The band’s co-founder – whose new book examines the emergence of post-punk in Thatcher’s Britain – on reconciling with Robert Smith and the real meaning of the dark music subculture
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.
“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.’
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