Review: Lol Tolhurst's 'Goth: A History'

If you'd asked one of the original punk groups in the seventies--say, the Clash or the Sex Pistols--if they were punks, they would have sneered at you and damned the very idea of being labeled. Same goes for the original Goths--say, Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure. Lol Tolhurst, drummer of the latter group, says as much in Goth: A History. But with time comes a certain perspective, and today Tolhurst obviously embraces that old label, hence his new book celebrating some fifty years of pallor, gloomy songs, wiry hairstyles, black garb, and black moods. 

Review: 'The Cure: A Perfect Dream'

Best known for their gloomy worldview and cobweb-coiffed front man, The Cure do not seem like an expected topic for one of Sterling Publishing’s slick, coffee table-style Rock biographies. Yet much about The Cure is unexpected. Mixed amongst the dirges were near-bubblegum confections such as “Just Like Heaven” and “Friday I’m in Love”, and for a band that seemed consciously designed for cult status, they’ve sold millions of albums and stadium-seat tickets. So unlikely stars The Cure may be, but they are stars nonetheless and perhaps not such a bizarre choice for a jolly old pictorial history such as Ian Gittins’s The Cure: A Perfect Dream.

Fortunately, A Perfect Dream isn’t really that jolly, because that would be dishonest to The Cure story. Theirs is a history with all the demon-wracked turmoil of “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” or “Give Me It”. The group was beset from within with substance abuse, legal, and interpersonal issues. Robert Smith was a sometimes-cruel control freak. Lol Tolhurst was regularly a victim of that cruelty yet often unable to contribute anything to the band because of his constant inebriation. Even those adjacent to the band could be rather difficult, such as Siouxsie Sioux, who dismissed Robert as “Fatboy Smith” when he decided to quit being a part-time Banshee to re-commit himself to The Cure, or Ross Robinson, the nu-metal producer who helmed The Cure and sounds like an absolute dickhead.

A Perfect Dream certainly isn’t a sanitized version of the Cure story, but it does have a whiff of redundancy considering how heavily Gittins leans on quotes from Tolhurst’s recent autobiography Cured and the old biography Ten Imaginary Years. His writing is generally crisp, but he has a tendency to lapse into pretentiousness when analyzing the music. To their credit, those analyses steer clear of hero worship, but they can also be a tad confusing. Why after giving Pornography a veritable track-by-track drubbing does the author conclude that it is “oddly addictive?” Despite such issues, A Perfect Dream still works as a pithy biography that refuses to pull punches and provides plenty of color images of some of Rock’s most photogenic freaks.

Review: 'Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys'

No one understands the shadowy mystique of The Cure better than Robert Smith, so the press release accompanying a new book about the band probably isn’t merely speculating when it implies that he will never dilute the myth with an autobiography. Yet Cure fans are some of the most hardcore fans out there, and many still want an inside portrait of their favorite band’s story. Drummer/keyboardist Lol Tolhurst, who was The Cure’s only constant member besides Smith from the beginning and through their eighties golden era, is surely the next best candidate to tell that story. Since he’d known Smith since childhood, The Cure’s two constants are also constant figures throughout Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys. They meet as five-year olds; geek out over Hendrix; attend punk shows together; form their own band, Malice, which morphs into The Cure, which leads them to true cult stardom. The son of an alcoholic father haunted by his experiences during World War II (the elder Tolhurst witnessed the horrifying aftermath of the Rape of Nanking), Lol Tolhurst ultimately followed the path into substance abuse, and his own excessive drinking resulted in his firing from The Cure after making their key album, Disintegration.

There is a grim, often tragic lining to many of the author’s stories, and he begins the book in a morose style perfectly in tune with his band’s tone (“I came into this world the day the music died… The music had died in Horley, the town where I was born, long before that” is a deliciously dark opening salvo). However, he soon moves into a lighter, more conversational, more typical memoir voice, and a number of the stories are downright comical (the time he peed on Billy Idol; the time his band was forced to wing a Tony Orlando song for the orderlies at a hospital staff party; the time he woke up to find himself being assaulted with cabbages, etc.). This drains Cured of its unique voice but is probably more befitting a man in his fifties who has been through the darkness and is now apparently in a much happier place. As its title implies, Cured has a happy ending. Happy endings may not be very Cure-like, but Tolhurst is a man, not a Goth cartoon character, and his book does a good job of scrubbing away the makeup and hairspray to reveal the human being beneath the stage persona. And since he doesn’t get too deeply into stripping Smith to his core, that Cure mystique remains very much in place.