Interview with Simon Price – Part 2

No More Workhorse chatted to Simon Price about his recent book Curepedia – An A-Z of the Cure and a few other things… This is part 2 of the interview, Part 1 is available here.

NMW: Do you think The Cure is still finding a new audience? 

SP: I think they’re one of those bands now who, even if they split up tomorrow, they are there forever for people to discover. Robert Smith’s one of those artists like Ian Curtis from Joy Division or Kurt Cobain, who symbolise something about not fitting in, being misunderstood, feeling alienated. The difference of course being, sadly, those two are no longer with us. Robert is still with us and this year they played their highest grossing tour ever in America, so they’re clearly still reaching people. I think it’s not just because he’s a sort of living legend in the same way that the Rolling Stones are living legends. I think The Cure, Robert Smith in particular, actually means something. I think even just the sight of him, just any photo of him from the late 80s with the makeup and the big hair is iconic. He literally is an icon in that it’s not just a picture of a famous person, it’s a picture which means something. You look at him and all these associations come flooding out because he’s externalising difference and otherness.

That’s one reason why they’re big around the world, you don’t even necessarily have to understand the lyrics. You can just look at him, hear how he’s singing, hear his voice, hear the chord changes and the general sound of The Cure and you kind of get what they’re trying to convey. Because of that, they will always be there.

NMW: Do you miss the days when the UK music press was really powerful?

SP: Do I miss being a gatekeeper, you mean? Yeah, I do. Because I think criticism matters. I think there was a genuinely productive dynamic between critics and artists. I think that if music or any art goes unchecked and uncriticized, that leads to complacency and it leads to things coming to a grinding halt, to quote The Cure. A world with uncriticized art gets the art it deserves. I genuinely think it’s a bad thing for music and for art, above and beyond the selfish reasons that it’s less easy for people like me to find work anymore.

NMW: Do you think it’s been a good year for music?

SP: I’m probably the wrong person to ask because I’ve been obsessing about one band for most of it, but I cannot allow myself to believe that good music is something that only exists in the past. There have been times where you had to really dig deep to find the good stuff. Probably from ‘86 to about ‘93 was one of those times. But before that, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a time, the late 70s, early 80s, where really brilliant, innovative, challenging music was front and centre. It was on Top of The Pops and it was on the front of Smash Hits magazine. So that was just my good fortune. In some ways, it’s theoretically easier than ever to find the good stuff because everything in the world is available at one click, but also you’ve got nobody to guide you through that. It’s just chance. If I was a young person now, I don’t know if I’d find it overwhelming, maybe paradoxically, that massive amount of choice can lead people towards finding one niche and just staying within that.

I couldn’t say whether this year is better than last year, but I’m willing to believe it is. I’m certainly not one of those blinkered old bastards who’s going to say all the good stuff happened in the last century, even if, realistically, that’s mostly what I listen to.

NMW: Your book’s not the only Cure related book that’s come out in the last couple of months with Lol Tolhurst’s goth book, and John Robb wrote a book about goth in general. Do you think that genre or that type of music is making something of a resurgence?

SP: And there was also Cathi Unsworth’s book on Goth as well. John and Cathi are both former colleagues of mine at Melody Maker. We’ve all ended up dropping these books around the same time. I don’t know if it’s just coincidence that those books all came out this year, but I think more broadly, there has been a resurgence in the gothic aesthetic, not just in music, but in everything from computer games to film to TV to young adult fiction. I could come up with some kind of far-fetched sociological theory about that, because my theory about goth in the first place is that it’s to do with the nuclear bomb, it’s to do with the fact that we all knew we were going to die. It wasn’t just, oh, maybe there’ll be a nuclear war. It was, well, it’s definitely going to happen. It might be this year, it might be next year. Well, the New Romantics would be thinking, let’s party, let’s throw ourselves into escapism. Then you had the more social, realist bands like The Specials and The Jam, who would tackle it head-on and write about that.

I think the goth scene can be explained by that as well, this kind of pervasive sense of dread that was hanging over everything. By the way, it’s a little bit rich of The Cure to deny being goth. Robert was hanging around the Batcave Club with the best of them and he was literally a member of Siouxsie and the Banshees. But then Siouxsie and the Banshees would deny being goth. I wonder if that feeling, that death is at hand, is that same feeling that the Rolling Stones encapsulated in Gimme Shelter in the late sixties? I think that was another one of those times. It might explain why people are turning to The Cure more than they maybe were ten years ago.

NMW: Are you working on anything else? Have you any other projects in the works?

SP: I’ve got a few ideas that I need to start writing the pitch for. I’m a contributor to a podcast called Chart Music which is all about old Top Of The Pops, and I’m doing a load of those at the moment and we’re doing a live show in January in Birmingham. I run a club night called Spellbound, which is very much in the same era. It’s an alternative 80s night here in Brighton where I live, so those things keep me ticking over and I have sort of thrown myself back into journalism now that the dust is starting to clear. I’m writing a bit for Record Collector and Classic Pop and I did a thing for the Guardian recently, so I’ve got all these little bits going on.