The following is a transcript of Marc's conversation with Simon Price about his book Curepedia: An A-Z of The Cure, as heard on the latest episode of the Music Book Podcast.
MARC: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really enjoyed the book so much. It's just got so much information and so much interesting stuff about the band. For people who know about them or don't know about them, there's just so much to learn. How did this come to be at the beginning? Did you pitch an idea of a book on the Cure? Did someone approach you about it?
SIMON: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me on and showing interest in this. It's great to be on. No, it wasn't my idea. This book was not a pitch by me . What happened was, I wrote my first book about the Manic Street preachers many years ago, 25 years ago, in fact it came out in 1999 and a guy called Lee Brackistone, a publisher in this country, he was working for Faber and Faber and was a big fan of that book and wanted to find something that we could do together, just trying to find the right fit for me and we had various meetings and never quite nailed it down. Until one day he just called me in and said, "Why don't we do just a big A to Z of the Cure?"
And I thought about it. I didn't have to think too long (laughs). I suppose I was concerned that it might be a bit of a gimmick, writing about them in an A to Z format. I thought it might lend itself to being too superficial, too trivial. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it didn't necessarily have to be that way. And that actually, there's something quite liberating about writing in an encyclopedic format, because yeah, on the one hand, you are obliged to fill the book with he required facts and figures about release dates and tours and band members and all of that, and all of that's in there. But it also allowed me to write thematically, and it freed me from having to write a kind of sequential chronology, which most biographies are really, and so I could draw together elements from different areas.
So, for example, there's a chapter called “Madness (Insanity)”, and it's something that crops up again and again, Robert Smith's fascination with mental illness. He read many books on the subject, and the fact that they hail from what is really a kind of an asylum belt around London of these grand Victorian lunatic asylums, as they would've been called at the time. In fact, Michael Dempsey actually worked in one. Then they ended up filming the video to "Charlotte, Sometimes" in one of these asylums that was derelict by this point. And Robert basically raided the art room of that derelict asylum and took home sculptures and etchings, and these inspired him to write a song called “The Figurehead.” And all of these things, these all from different eras of The Cure. And I realized that if I was just writing, well, this happened and then that happened, that that would be lost. You wouldn't be able to draw these things together. So the A to Z format, as kind of silly and frivolous and gimmicky as it may look, actually allowed me to write in quite a lot of depth about some of these subjects.
MARC: Yeah, I totally agree that that is a really cool part of the book, you could include things that you might have had to cut from a relatively conventional narrative because they don't necessarily fit the flow or whatever. You can go deep without having to worry too much about connecting them. Although the great thing is you do do a lot of connecting, both with references to other parts and the fact that I love the way that you highlight words that have their own entries so that you can, as you're reading, do all sorts of cross-referencing. And I think that was a really good idea to do it that way.
SIMON: Yeah. For people who haven't seen the book, the words in sort of bold red type are basically kind of hyperlinks, they’re analog versions of hyperlinks, intended to send people to other parts of the book. And that kind of highlights the way in which I wanted people to read the book. I didn't expect people to start with A and read through to Z. I very much thought people will dip into it and they'll sort of jump around from subject to subject within it. And maybe eventually they'll finish it that way. I did find that it gave me this freedom, perhaps too much freedom, because it took three years to write. It really shouldn't have. And I almost didn't know when to call quit. I didn't know enough was enough.
MARC: Yeah. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, about that process is, so when you sat down to approach the book, I imagine the first thing you probably had to do is to make your list of what you wanted in A, B, C, and all the different categories. And I'm sure you first thought, well, I'm gonna do albums for sure. I'm gonna do singles, I'm gonna do bios of each member and participants. But then you have themes, and like you were mentioning before, there's certain subjects, there's certain, I guess themes is the best way to put it, but there's sort of more idea-based ones. And so did you make yourself a long master list first and then whittle down, or did you start writing a few of them first and then go from there? Or how did that work?
