Interview with Simon Price – Part 1
by Killian Laher

No More Workhorse chatted to Simon Price about his recent book Curepedia – An A-Z of the Cure and a few other things…

No More Workhorse: How long have you been a fan of The Cure?

Simon Price (SP): I would date my fandom to 1983 when I saw The Walk on Top of the Pops. But one thing I mentioned in the book is that the persona of Robert Smith really kind of captivated me before I was even into the music. There was a magazine called Flexipop, a short-lived monthly glossy magazine, which had a flexi disc on the front. And it was a bit of a kind of rogue, renegade publication… Every month they would have a diary of a pop star, a sort of week in the life. there was one of Robert Smith and the things he did, they didn’t seem to be, ‘oh look at me, I’m so weird’. They weren’t performatively trying to be strange, but they were just gently strange. He was doing things like planning a ballet with his partner, Mary in the garden, where he was going to film only her feet… or there was a thunderstorm and he went walking at one in the morning. He went walking in the ornamental park because he enjoyed being scared, enjoyed thinking somebody might jump out at him. He dressed up as his own mother to cook the dinner. And they sat in the garden and watched a football match on the TV that was in the house from outside through the window!

I didn’t know that being an adult meant that you were allowed to just do anything. I suppose my idea of adulthood was that windows of possibility shut, if anything, and that you have to be very conformist. So to see this guy just living that way, his whole way of being in the world… I tore the pages out of the magazine and folded them up in my blazer pocket and just took them to school every day just to sort of find inspiration. Musically it was seeing The Walk on Top of the Pops, which is obviously fantastic. A dark electro dance track, somewhat influenced by New Order’s Blue Monday, though they deny that. I was fully on board from then onwards. I was one of those ’80s teenagers who had the big hair and the eyeliner. I experimented with eyeliner purely because I’d seen Robert Smith wearing it. I nagged my mother to knit me a big mohair jumper because I’d seen Robert wearing one, and people used to heckle me in the street by singing Cure lyrics at me and all know. So I was one of those. I go back a long way.

NMW: How did you get started in your writing career?

SP: It wasn’t long after seeing The Walk on Top of the Pops. Actually, it would have been 1984 I was 15 when that song came out (1983), and I was 16 when I started writing. I used to read the local newspaper in South Wales, the Barrier District News, and there was nothing in it for young people, and I wrote a letter complaining about that. I definitely wasn’t angling for work! I just wrote and said that all that’s in it (the local paper) is obituaries and Lady Skittles results. They wrote back and said, well if you can do any better, have a column. That kind of blew my mind a little bit. I was reviewing singles every week, stuff that I’d heard on the radio because I certainly wasn’t getting them sent to me. Localised notoriety. Big fish in a small pool, 14,000 readers in a town of 42,000 at the time. So one-third of the town was reading it and sending angry letters saying, how can you say The Smiths are better than The Beatles?!

When I went to university, I carried on. I wrote for the student newspaper, London Student, and through that I managed to wangle an opportunity to interview my journalistic hero, Simon Reynolds of the Melody Maker, and he kind of took me under his wing a little bit and introduced me to the reviews editor. I was doing a French and Philosophy degree, and I said to him, I’m going to live in Paris. Can I send you reviews from Paris? And they agreed, just to get rid of me as much as anything else. And I started sending reviews in from Paris. The first few they ignored, but then finally, in November ‘88, they printed my Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Live Review, which had a photo with it. It was very exciting and carried on from there, really. I came back to London, I finished my degree, but my heart wasn’t in anymore. I knew what I wanted to do and I just sort of seamlessly carried on with Melody Maker then for nine years. During that time I got to know the Manic Street Preachers really well and ended up writing a book about them (Everything). And off the back of that, doing quite well. I got my job with The Independent on Sunday, which lasted for twelve years and that takes us up to ten years ago.

NMW: How did you come to start writing the Curepedia?

SP: It wasn’t my idea, to be fair. The publisher is actually a guy called Lee Brackstone who set up this publishing house, White Rabbit, which is part of Orion, which is in turn part of Hachette, so quite a big corporation, but White Rabbit is the little indie label within it. He’d been working for Faber and Faber before that and for years he’d been trying to figure out the right book for me to do because he really liked my Manics book and we just couldn’t figure it out. But one day we had a meeting and he just said, why don’t we just do a big A to Z of The Cure? I wasn’t sure.
On the one hand, it’s paid work, a decent hefty job, and I wasn’t going to turn it down. It was an era I was comfortable with and a band that actually meant something to me. But I did think the A to Z thing, is that a bit of a gimmick? Is it a bit of a novelty way of approaching their body of work or their history?

But I actually ended up finding it quite liberating because obviously the book’s got essays on every member of the band, every album, every single and all of that. But doing it in A to Z format allowed me to dispense with doing a linear timeline and allowed me to sort of write thematically and draw together different things from different eras so that I could write essays on things. Like religion, sex, politics, how they relate to The Cure and also seemingly trivial things like hair, makeup and shoes, which kind of turn out not to be so trivial when you examine them closely enough. And Q for Queens Park Rangers, which allowed me to write about football and so on. It turned out to be a really enjoyable way of tackling the subject matter.

NMW: Did it take you long to put together?

