2023-09-18 06:25:05

The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst: ‘Goth is about being in love with the melancholy beauty of existence’ | The Cure
"It’s a long time since Lol Tolhurst last played drums or keyboards for the Cure, the band he co-founded in the late 1970s with his schoolfriend Robert Smith. But occasionally he still finds himself striving to explain what the songs of those early years were all about. In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, early Cure classics such as Seventeen Seconds and A Strange Day sounded a note of existential angst in teenage bedrooms across the land. The lyrics to A Forest, released in 1979, communicate the general vibe: “The girl was never there/ It’s always the same/ I’m running towards nothing/ Again and again and again and again…” Sadly, the cathartic power of such virtuoso melancholy has not always been obvious to everyone.

The Power of Cathartic Melancholy
"In conversations I’ve had all around the world,” Tolhurst says, “the thing that’s irked me is when people say: ‘Oh but the music is so depressing and you’re so depressed, and people listening must end up becoming more and more unhappy and even harming themselves.’

“Nothing could be further from the truth. The opposite is the truth! It’s without this way of understanding life, and the expressions it gives rise to, that negative stuff becomes more likely. Listen, I’m not saying the Cure have been some great saviours or anything. But so much correspondence we have had – that I have personally had down the years – has been from people saying: ‘Things were very bad for me and this music was my way out to a better place.’”

"Goth" as a Broader Snapshot
"When it comes to depression and bad times, Tolhurst knows whereof he speaks. On the eve of the publication of his new book, Goth, he is speaking from Los Angeles, where he has lived for 30 years, after escaping his own spiral of decline. A self-confessed “blackout drunk”, Tolhurst’s chronic alcoholism led Smith to sack him as the Cure’s drummer in 1989, painfully rupturing a friendship that had begun at the age of five at St Francis’s primary school in Crawley, West Sussex."

“Things had fallen apart – me and the band, my first marriage. I had the disastrous court case – I owed a lot of money for that. I didn’t have anything much to do. I couch-surfed for a while, living with one set of friends during the week and then with others at the weekend.”
Goth is an attempt at a broader snapshot of the times that formed him. Observer readers of a certain vintage, brought up on a late-70s diet of the John Peel show, NME and the occasional French existentialist novel, will feel a warm glow of recognition. Via a litany of bands, and literary influences ranging from Rimbaud to Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, Tolhurst explores the alternative mindset that even managed to infiltrate Top of the Pops in the late 70s and early 80s. “People who enjoyed Cured,” he says, “said they wanted to know more about where it all came from, that music and that world. So I’ve tried to locate the meaning, the whys and the wherefores.”
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