SIMON: I did make a master list, but it wasn't really a case of whittling down. It was whatever the opposite of that is – whittling up, if that's a thing. (Laughs) It's like watching a video of whittling but in reverse (laugh). It just spiraled out of control really. I think initially I foolishly thought, well, maybe there's just one subject per letter of the alphabet. Then I realized that was ridiculous, and it ended up being nearly 300 subjects. And even when I sent the manuscript, I was kicking myself because there were about 10 subjects that I thought, oh, maybe if there's a reprint, I'll sneak them in there. But, yeah, obviously, you're right. I was guided by certain things had to be in there, every single, every album, every band member.
But from then onwards, I did have the kind of luxury of if something captured my imagination, I thought, there’s a theme developing here, and this topic keeps cropping up in different albums and regarding different era and different band members, I thought, well, there's nothing stopping me just adding another chapter for that. Sometimes the alphabetical format did mean that I had to kind of crowbar things in, in a slightly unnatural way. So the letter Q was quite difficult. (Laughs) Fortunately there was an EP called Quadpus, but that's not quite enough to fill out a chapter, but it so happens that Robert is a supporter of the of the soccer team, Queens Park Rangers. So I managed to get several thousand words not just about Queens Park Rangers, but about football, as we call it, and his, and the other members love of that sport as well. I kind of cheated a little bit by going with “Zoology” to talk about all the animal references in Cure songs. So yeah, there are a few that are a little bit fake. It's a little bit hard to find something to fit every letter.
MARC: And once you had your list, or at least a working list, and you were diving into each one, you mentioned how you could have kept going with a lot of the research. I'm just wondering how you approached the research to begin with. And even in the book, you mentioned that you went down a lot of rabbit holes, and so probably part of the process was restricting yourself somewhat in deciding when you had to stop on each one, and how. What was that process like?
SIMON: I, I didn't have a lot of discipline with that. I did find myself sitting on my own at, I dunno, three in the morning, four in the morning, listening to some kind of interview tape from Australia from 1981 that probably hadn't been listened to by anybody else since then. Or watching a TV interview from Swiss television from 2002 that only had a few hundred views on YouTube. Just in the hope of finding that one perfect quote that would illuminate the topic that I was writing about. But yeah, in terms of the rabbit holes…so for, for example, when they filmed a video in an asylum, I had to find out more about that asylum, find out which other videos have been filmed there. Find out about the kind of methods of, well, one hesitates to even call it care that, that patients endured. Because it was sort of…incarceration is punishment almost in Victorian times, all of which seemed somehow relevant to the Cure.
And I found a weird thing that the further I spiraled out from the center, whether the center is a particular song or album or video, the more I understood them, because they are a band, I think deliberately, where their music is full of resonances, and you are invited almost to explore these things. I think it's quite deliberate. The most obvious example has been the many songs which are inspired by literature or poetry. Robert is very much encouraging the fan to go off and read those books and find out about them. So yeah, I happily picked up the invitation on, on all those things.
There's such a culturally rich band – with a lot of bands, the lyrics are just nonsense written on the back of an envelope during a drunken moment in the studio. But the Cure are quite obviously…they did plenty of that as well, there’s an A is for Alcohol chapter in the book and D is for drugs. But I think it's very considered and a lot of thought goes into it. They, they don't just rattle off any nonsense and shuck it out there in the hope that nobody will notice. I think that the sort of quality threshold, the quality control is very high, extraordinarily so for a ban who've been going for 45 years. So, yeah, I'm not sure if that really answers the question, but...
MARC: No, no, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that was one of the things I really loved about…I've been a decently big fan of theirs for a long time, but I think reading this book really brings together how much in certain places, just kind of explicit. Like, you have a section on drowning, and you go through all the different songs that refer to that. And it's kind of cool because I'd heard all those songs before, but I don't think I necessarily always made that connection. I think that's really cool. They turn out to be a band for whom…I mean, I think you could do this format for a lot of bands, but they certainly are one for whom this really works because they're such a consistent, coherent kind of artistic entity in that way. Or at least Robert is.
