Rock And Hard Places Part 5

"Put these on and wait here," he says, handing over two VIP laminates, each bearing a cartoon picture of an unshaven drunk p.i.s.sing on a visibly distressed daffodil. "I'll go and get 'em." He zooms off down the hall, bellowing "Coooommminggggthroooo."

He returns, on foot, with an obviously recently woken young pop group. "Green Day," he announces. "Da-naaa."

The introductions are awkward. To Green Day, I am an agent of a paper which has just reviewed their new alb.u.m, Insomniac Insomniac, in much the same way that Air Marshal Harris could have been said to have "reviewed" Dresden. My esteemed colleague Neil Kulkarni has dismissed Insomniac Insomniac as the work of "quacks and mountebanks peddling placebo enervation which is in fact tranquiliser to kids stupid enough to know what they want and how to get it," before informing the sections of our readership that mightn't have followed that argument that "Green Day suck for real." as the work of "quacks and mountebanks peddling placebo enervation which is in fact tranquiliser to kids stupid enough to know what they want and how to get it," before informing the sections of our readership that mightn't have followed that argument that "Green Day suck for real."

To me, Green Day are three people who have no real reason not to make my life difficult-sell ten million copies of one alb.u.m and one Melody Maker Melody Maker cover more or less doesn't make much difference. The photographs seem a good place to start, so Sweet suggests some seats down by the football field outside the venue. This elicits a ma.s.sed negative response. cover more or less doesn't make much difference. The photographs seem a good place to start, so Sweet suggests some seats down by the football field outside the venue. This elicits a ma.s.sed negative response.

Aha! Spoilt whingeing brats who can't cope with the idea of getting their fingers cold for ten minutes?

"Um," says Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day's singer and guitarist, "the trouble is that there'll be people out there who'll be waiting to see the show."

Yes! Stuck-up nouveau megarich who reckon they're now too good for the people who made them what they are!

"And, well," he shrugs, looking monumentally embarra.s.sed, "we do get ha.s.sled. I mean, really. Especially in small towns."

There's a bit of self-conscious giggling as the absurdity of the situation comes into focus. Green Day's current status is the stuff of the most piquant silliness. I keep thinking, and I suspect they do too, that they're just a spirited, if straitlaced, power-pop outfit, a standard-issue one-two-three-four ramalamalama three-chord garage band with better than average tunes. But Green Day are, unarguably, much more. That number again: ten million.

It occurs to me that I wouldn't have thought of suggesting to Robert Smith, or Bono, or Michael Stipe, or Eddie Vedder, that they run the gauntlet of the kind of people who might have travelled across a state to watch them play. Green Day's last alb.u.m, Dookie Dookie, sold more than any of the following: The Cure's Wish Wish, U2's Zooropa Zooropa, REM's Monster Monster, Pearl Jam's Vitalogy Vitalogy or, come to that, Nirvana's or, come to that, Nirvana's Nevermind Nevermind. It is possible that the three dopey, dishevelled wretches before me are the component parts of the biggest band in the world right now.

"Look," says Billie Joe, who seems to find the situation as baffling as we do, "you think about it, and we'll see you after the soundcheck."

Green Day wander off, leaving Sweet and me feeling like we've fallen through the looking gla.s.s.

GREEN DAY FORMED longer ago than most people give them credit for in Rodeo, the unfashionable end of the fashionable Californian town of Berkely. Billie Joe and Mike Dirnt, Green Day's ba.s.splayer, a.s.sembled their first band when both were aged eleven. Sweet Children, as they were known, failed to make a significant impact outside their own bedrooms, and the project was abandoned in favour of a succession of punk covers acts. Under a variety of long-forgotten names, Billie Joe and Mike took skiploads of speed and played around the Bay Area of San Francisco during the boom years of the peculiarly ascetic version of punk sp.a.w.ned by such grimly conscientious acts as Dead Kennedys and True Sounds of Liberty, and developed by the likes of Operation Ivy and Neurosis. At one of the all-ages concerts that characterised the hey!-if-the-kids-are-united ethos of the genre, Billie Joe and Mike met Tre Cool, a drummer. There is a possibility that Tre's name is some sort of cunning fraud.