SP: Oh, God, yeah. It took over three years. I started it in February 2020. It was originally a sort of lockdown project, but for various reasons, some of them nothing to do with the book, and also just the subject matter itself, I didn’t realise how much I’d taken on. It ended up taking three years on and off – I was doing other stuff in that time as well. The more I started zooming in on The Cure, the more worlds within it I started to find, and I don’t think that would be true of every band. I think that says something about The Cure, that the more you stare at it, the more there is to stare at.

I did a ridiculous research job. I just decided, because this isn’t any kind of official book, I didn’t sit down with the members of The Cure, I sat down on my own and trawled through the collected global knowledge about The Cure, which is obviously easier online these days than it would have been in the old days. I’ve also got a shed full of old music papers and an attic full of old books and all of that. I think I went a bit mad during the making of it. I lost sight of who I was, what it was and where I was going with this, and I just didn’t think it was ever going to end… much like that answer to the question!

NMW: Was there much that you left out of the book?

SP: After I’d finished it? There were 290-something entries, but almost immediately I thought of another ten I could have done and I was really kicking myself. But I also thought, Simon, stop it man, this is finished! The answer to the question is no. I didn’t knowingly leave anything out. I was almost challenging or daring the publishers to tell me I’ve gone insane and tell me, ‘oh, come on, that doesn’t belong in a rock biography.’ I’m talking about the really quite obscure stuff that seems quite distant from the subject matter, because I found that the more you kind of spiral outwards from the central subject matter of The Cure, I was going down these research rabbit holes and finding out about outbreaks of Tarantism in medieval Italy, or a Scottish body of water between two of the Shetland Islands, and all these things which are somehow tangentially related to The Cure. It sounds very trite and glib to say that, but I did find that this kind of doughnut-like hinterland of weird stuff that’s on the periphery of relevance to The Cure, gave me a sense of The Cure and told me more about who they are.

So it all went in there and it all got published to the extent that I believe they had to send it to China to get it printed because it was just too big and heavy to publish the normal way, which I’m weirdly proud of!

NMW: Any word from the band at all? Are they aware of it?

SP: We kept them aware all the way through. We sent the manuscript in various stages of completion for Robert to look at. Really the short answer is no. There are a couple of things that came back, there was going to be an extract published about The Cure in Orange, the film. It was going to be published in Record Collector and Robert had a look at that because he was quite involved in that issue of Record Collector and he came back with a couple of alterations, just factual stuff really, which I took on board. But it was very much me getting on with it on my own, nobody looking over my shoulder, and there are pros and cons to that.  But certainly, I’ve had the freedom to say things that maybe I wouldn’t have done if they were directly involved. I don’t know. It’s kind of how when I wrote my Manics book I had the best of both worlds because they really helped me with it off the record, lots of information given and stuff like that.

It was basically just me going through everything that they’ve said in the past. I got a lot of really obscure stuff like illegally downloading cassette-only interviews from Australia from the early eighties and stuff like that. In the hope of finding the one quote that would unlock it all for me. That’s how I approached it.

NMW: What’s your favourite era or album of The Cure?

I’m going to dodge the question slightly by saying two. So first of all, I would say 1982, the Pornography album, which is their bleakest, darkest, most intense record they described it as the ultimate fuck off record and the opening song, One Hundred Years, which begins with the words, famously, “it doesn’t matter if we all die”. It has lyrics in it about sharing the world with slaughtered pigs and so on and waiting for the death blow so that’s them at their most miserable, you might say.

But then, five years later, the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, was probably my equal favourite. That would be the one that, if I was telling somebody who’d never heard The Cure which album to start with, start with that. It’s got a bit of everything. It’s almost like a sort of grab bag, like a variety box of greatest hits, of what they do. It’s got the big pop hits like Just Like Heaven, Why Can’t I Be You? It’s got psychedelic, rock out stuff like Snakepit and The Kiss. And it’s got dark, mysterious things, like If Only Tonight We Could Sleep. It’s also got the literary influence that is so important and so many Cure records of Baudelaire on How Beautiful You Are.

NMW: Do you think late-period Cure is underrated?

SP: I do, yeah. I think something happens with any band of that vintage, which is that you can tour the world and play to massive stadiums, but nobody cares about your new stuff, nobody really wants to hear it. That must be frustrating for artists. There’s a quote to that effect from Robert in the book where he’s saying that. I think he might be talking about Bloodflowers, because that’s an album from 2,000 he was particularly proud of. He was saying he could have made the best album of The Cure’s career. But he also knows that it can never be as powerful as their earlier stuff because the cultural conditions were just no longer right and they were no longer central. The Cure were no longer central in the way that they had been. I think that album, in particular, was one I barely paid much mind to at the time, because I was deep in Manics world at that point. Even things like the self-titled album The Cure and 4:13 Dream, they’re records which I would have reviewed at that point. I was working for The Independent on Sunday and I gave them sort of fond, appreciative reviews, but I also know that I just put them to one side after that and got on with the next thing, because that’s the job of being a critic, you’ve got to have this constant turnover.

So with a certain amount of regret, you can hear a record that is really good and might grow on you, but you also know you just haven’t got the bandwidth to do that. So it was good to actually have a reason to just pause everything, to stop and go back and properly listen to some of that stuff. Some of it’s really good. And who knows, there might be another one about to drop. We’ll see.

The Interview continues in Part 2…