SIMON: Well, if I know anything for sure, or if there's any single truth behind my writing about music, it's that music is never just the music. There's always some kind of cultural context or kind of hinterland around it, which informs the music and kind of directly or indirectly creates it. And the way that music affects the listener is never as simple as just, I dunno, serotonin stimulated through the ears. There’s always something else going on. Quite often the way that music plays out in people's lives is not the way that it was intended by, by the performer. And in that way, I was quite inspired…well, I've always been quite inspired by Greil Marcus, whose book Lipstick Traces is one of my favorites, where he starts off with Sex Pistols and you think that it's just gonna be a fairly straightforward history of the Pistols and the history of punk, but it spirals outwards into this entire history of sort of European heretics and dissenters and places Johnny Rotten in that tradition. I love things like that. I love writing that way. And yeah, the Cure are a band who allow that kind of writing more than most, I would say.
MARC: Yes, I agree. And one of the other things I found really interesting about the way you went about the book is, it probably would've been pretty easy to just make every entry kind of a bullet point thing. And in some cases with some entries, you do have to kind of just list, say, these are the covers or things like that. But I thought that a lot of the entries you approached as mini-narratives, especially the album ones. And even within that you varied, like I was reading the one for Wish (note: I should have said Wild Mood Swings) last night, and you start with the band’s defense of the album, kind of the reception of like, well, grunge was going on, so that's why it wasn't so popular. So you start with the aftermath, and then you go into the making, and then in other albums you start with the making and then go to the aftermath, and so I think you varied it in terms of how each record kind of presented itself to you, the history and things like that. I wonder if that was something you were thinking about as you were writing about creating sort of these mini-narratives.
SIMON: Yeah, I had a certain kind of template or certain kind of formula where I knew I had to include the chart positions, I knew I had to include the critical response to the albums. And usually I would begin with just the kind of mood of the band before making it, what was going on in their world, and then the making of. But yeah, sometimes when doing that, a particular point would leap out as being a really strong way of starting it. And I would just change the order and put that at the top because yeah, I wasn't tied down to having to write in strict chronological order. So yeah, that was quite fortunate that I had that freedom.
MARC: I just think it's neat because it, there's all sorts of stories that you build in some drama and some of the things that were happening between the band mates.
SIMON: Yeah. I mean, it's a human story as much as anything else. There have been 15 or so members of the Cure over the years, and there has been quite a lot of drama between them. And that's kind of fascinating as well. I think a lot of people like to read about that stuff. But I also think that informs the music. I think the kind of records that Robert was making at any given time were partly a function of the musicians he had available. And on other occasions, he sort of picked a band to make the album that he wanted to make, I think. So all of that's in there for sure.
MARC: One of the other things that that struck me about the book that I thought really worked really well is, you approach it somewhat as, you know, you’re a fan of the band. You knew the band well, and you know that the primary audience is gonna be fans. So you do have an appreciation for the band in a way that's not just sort of this cold detached look at the band, but at the same time, you are objective as you can be in terms of…and you're honest about if certain albums didn't seem to work as well as other ones, you don't shy away from that. And I wonder if that's something you thought about balancing to make sure that you weren't coming across as…this isn't a fan club book, but at the same time, you wanna have an appreciation for the band come through in the book.
SIMON: Yeah, I'm a fan. But I would stop short of saying I'm one of THE fans. I'm not. The actual fans, the obsessive fans will know more than I ever will about the real details and real facts. I knew it when I needed to know it for writing the book. A lot of things that sort came into my brain through my brain, I'm typing them, they're there in the book, and they're already gone, to be honest. But yeah, I would say that…I just think everybody's reaction to music is, in fact, I would say everybody's reaction to art is subjective at the end of the day. And you can apply a certain kind of analysis to that you, you can write with a sort of informed subjectivity, but it's still only your own view.
And I didn't shy away from expressing that view, but one of the reasons I included so many quotes from contemporary critics of their albums at the time was to kind of balance out my own opinion. And you know, just to sort of maybe dodge the accusation that this is just me. I wanted to write in a way that's respectful without being fawning of or towards the band. Does that make sense? I didn't want it to seem like…you know, they're not perfect. They've made some record, which are substandard. They've made some real stinkers, not many, but when they have, I've said so. I think that's important.
