really saw that. I understand why people say that, but then when I look at our output, I don’t think of us as a Goth band. I don’t think of us as pre-emo. I don’t think of us as pre-anything.

A lot of people actually think the Cure were the godfathers of Goth. You disagree?

I don’t feel that. I feel we’re the fertile ground that made that possible. I think we gave people permission to have that happen. But even with some of our darker stuff, it doesn’t strike me as Goth, particularly. Saying that, I’m not anti-Goth at all. It’s just that I don’t feel like that’s encompassing it.

There’s this stereotype that music with dark lyrics or themes encourages people to behave violently or suicidally. But I would argue that the Cure’s music has actually helped fans.

I know for a fact that it’s helped people. People have sent us letters saying, “I was going to kill myself, and then I heard your songs, and they explained to me a bit about what I feel.” That’s oversimplifying it, but it’s the truth. To me, the fact that we had those similar feelings ourselves, and were able to channel it into our art, that’s the grace of being able to have that, to put it out there. I know it helped people in that way. Even nowadays with Cure fans, it’s their tribe, and they identify with each other. To share that gives them a sense of identity and makes them healthy. I’ve never thought walking around a Cure show that there was anything other than love and understanding. I’ve never felt any kind of violent or destructive tension… It’s supportive and not aggressive in the slightest.

What would you say is the biggest misunderstanding about the Cure?

That people probably thought we sat backstage crying in candlelit rooms. That’s obviously not the case! We never took ourselves seriously. We took what we did seriously, yes. But if you believe the hype, and if you believe your own fame, that’s not a good place to be in.

How did the peak of the Cure’s fame mess with your head?

I think in some ways, my [getting fired from the Cure] was actually a saving grace for me. Because without that, I probably wouldn’t be alive. I would have gone to the furthest realms of excess, and I’d be dead. So the destruction that I caused, and having it basically alienate me from my family — as in, the Cure exiling me — it’s become my greatest asset. I remember [when I was in the Cure] I was kind of detached from reality, literally, in my rock-star mansion in the countryside. I had no control over anything, because I didn’t care about anything. I was just existing. My world came tumbling down, and it was probably the best thing that happened to me, because it brought me back to me. Robert said to me one night, when we did the “Reflections” tour, “You’re back to who you are.” That’s what a real friend will tell you. And it’s true.

Do you regret the lawsuit — like, if that had not happened, do you think you would have returned to the band after successfully completing rehab?

I like to be like Edith Piaf — I regret nothing. Because you can’t regret stuff. It’s your life. I mean, I do know that in the period, between me leaving the Cure and before I decided the lawsuit would be a great idea, relationships were pretty good still. We were still talking and it was OK. So maybe if I’d gotten myself better then, things might have changed and it might have gone that way. But it is what it is. That’s a horrible expression, really, because it doesn’t mean anything.

Is there any lingering tension between you and Robert, or are you cool now?

I don’t think there’s any discomfort. I think things are all patched up… When I lost the court case, it was a heck of a low, and I probably haven’t said anything about this, but there were a lot of legal bills to be paid, and I ended up having to give away certain rights with the Cure to pay for it. Once that all got paid off, Robert called me up and said, “You should have this all back. This is your stuff.” And he didn’t need to do that. It’s like a legal thing that could have stayed that way. But he always said, “I’m like my mother; I want to keep everybody together.”

You write a lot about your father’s drinking in your book, and about how you got blackout-drunk the very first time you tried booze at age 13. Did you ever put two and two together and think you might be genetically predisposed to alcoholism?

No, not then, because we’re much more evolved here [in the U.S.] in terms of looking at people’s relationships to alcohol and drugs. In England, there was always this sort of assumption: “Oh, just change from drinking whiskey to beer and you’ll be fine!” Because everybody drinks [in England]… It never really occurred to me with my father that that was what wrong with him. Until I got here, I never really thought to myself, “Oh yeah, that’s probably what he died from.”

When you were in the studio and not sober yet, you said Disintegration wasn’t a good album when the band played it back. Most Cure fans and music critics think that is the Cure’s best work! Do you still think that?