The three became Green Day, an invigorating fusion of the hardcore they'd grown up on and the pop sensibilities of their transatlantic infatuations: The Who, The Clash, The Buzzc.o.c.ks and The Kinks. They took more skipfuls of speed, played more gigs, and released two alb.u.ms, 39/Smooth 39/Smooth and and Kerplunk Kerplunk on an excitingly obscure local label. These sold about 30,000 copies each and got ecstatic, semi-literate reviews in fanzines with names like on an excitingly obscure local label. These sold about 30,000 copies each and got ecstatic, semi-literate reviews in fanzines with names like Pocketful Of Vomit Pocketful Of Vomit and and The Urine Sample The Urine Sample.

In 1993, some bright spark in an A&R department in a thumping great American record company noticed that every other thumping great American record company was signing punk-influenced guitar groups and making shedfuls of money: at the height of the Nirvana-inspired grunge goldrush, it seemed that a major deal and major success were there for the taking for anybody who could operate a guitar without hurting themselves, whinge convincingly about nothing in particular and cope with a few fashionable indignities being wrought with their hair. Green Day, present and correct on all three counts, were offered a deal. Hoping that here lay a way to make a living from their music, they signed it. Green Day were pleased with Dookie Dookie, their major label debut. It seemed to them a solid and likeable piece of work, well recorded but not oppressively polished. Who knew, with a bit of luck, it might sell 100,000 copies.

It did. Then it sold another 9,900,000, and counting-a turn of events that has confused n.o.body more than Green Day. When they talk about their good fortune now, they do so with the perplexed air of people who've been knocked down in the street by a runaway dustcart full of cash. They're defensive, almost paranoid. They almost sound like they feel guilty.

In Britain, the conventional critical wisdom on Green Day, for what little it's worth, is that they're smart, cynical charlatans, living high on some spurious notion of adolescent alienation, and milking the affections of their deluded fans for every last cent. This case collapses within seconds of arriving in their dressing room.

Bands of Green Day's status generally ensure that they're well looked after backstage. There will be ample food of the junk and fresh varieties, a selection of drinks alcoholic and non, magazines, a couple of contractual eccentricities like fresh socks or bowls of M&Ms with the red ones carefully separated-even televisions, stereos and video games are not unusual. Green Day's backstage rider consists of one espresso machine, and whatever eye-reddening herb the room is reeking of, and they bought all that with them. This self-imposed austerity is all in the name of keeping overheads, and therefore ticket prices, as low as possible. For similar reasons, Green Day travel with minimal crew-Randy doubles as a soundman-and subject themselves to a punishing tour schedule that often sees them playing stretches of fifteen gigs in as many nights, travelling between them overnight on the tour bus, thereby obviating the expense of hotels.

"It is now two weeks since I had a shower," grins Tre, welcoming us in. Tre, from the vertiginous blond bouffant, to the immovable deranged grin, to the continuous high-pitched giggle, is going to walk one of the parts if anyone ever casts a stage production of Beavis and b.u.t.t-head Beavis and b.u.t.t-head. When I tell him this, he replies, without missing a beat, "Huh-huh. You said 'parts.' Huh-huh." The ice is breaking, slowly but surely. "Do you want an espresso? We don't have anything else."

Billie Joe and Mike are sitting on benches, and seem warily amicable. Their determination to keep their shows as accessible as possible for their growing legion of fans is laudable, but Green Day are hampered by their tendency to protest rather too much. The first minutes of conversation sound like a rehearsal for Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch.

"I guess," begins Billie Joe, "that the biggest misconception about Green Day, at least as far a Britain is concerned, is that we all come from rich backgrounds, which is bulls.h.i.t. Rodeo, which is where we come from, doesn't have a low, low cla.s.s, but it doesn't have a really high, high cla.s.s. It has no cla.s.s. It's a refinery town, a smudge on the map of California."

"My mom was living in a trailer last year," adds Mike. "And she's a Native American."

Tre is engaged in single combat with the espresso machine, preventing him from regaling us with tales of a childhood spent in a s...o...b..x in t'middle of t'road, or something very like it.

"I was the youngest of six kids raised by a single parent," continues Billie Joe. "She had a waitressing job. She is still a waitress. But if people read a few things from various British publications . . ."

We both know who he's talking about.

". . . they'd just think we brought together by some record company or something."

Would that matter?

"Well, yeah . . . I don't want people to think we were this thing that was put together."