If people want to read kind of Fan Club stuff, well, I’m ok with that, but I do think that music criticism and music journalism in general has gone down a pretty sorry path now, where pretty much everything you read is cheerleading. And we've just seen in the news this week, that Pitchfork has been folded into GQ. So that's one of the last remaining places where you can read criticism in its true sense. That's probably gone now. And there have been whole successive generations of music fans who are absolutely outraged if they see anything critical about their favorite artists–they don't understand how it's allowed. They’ll organize online pile-ons to scapegoat and hound anybody who dares say anything remotely critical about their idols.
I grew up in a different time where criticism of music was very important and there was a kind of a dialogue going back and forth between the critic and the artist. The artist would very rarely acknowledge that or mention it, but I think that it kept artists agile, and it prevented them from being lazy, if they knew that if they just phoned in, if they just made an album that's exactly the same as the last one, somebody would call them out on it. I think it's beneficial for music, I genuinely do. And even though the Cure themselves were critical of critics, famously critical of Paul Morley with their song “Desperate Journalist” that they recorded for a John Peel session, I think that if you really put them on the spot, they would have to admit that they benefited from growing up in a culture where you were scrutinized and you couldn't expect just to throw out any lazy old nonsense and get away with it.
MARC: Well, that's interesting, because one thing I was going to ask you is…you do mention even in the intro that fans will know more than you ever will. And I have to imagine…it sounds like you probably weren't too bothered by this, but I have to imagine writing a book like this, it's hard not to get in your head, oh, what is the ultra fan gonna think? What minute things are they gonna nitpick from this kind of thing? And was that something you found challenging, or is that something pretty easy to put out of your head?
SIMON: I had to kind of let it go. It was a weird feeling sending in the manuscript, it was on Easter Monday of last year. And I remember a feeling of looking at this enormous document and knowing that within it, there were mistakes. Inevitably there would be mistakes within it. And by definition, I did not know what those mistakes were yet. And I thought, I've just gotta live with that. I've just gotta accept that that's the case. And I made peace with it by thinking that I enjoy finding faults in things that other people have written. It makes you feel special, it makes you feel clever that you know something that the supposed expert doesn't know, and that they've got wrong. So I thought let them have it, you know, they will enjoy this and they'll be happy.
A few things that people have sort of directed me on…I'm happy to just suck that up, just to take it. It's absolutely fine. I suppose I was more worried just about the general reaction from the fans, whether they would hate the book, whether they would think, well, who is this guy? Who does he think he is? How dare he, et cetera. I was bever very active within Cure fandom. Before writing the book, I was very much sort of a distant fan, if you like. I, always loved the Cure's music, but never thrown myself into this sort of fan culture until I was required to do so to write the book, so they don't know who I am. They may have read the odd thing by me in the past in live reviews or album reviews, but I'm not a name who's automatically connected with the Cure.
At least I wasn't until writing this. So I, I wouldn't have blamed them at all for being a little bit suspicious of me. But it's been overwhelmingly positive. Most of the fan groups and Twitter accounts and Facebook pages associated with the Cure have been remarkably positive about the book. And I'm really, really touched by that support. They're so glad that it exists, even though it's not by any means an official book. Nor does it claim to be. I'd like to think that it's some way towards definitive in that it's exhaustive enough that no stone is left unturned. I really tried to get it all in there. And I think that they can sense that the amount of, just the sheer amount of work that that went into it, even though what I love doing is writing the most, most of the work was research. It was just looking, just sifting through the world's collective knowledge of The Cure and trying to draw things together and make sense of it. And I would say 80% of the job was just a massive research job, really. And then the, the actual writing was the final 20%.
MARC: That's great. Between the research and the writing, this must have been such a unique process too. I imagine, like maybe you found an interview and you're like going through and you're like, oh, well, that quote would work for this category, that quote would work for this category. Maybe you were going to the interview hoping it would be about one thing, and suddenly you would find something else. Did you have to keep some kind of organizational tool to make sure that you remembered where everything was as you were writing each entry?
