It’s only at the very end of his second book – his first, Cured
(2016), described how The Cure came into being, what he did in the band, and
how he crashed out of it – that Lol Tolhurst lets us in on the plan. At first
he thought of writing an encyclopaedia, he says, before concluding that he
wasn’t up to it and that nobody would be satisfied by anything he might
produce, and so, instead, he wrote a memoir. But its subject isn’t ‘my time in The
Cure’ – the earlier volume covered that – rather it tells how music, literature
and aesthetics have fed into Mr Tolhurst’s sense of who he is and how he looks
at the world. You do get a thirty-page account of the life and times of The
Cure, but you also get encounters with other great names in the post-punk and
Goth world, the bands Messrs Smith, Tolhurst et al saw perform, met, or worked
with. Sometimes the connection is a bit oblique: a discussion of Depeche Mode
begins with the author describing how he bumped into Andy Fletcher when they
were both being treated at The Priory, and I can’t see any overlap that
justifies two pages on the Sisters of Mercy at all, but along the way Mr
Tolhurst addresses exactly the kind of questions other works haven't tackled. What
was it like being a teenage music fan in the 1970s? He outlines the importance
of John Peel, the music press and local record shops. What led proto-Goth young
people to start playing music in the first place? He describes the drabness of
his and Robert Smith’s Crawley surroundings and how their first visit to
Salford revealed exactly why Joy Division sounded like they did; he relates
Julianne Regan of All About Eve’s similar feelings about the landscape she grew
up in, and David J of Bauhaus’s about Northampton. During an account of The
Cure’s tour supporting the Banshees in 1979, he ponders the differences between
London and the suburbs, laments the grotty venues they often played, and
marvels at Siouxsie’s brisk methods of dealing with the unenlightened males who
gave her grief at concerts. Why did musicians keep going? Mr Tolhurst tells us
how making new music with French group The Bonapartes made him feel better
after the stresses of his own band; David J describes performing as ‘an
exorcism’ of negative feelings; Julianne Regan confesses that making music was
a compensation for a decidedly unromantic existence. The chapter on the poetry
that’s meant something to the author, and the concluding section on wider Goth
culture, are there, again, to stress his sense of being part of something
bigger than just one Goth band at one moment, something that ultimately brought
him meaning.
You will look in vain here for Lol Tolhurst saying a single
bad word about anyone. The closest he gets to being personally critical is in
an account of The Cure’s first trip to California in 1981 when they find
themselves staying in the same ‘kitschy motel’ as Joe Jackson: ‘Joe represented
the new wave movement. Oh dear’. And that’s it. For all the gloomth of the Goth
world, this book is overwhelmingly positive. It’s kind, humane and humble,
conversationally-written and easy to read, and there is nothing else like it at
the moment. Take off the odd paper half-jacket around the cover, and it’s even
rather beautiful, bearing an embossed black raven against a cloud on the front
and a feather on the back, with a neutral grey background, a bit like a
children’s adventure book from the 1950s. Lol Tolhurst’s girlfriend in 1977,
when the book starts, was a black-clad girl with straight black hair he calls
The Raven; and we know that, in the dark, All Cats Are Grey.