The American strain of punk is plagued by the same craving for "authenticity" as every other form of American music. American musicians talk about being "real" and "meaning it" with genuine fervour, believing that the central virtues of rock'n'roll are sincerity and credibility. To the British pop consumer, such considerations as background, motivation and underlying morals appear rather quaint. Whether Green Day were raised in paper bags in septic tanks or are all architecture graduates whooping it up on trust funds is a matter of supreme irrelevance, surely. They've made at least three belting pop singles ("Basket Case," "Longview," "Stuck With Me") and those are all the credentials they'd need, you'd think.

"I know what you're saying," nods Mike. "When I was growing up, I didn't really think bands had backgrounds. They weren't real. But we have ideals that we carry with us, and they matter. I'm a momma's boy, totally, and that instilled good morals in me, I think. I'm not saying our backgrounds were completely f.u.c.ked, but they weren't great. We've been through as much s.h.i.t as anyone, but we keep reading that we're rich college kids."

Let's drop the college thing. That leaves "rich"-and you must have made a few bob by now-and "kids." Your average age is around twenty-three. So "rich kids" is hard one to refute, surely.

"I bought my mom a house, yeah," says Mike. Mike stares at his shoes. He seems a bit frail, and will later tell me that he suffers from a heart condition that gets exacerbated by stress. "But we don't have high standards of living. People think that once you gain money you suddenly have no feelings and no problems. We all have a life to live, and monetary stability brings another list of problems that comes with it. I can't expect people to understand or relate to that-they'll just say 'You're a rich rock star, what are you b.i.t.c.hing about?' Well, I'm b.i.t.c.hing because I've been gone from my fiancee for a year and a half. That still hurts."

Go and see her, then. That's the whole point of being rich. You don't have to do this (Green Day all have other concerns-Billie Joe is married with a young son, Joey).

"When we stop having fun, we will stop," says Billie. "I'm still having a total ball playing gigs. I don't know if you noticed the other night in Halifax, but I was having fun."

People don't usually come on naked for the encore when they're feeling a bit downbeat, no.

"If people pay to see us play-and we are entertainers-we have to put out as much as we possibly can. We can't go, 'Duh, I'm a rock star, this sucks, the people who are paying to see me now are the kind who used to beat me up in high school, I want my mummy."

Billie Joe is starting to lighten up a bit.

"I don't want to sit here and complain about being a rock star. I don't want to be whining and moaning. f.u.c.k that, you know. I'm not gonna take for granted the fact that I have the ability to play music for the rest of my life if I want to. That's all I've ever wanted. For one or two or a few people to understand what the h.e.l.l I'm talking about in my songs, that's more than I've ever asked for, for people to f.u.c.kin' get it."

WHICH BEGS THE question of what people are getting when they get Green Day. You don't shift ten million records without hitting a fairly significant seam in the cultural firmament. Nirvana's astonishing, and astonishingly sudden, success demonstrated that America was crying out for a punk-influenced rock trio articulating a large and hitherto unrecognised undertow of alienation, but it all got a bit messy and ugly for comfortable consumption when Kurt Cobain reacted to the fame, acclaim and wealth visited upon him by shooting himself.

Enter Green Day with their cute, catchy songs about television and school and masturbation, their pop-eyed cartoon of a singer, their funny videos, their implicit a.s.surance that it's all just a lark, The Ramones all over again, and here's your licence to print money.

"Mmm," nods Billie. "That's the bleakest a.n.a.lysis I can come up with. It's what kids are talking about in their high schools, or their grammar schools, for that matter. I don't like to belittle people, though, because they happen to be liking my music at the same time. There again, kids are some of the most brutally honest critics there are."

If I could just play devil's advocate for a second, do you ever wonder-as a parent, even-what effect your relentlessly bleak lyrical view has on the kids buying your records?

"Maybe people take it the wrong way," says Billie. "I don't think I complain that much. A lot of our songs, I guess, are kind of about other people that whine. 'Brat' is about waiting for your parents to die so you can get your inheritance. That's where everyone starts saying, 'Oh, you're rich kids.' But that song's not about me, it's about f.u.c.king college kids. I mean, I don't know if you're a college kid . . ."

No, I'm not. Or at least wasn't. Or at least not for long enough to deserve the name. But we've done this bit.

"Well, we're not coming out with some t.i.ts-and-a.s.s beerfest. We say obnoxious things and stuff, but I'd rather have my kid go to see Offspring than Poison, because at least I'd know there was some kind of sensibility a.s.sociated with the band. Because . . ."