SIMON: Yeah, there was a lot of copy pasting, and a lot of, you know, I would find great quotes and I drop it somewhere in certain chapter, but next to it, I would say drugs, insanity, whatever, you know, because I thought, well, it's also relevant to these things. So there's an amount of repetition in the book because of that. But as I say, I don't expect people to read book from start to finish, so that is kind of inevitable.
MARC: Was it also that sometimes you would find that you would wanna use a quote in five different places or whatever? I guess that would probably be a challenge too, right?
SIMON: Yeah, a little bit. There were definitely occasions where I had to limit myself on that, but certain interviewers did such a great job in the past that I did find myself drawing upon some articles a lot more than others. Even though I didn't sit down with Robert or the band to write this, I found myself thinking that is exactly what I would've asked them. That that's the question I would've asked them. But the benefit of reading these old interviews is that you are finding out what they thought then. What they thought then and what they maybe now would like people to think they thought are two different things. I think bands are often unreliable narrators of their own lives and careers. For all sorts of reasons. They're right in the thick of it. 45 years of sex, drugs, and rock and roll is gonna take its toll on anyone. So I think there's something, I'm not gonna say completely honest, because there's always a certain amount of misdirection when people are talking to the press, but there's something slightly more authentic about seeing what they were saying at the time.
MARC: I think that that is interesting, number one, because I think you made the right choice that them looking back on this would not really have worked for the what you were trying to do, but also it creates this interesting thing where you have these many years of things to draw on, and you can even say in one entry, well, at one point Robert said he wrote the song about this, but actually later he said he wrote the song about this, or, but one point he said he liked this album, then he admitted that he didn't like it as much, and that that created kind of a neat narrative, even though that's probably a little challenging to juggle all that too.
SIMON: Yeah. That thing I was saying about readers loving it, if they can spot mistakes in your work–I am not immune to that either. And I loved finding inconsistencies in The Cure’s own version of things. And sometimes you can see why they may have been a little bit coy about the truth. If a song was very much about a certain experience there may have been reasons in the eighties why you didn't want to say that openly, but now you can say it, and yeah, there'll be things like them claiming that they couldn't possibly have heard “Blue Monday” by New Order before writing “The Walk.” But I looked into the facts and the dates and their version of events doesn't really hold up, and I got quite a kick from finding that out. It’s not exactly Woodward and Bernstein, but you think, well, I've got something here.
MARC: Right, right. And the interesting about that isn't so much that they necessarily were lying, but that they tell stories about themselves for the way they want to feel portrayed. And reality doesn't always match up with that, which is just an interesting friction.
SIMON: Well, we all do it. We all kind of airbrush our own lives, our own backstories a little bit, I think flatter ourselves just to make sense of things. Because Life is chaos. Life is a mess, you know? And in any given moment, there's so many things going on that you don't really know where it fits in the narrative. And the job of a biographer is to apply some kind of order to that chaos. Normally the order would be chronological. I've just chosen to do it in a thematic, alphabetical way, but I don't think there's any less value to do it that way. I think all, all biography is fiction to some extent for exactly that reason, because you are applying…you're sort of forcing things into the strands and shapes which were really never there. When things were going on, it was absolute chaos. And it's only in hindsight that you’ll zoom out and certain kind of patterns and shapes start to emerge.
MARC: Absolutely. I'm curious, what is the revising process like for a book like this? First of all, the fact that it has entries rather than a conventional narrative but also the fact that it's just, it's a longer book. So, I mean, you can't sit down in one night and read through the whole thing. So I'm just curious how you approached that and did you have a lot that you needed to trim out, or was it in the area that you wanted to begin with so you didn't have to worry about that so much?