No, Disintegration is a marvelous album! It wasn’t that I thought Disintegration was crap, because I didn’t. What I thought was — and this in the book — I was so upset that I couldn’t do anything [in the studio, because I was too out-of-it], so that was me lashing out. Any kind of input I had [in the music] was drifting away; I was clutching at straws and I thought I was going mad. I just thought, “OK, I have to say something,” and that’s what I ended up saying. But it was not what I think at all.

https://www.yahoo.com/music/video/robert-smith-talks-disintegration-190413807.html

Are there any Cure albums that are difficult for you to listen to now?

No, they’re all great for me to listen to. Disintegration has some wistfulness about it for me, because I know I could have made it even more, I don’t know… But, no. For a long time I didn’t listen to anything, because I couldn’t. But as my soul got repaired, it all comes back and you realize how nice it is, and how wonderful it is, and then you start to feel acceptance and you start to feel proud of what you did.

Some of the gloomier Cure records came out of difficult times for you. Faith and Pornography, for instance, were made around the time of your mother’s death from lung cancer.

Yes, I was the muse of the Cure, really. I say that half-jokingly, but it’s probably true. Like also, during Disintegration, I was disintegrating. Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, you know.

Does it bother you to see the Cure continue to have success without you, doing things like headlining three sold-out nights at the Hollywood Bowl? I know you went to those shows.

No, it does not bother me at all. I want to be successful too, of course, but I’m happy for them, because I know what it’s taken for them to get where they are. And I like to watch them play live. I’m not that keen, obviously, on some of the newer stuff that I was not on, because I don’t have any emotional attachment to it.

Was it surreal playing in the Cure that first time at the Sydney Opera House, for the “Reflections” shows, after you hadn’t performed with them in 22 years?

It was a surreal experience in the fact that I’m fifty-whatever, and here I am, back with my band — but it was absolutely natural. The second I stepped onstage with everybody, it clicked and it was like riding a bicycle. I know people say that all the time, but it’s true. It felt just exactly the same as always. I looked out and there’s [bassist] Simon [Gallup] in front of me, there’s Robert, and having the three of us like that, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew exactly how it was going to go. So did they. What was there to be scared of? Nothing. And it was very lovely.

A “Reflections” mini-tour followed, but you didn’t rejoin the band permanently after that. How come that was just a one-off?

You know, the Cure has always been about going forward. So I’m sure that at some point there’s other things that will happen. But right now I think it’s better to have it as it was, which was a time to reflect. That’s really what I wanted to get across in the book. Yes, I would love to do something again with all the other guys, because Robert and Simon are my lifelong friends. But it doesn’t matter if we don’t for a while.

The Cure hasn’t put out a new album in eight years. Do you think they ever will, with any lineup?

My gut feeling is, there’s life in the old dog yet. [laughs] That’s what I’m gonna say.

Robert has been crying wolf for a long time, claiming over and over, with pretty much every album and every tour, that the Cure are going to retire.

He’s been saying that forever. Forever! But he’s never going to stop. He’s going to stop the day they put him in the ground — that’s the day Robert’s going to stop.

I would love for the Cure to do a similar trilogy show that they did for ”Reflections,” but doing The Head on the Door, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, and Disintegration.

Somebody told me the other day that era is called the “Imperial Cure.” I was like, “What? What is that?” That sounds a little pompous for me, but maybe.

Tell Robert you should do an “Imperial Cure” tour!

OK, sure. I’ll set that word in his head. I’ll say it’ll work really well if we do that.

What did you think of Robert saying the Cure’s 2000 album Bloodflowers was part of some sort of unofficial trilogy alongside Pornography and Disintegration?

It’s not how I would have framed it. But he’s welcome to frame it the way he likes.

So now that you’ve had time to reflect on your life in the Cure via this memoir, what is your proudest achievement with the band? What should the Cure be remembered for?

That’s very hard to answer. I think we made some kind of cultural change. I think it’s more than just selling records or filling concerts. I think that we made it allowable for people to be who they were — we made it possible for people to have pink hair, wear black clothes or funny shoes or whatever, and not be chased out of town. People say that to me, and I’m flattered and humbled every time I hear it. There’s at least 500 Goth kids in every city in this country — I know, because I’ve met most of them. It’s nice to have that, because you know, normally I’m like Groucho Marx: I wouldn’t be in a club that would have me as a member. But I think we created our own club, and that’s nice.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.