Billie Joe takes a deep breath and goes into rant mode.

"In America in the early part of the 90s, mainstream music was starting to get more interesting, Nirvana breaking big, Pearl Jam-who I don't like that much, but they're still more interesting than Bon Jovi-taking off and punk rock starting to get everywhere. Lots of cool stuff. Then, suddenly, in 1995, you get a bunch of f.u.c.king golf-playing fraternity boys putting out music. I mean, have you heard Hootie & The Blowfish?"

I have. While having no objection in principle to golf-playing fraternity boys releasing records, the appeal of Hootie & The Blowfish eludes me. In a sane world, they would play to modest audiences whose average age and IQ coincided somewhere in the high forties. In reality, there's hardly a venue in America they can't fill.

"Regular guy rock. Jesus. And Jay Leno is beating out David Letterman for ratings. Can you believe that? Things really are going backwards."

Green Day, presumably, see themselves on the side of the angels.

"There's more to us than people think," says Mike. "We do more than whine. There are a lot of subjects on the new record if people want to decipher them. 'Westbound Sign' is about the time Billie's wife moved out. 'Tightwad Hill' is about where we come from. 'No Pride' is like the anti-anthem, it's an anti-nationalism kind of song."

Ah, Green Day whining about nationalism.

Billie Joe gives me the look this last remark deserves, but decides to let it go.

"Listen," he says. "We've got to go and play, but come and have a beer afterwards, huh?"

This seems a reasonable offer.

WE STAY UP pretty late afterwards, while Green Day's crew pack crates, roll cables and give the buses the sort of meticulous clean you give buses when you're about to drive them across the border into America and you don't fancy becoming an extra in some lonely customs post's remake of Midnight Express Midnight Express. Tre helps the process along by smoking what remains of Green Day's stash, and entertains himself by smashing empty beer bottles against the dressing room wall. Mike shuffles quietly about, chatting to pa.s.sing crew, and Billie Joe and I get into a frankly embarra.s.singly detailed argument about whether or not All Shook Down All Shook Down is a better Replacements alb.u.m than is a better Replacements alb.u.m than Let It Be Let It Be.

The Replacements were one of those bands whose commercial success was directly inversely proportional to their musical merit, which is to say they had almost none of the former and a lavish wealth of the latter. Bands like this have a way of turning their fans into crusaders, pa.s.sionate bores who will seize at the slightest opportunity to make a convert. Woe betide the stranger in the seat next to me who makes a pa.s.sing reference to The Go-Betweens or The Fatima Mansions at the beginning of a Heathrow-Los Angeles flight. Where The Replacements are concerned, Billie Joe and I have met our matches in each other. A glazed look begins to descend on everyone else in the room (Tre had one already, but for different reasons).

While I'm just delighted to have met someone else who can quote the line "Anywhere you hang yourself is home" from "Someone Take The Wheel" (The Replacements' peerless lament of the touring life), Billie Joe is trying to make a point. Green Day are in this for the long haul, he says. Earlier, he'd drawn a comparison with The Beastie Boys, who started out with multi-platinum success as a puerile novelty act, and went on to achieve genuine respect and the cult-level fame that Billie says he'd be more comfortable with. A shame that The Beastie Boys accomplished this transition by ceasing to make such splendidly cretinous records as "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" and turning into a bunch of smug, self-righteous hippies in silly jumpsuits, but that's not relevant to Billie's argument.

The Replacements, Billie Joe reminds me, filled their first couple of alb.u.ms with songs called "Gary's Got A b.o.n.e.r," "Dope Smokin' Moron" and "f.u.c.k School." They made Green Day sound like Soren Kierkegaard. They went on to make some of the most haunted and glorious music in the rock'n'roll canon.

"That," says this determined, and brighter than expected, young man, "is what we're here for."

6.

FRIDAY I'M IN CHICAGO The Cure in America and Canada JUNE 1992.

