How Pornography brought The Cure to the brink

Ahead of their headline set on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, Ed Power looks back on how drugs, drink and the recording process turned goth-rock troupe into ‘a powder keg ready to explode'.

Summer 1982 was drawing to a fitful close when Robert Smith slid his guitar under the bed, scrubbed away the last of the mascara and packed his sleeping bag. The Cure frontman was about to step outside the door of his parent’s house in Crawley, West Sussex, and away from the goth-rock troupe he had led to unlikely success across the previous six years. He was heading into the blue yonder in a desperate attempt to silence the tumult in this head, the chaos that had come crashing down on his music career.

He didn’t tell anyone but he suspected that, after four albums and a lifetime of upheaval stuffed into half a decade, it might be the end for the band. As far as Smith was concerned, The Cure were over. And so here he was, a literally unhappy camper about to hit the road. “Everything seemed to be going wrong,” Smith would recall. “So I decided to go off for a few months. I took a tent and went around England.”

Read the article at The Independent.