SIMON: I can honestly say nothing was trimmed. That became a bit of a problem, in fact, because I gave in double the amount of words that was required of me in the first place. I can remember with quite a lot of sadness hitting the word count that was originally requested and realizing, well, the book isn't finished. There are so many things I need to put in here. I just have to keep going and keep going. They ended up, for the UK Standard Edition, they had to have it printed in China because the economics of having it printed here just didn't work. And yeah, it became quite a problem, the length of the book. But when I gave it in, I was almost sort of challenging the publishers. It was a case of, well, look, I know that I've gone off on some ridiculous tangents here, and I completely understand if you wanna chop all those out or send it back to me and tell me to chop them out. But they didn't. They loved it. They thought that this is gold, this stuff that’s hanging on the edge of relevance by its fingernails is actually the good stuff. It's actually the gold because all the other stuff, people could find on Wikipedia, if you just wanna know when a record came out. That's, that's the easy part. It's, it's the really arcane, esoteric, obscure stuff that I think people are looking for. I hope they are, anyway.
MARC: Great. I think that was one of the coolest things about the book is that you couldn't Google this book. There's a lot more happening than just what you can find on the surface.
SIMON: It’s all about analysis. People think music journalism is dead because you can find all the facts and you can find out about release dates, and you can access music directly without the sort of gatekeepers of the music press. But what an algorithm can never give you is analysis. The journalists who influenced me the most when I was starting out, like Simon Reynolds, were all about that. All about, so you've heard this music, but we're gonna provide a different way of thinking about it, different way looking at it. And I really hope that's how Curepedia will work for people. I hope that people will maybe take out their favorite album or even an album that was one of the lesser ones in their mind, put it on and read what I have to say about it. And I hope it'll just make them think of music in a different way. That's what I'm really hoping for, as well as hopefully entertaining because it's quite funny in parts as well. There they are, despite their reputation for being gloomy, quite a hilarious band.
MARC: Yeah! was laughing at one part, reading to my wife one part last night, the “Friday I'm in Love” entry where Robert's calling everybody he knows and saying, “Have you heard this melody before? I can't possibly have come up with this on my own.” I think that's great because I wonder that about bands all the time. They must always be paranoid that someone else wrote the song already before they did.
SIMON: Yeah, and quite often they are correct, and there are lawsuits. But yeah, I love that. That's quite funny. Also if you just look at their videos, they are so willing to play the fool for a band who are taken very seriously. Their early work was so intense and so dark that it basically invited the audience to take it very seriously. They had a little bit of a 180 degree turn around the time of “The Love Cats,” where suddenly they've really playful and writing just great lots of pop songs and making videos where they just got mucking about really and dressing up in animal costumes and all of that. I think that was quite brave of them because they could have, and in fact did, lose some of their more serious fans.
But as their career progressed beyond that, they were able to include both strands, both sides of The Cure on pretty much every album. And I think in a way that's more honest. It's true. It's life. Because nobody's miserable the whole time. And I don't think being humorous really ought to be seen as kind of deficit of intellect. Do you know what I mean? But I think some people did take it that way. It's like, “Oh no, he's singing about cats. He's no longer a great artist. He's, he's betrayed us all.”
MARC: Yeah, I think they're the kind of band who, and Robert particularly, have really figured out that being dark and gothic and serious also has an element of absurdity to it. It points out the absurdity of life and the weird predicament we're all in. And that's funny too. There’s humor in that for sure.
SIMON: Definitely. Absolutely. If you look at something like “Close to Me,” a song which is about kind of claustrophobia and feeling uncomfortable within your own skin, it's quite sort of dark lyrically in some ways. But then you watch the video and they're crammed inside a wardrobe, playing the tune on plastic combs and falling off a cliff into the sea, and the whole thing filling up with the water, it's just ridiculous. And you can do both those things at the same time. And I think that’s the beauty of The Cure is that kind of mix of gravitas and levity, I suppose. And I really tried to encapsulate that in the book.
MARC: I think you really did. There were moments of seriousness, moments of levity and moments when both are in the same entry. And I think that makes it entertaining, but it also brings out the richness of this art that they've created that really justify justifies this kind of approach to them, to put it all in there.
SIMON: Yeah, I'm glad you think so because that's definitely what I was trying to do.
MARC: Well thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate all your insights, and I really appreciate this book so much. And I hope it's going great, and it continues to go great for you.