ONE OF THE joys of travelling as a reporter is the opportunity to work with great photographers, and I've been unusually blessed in that respect-as I was on this trip, travelling with Melody Maker Melody Maker's Stephen Sweet. And one of the frustrations of working as a writer is realising how little impact thousands of your words might have in comparison to a single frame snapped by a great photographer, which was what happened when this story originally ran. I'd mumbled something to Sweet about maybe focusing on the odd relationship between The Cure's Robert Smith and his mascara-smeared legions of look-alike fans, and Sweet nailed it the first night, outside the band's hotel in Chicago.The scene is described, and done insufficient justice, below Sweet's shot of Smith's encounter with an especially ardent adherent from behind the singer's shoulder, deftly capturing the worshipper's supplicant gawp and Smith's wincing, forehead-rubbing awkwardness. I still think it's one of the best ill.u.s.trations of the dysfunctional relationship between celebrity and celebrator I've ever seen, and its potence is diluted not even slightly by the knowledge that the anguish discernible in Smith's expression was due princ.i.p.ally to the fact that he was just plain sloshed. The camera, in those pre-Photoshop times, may not have lied, but it didn't always declare the whole truth.

What is lacking in the story that follows is much in the way of any meaningful attempt to understand the cult of Robert Smith from the perspective of its adherents. This was partially due to constraints of time, but mostly down to your correspondent's pathological aversion to boring nutters. I could understand being a fan of The Cure, because I was-and am-one: indeed, a little over two years before I did this trip, I was living, back in Sydney, in a room dominated by the black-and-white Boys Don't Cry Boys Don't Cry poster, and I would still doubt the sanity of anyone prepared to argue that poster, and I would still doubt the sanity of anyone prepared to argue that The Head On The Door The Head On The Door wasn't one of the dozen best alb.u.ms of the 1980s. I just don't understand the urge to appropriate your favourite singer's haircut and taste in misshapen jumpers, and regard his every p.r.o.nouncement as freighted with Delphic sagacity. Which is to say that I don't understand uncritical reverence for anything, which is, I suppose, to say that I don't understand quite a lot of the rest of my species terribly well. However, I believe that the a.n.a.lysis of his own flock that Smith delivers later in this piece is both astute and compa.s.sionate, or at least blessed with more of both those qualities than anything I might have come up with on my own. wasn't one of the dozen best alb.u.ms of the 1980s. I just don't understand the urge to appropriate your favourite singer's haircut and taste in misshapen jumpers, and regard his every p.r.o.nouncement as freighted with Delphic sagacity. Which is to say that I don't understand uncritical reverence for anything, which is, I suppose, to say that I don't understand quite a lot of the rest of my species terribly well. However, I believe that the a.n.a.lysis of his own flock that Smith delivers later in this piece is both astute and compa.s.sionate, or at least blessed with more of both those qualities than anything I might have come up with on my own.

Fame is a phenomenon that generally conspires to make both the admired and the admirer look ridiculous: I suspect that this is what I was trying to demonstrate with the random observations of The Cure's celebrity inserted throughout the narrative. The best that all concerned can do with any variety of notoriety is refuse to take it seriously, and I've rarely since seen anyone cleave to that att.i.tude quite so splendidly as The Cure.

"HERE, LOOK. NO, over here. See, I've invented this game for you. And I'd like you to play it."

The face-that great grinning shambles of lipstick, pancake and hair gel that I've only previously seen on magazine covers, television screens and, I'll admit, the walls of the bedrooms I occupied during my teens-is inches from mine. We're in a dressing room backstage at The World, a modestly-named arena an hour and a half's drive from Chicago, where The Cure have just played a superb show in front of 15,000 people. I'm sandwiched between Robert Smith and long-serving Cure ba.s.s player Simon Gallup on a black leather couch that might conceivably seat one in any kind of comfort.

"Look. On the table."

While Gallup has been asking me about a couple of friends of his back at the Melody Maker Melody Maker office, Smith has been arranging the contents of a bowl of M&Ms on the polished black table in front of us. From where I'm sitting, there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to what Smith's doing, but as we've only just met and I've got to get a cover story out of this, I figure it's as well to humour him. I nod, and smile, and wish I wasn't quite so sober. office, Smith has been arranging the contents of a bowl of M&Ms on the polished black table in front of us. From where I'm sitting, there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to what Smith's doing, but as we've only just met and I've got to get a cover story out of this, I figure it's as well to humour him. I nod, and smile, and wish I wasn't quite so sober.

"Right," Smith continues. "Now what you have to do-and pay careful attention to this, right-is move that red one there at the bottom up to the top without," he pauses for effect, "touching any of the others."

Ah. Smith, it must be said, is drunk. Heroically so, in fact, and operating according to the deranged and indecipherable logic the state engenders, which is to say that while I'm sure this is all making cast-iron sense to him, I haven't a clue what he's talking about. I turn to Gallup in some faint hope of support, but he's got his head in his hands, is muttering intently to himself and clearly has no wish to be disturbed. I'm on my own.

"Come on," says Smith. "I'm waiting."

I'm thinking that somewhere, in some little-regarded footnote in a dusty thesaurus stashed in a dank corner of a cobwebbed attic owned by some mad, bearded, elderly professor, there's a cracking French or Latin phrase for "the fear of making an irredeemable plum duff of oneself in front of one's adolescenthood heroes within five minutes of meeting same for reasons you can neither control nor comprehend." Still, I steel myself, extend a trembling digit to the small red sweet, push it around the others to the spot Smith had designated at the top of the table, and sit back, trying to look nonchalantly triumphant. There follow some seconds of confused silence, broken only by Gallup's mumbling.

"Right," says Smith, eventually, and buries his fingers deep in his hopelessly congealed thatch. "Ah . . . okay. I can see I'm going to have to make this more difficult."

I'M STAYING IN the Claridge Hotel in Chicago, a renovated terrace house in which the halls are lined with gla.s.s cabinets full of antique toys. Amusingly, the hotel also has a complimentary stretch limousine service, and a driver with enough of a sense of humour to cope with directions like, "Oh, I don't know, just drive around for a bit and let me wave at people." When I come back and turn on the television, there's one of those uncountable, indistinguishable sub-90210 teen angst soap operas on. This particular episode revolves around an outwardly normal, obviously beautiful, and tiresomely overachieving young woman who takes a stack of pills in an effort to kill herself. On her bedroom wall, looming above her as she belts back the downers, is what the show's producers doubtless imagined was a definitive signifier of tormented youth: a poster of The Cure. teen angst soap operas on. This particular episode revolves around an outwardly normal, obviously beautiful, and tiresomely overachieving young woman who takes a stack of pills in an effort to kill herself. On her bedroom wall, looming above her as she belts back the downers, is what the show's producers doubtless imagined was a definitive signifier of tormented youth: a poster of The Cure.

IT IS DECIDED, after a couple more hours of drinking and slurring by all present, that The Cure will give me and photographer Stephen Sweet a lift back to Chicago on their tour bus. While we huddle on a couple of couches, The Cure's crew move into fluent action, packing up and rolling out everything non-human in black flight cases. Someone takes off the Sensational Alex Harvey Band CD that has been playing at excruciating volume since I arrived. "I was enjoying that . . . ," protests Smith, half-heartedly. "Someone threw it on stage tonight . . ." He stops, looks slowly around the room, then embarks on an animated ramble about how Alex Harvey reminds him of his wife, Mary, and about something that once happened with his brother and some French women, which I can't follow at all.

Gallup, meanwhile, is flinging surplus crisps, unwanted carrot sticks, empty cups and Robert's M&Ms at the nearest available target, which turns out to be The Cure's record company boss, Chris Parry of Fiction. One of The Cure's minders makes him stop. Smith, by now, is wrestling on the floor with another of the band's minders. It's hard to say how serious it is. Given that Smith has the upper hand, it's probably fair to surmise that he's trying harder than the minder (I mean, Smith is a big bloke, and probably more than capable of looking after himself, but the chap he's locked in combat with has arms thicker than my entire body and looks like he could kick-start a 747). A couple of crew prise the two apart and organise everyone onto the bus. As we pull out of the venue, the few dozen cars that have been parked, waiting, in the darkness alongside the road, start their engines and follow us.

The bus is as well-appointed as you'd expect, given that it's carting about a bunch of thirty-something millionaires whose singer is pathologically terrified of aeroplanes (The Cure crossed the Atlantic on the QEII). There are lounges fore and aft, a small kitchenette, a toilet, at least two televisions, a VCR and, inevitably, a stereo capable of broadcasting to all points within six zip codes in any direction. The Cure's on-board listening this evening rather belies their reputation as arch miserabilists: T-Rex's "Hot Love," Gary Glitter's "Didn't Know I Loved You Till I Saw You Rock'N'Roll" and, perhaps surprisingly given the bickering over stolen ba.s.slines traded by the two groups down the years, New Order's "State Of The Nation." It's while Smith is on all fours in the bus corridor, cradling a beer in the crook of his elbow, bellowing along to Middle of the Road's "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" in a hearty roar quite removed from his patent wracked whine, and trying, for reasons known only to himself, to tie my shoelaces together, that Gallup, entirely unprovoked, makes an announcement.

"I can cook, me," he informs the bus at large. This is greeted with total indifference.

"I said," Gallup says, focusing this time on Sweet, "I can cook. I can."

"I, uh, don't doubt it," replies Sweet, polishing his lenses with a view to recording the carnage unfolding around us.

"I'm one of the greats," continues Gallup, swaying back and forth for reasons not entirely to do with the movement of the bus. "And I'm going to prove it. To you all. To you, my people, to whom I am a river."

Gallup approaches the stove and begins waving ingredients around. The dusting of herbs and generous squirt of Worcestershire sauce that congregate on one shoulder of my jacket suggest that the tottering gourmet is working on Welsh rarebit. Smith, meanwhile, has hauled himself upright via my left knee, a table and a handful of my hair, and has descended again on his long-suffering minder, whose job description appears to encompa.s.s punchbag as much as protector.

Gallup's culinary tour-de-force stumbles to a finish. He arranges it on a paper plate, and with a slurred "Ta-daaa," taps Smith on the shoulder and presents it to him, having evidently forgotten who he set out to impress in the first place. Smith disentangles himself from a headlock, takes the plate from Gallup, looks at it briefly, emits a maniacal cackle, and flings it across the bus, where it bounces off the wall just above where guitarist Porl Thompson is sitting, quietly reading.

"p.i.s.s off," he murmurs, without looking up, and turns the page.

WISH, THE ALb.u.m The Cure are in America touring with, went straight into the American Billboard Chart at Number Two. It was kept off the top spot by Def Leppard. Robert Smith claims that this doesn't bother him. I can't believe he means that. THE ALb.u.m The Cure are in America touring with, went straight into the American Billboard Chart at Number Two. It was kept off the top spot by Def Leppard. Robert Smith claims that this doesn't bother him. I can't believe he means that.

AT THE CURE'S hotel on the bank of Lake Michigan, there's a bigger crowd waiting for us than most bands ever get coming to see them play. This happens everywhere The Cure go, but the Chicago crowd are going to be luckier than most-depending on how sociable the band are or aren't feeling after a show, the tour bus is often sent off empty, while Smith and company are spirited away in anonymous, windowless minibuses.

An obviously time-served plan is immediately in effect: two minders get off the bus, explain that the band will be coming out shortly, and will sign things and chat for a bit, but they're all very tired, need to get up early and so forth (Gallup and Smith, at this point, are waltzing, cheek-to-cheek, unsteadily up and down the bus, each humming a different tune). The minders arrange the mob in an orderly queue between the bus and the hotel door. Porl Thompson, drummer Boris Williams and guitarist/keyboardist Perry Bamonte make their way briskly along it, signing t-shirts, shaking hands, exchanging brief pleasantries. The queue is then re-straightened, and Simon and Robert appear, holding hands and smiling shyly, like children being presented to friends of their parents.

It takes Smith half an hour to get inside. Most of the fans are just enthusiastic and excited, though there's a few who give every appearance of being unhealthily obsessed. At least three are in floods of tears and hyperventilating, and there's one that Smith just can't seem to get past-the kid is a lot shorter and slighter than Smith, but in every other respect looks exactly like him, from his oversize white sneakers to his baggy black shirt to his powder-pale face to his artlessly smudged lipstick to his uproariously tangled black hair. The scary bit is that the kid doesn't say anything, just gazes up at Robert with a daft, adoring smile. "Look . . . ," Robert starts saying, then rubs his eyes. "I mean . . ." One of The Cure's minders notices what's up, and hustles Robert past him.

Another earnest mascaraed waif, who's seen me get off the bus just before Robert, comes up to me with her Wish Wish tour poster and a marker pen. tour poster and a marker pen.

Uh, I'm not in the band.

"Yeah, but you know them."

Well, I only met them a couple of hours ago, and I meaningfully doubt that they're going to remember it in the morning. I don't know if that counts.

"Oh, please. Would you?"

I take her pen. With love from Andrew. Melody Maker Melody Maker, every Wednesday. Still only 65p.