THE
GLOVE WILL TEAR US APART
Steve
Sutherland witnesses the birth of The Glove, further adventures of the
Banshee mafia starring STEVE SEVERIN and ROBERT SMITH.
The
comely young wife with her hands in the sink smiles as her husband strolls
into the kitchen of her Los Angeles dream home. Just back from the
office and starving for his dinner, he skirts the table and folds his arms
around her ample waist, twisting her into an affectionate embrace.
She
tilts her head back to receive his kiss, and suddenly tufts of her hair
drift gently to the tiles. As he recoils in horror a carving knife
arcs up out of the suds and strikes and strikes and strikes again....
This,
or thereabouts anyway (it's a long time since I've seen it) is a scene
from 'Blue Sunshine', a superbly B-movie that did the rounds to little
acclaim towards the end of the disillusioned seventies. Taking it's
name from a reputedly super-potent strain of LSD, it's plot was lip-smackingly
simple: anybody who was unfortunate to have sampled a certain contaminated
batch of the said hallucinogenic would, without warning, go bald ten years
to the day that they dropped their dammed trip an then turn into a homicidal
maniac. The revenge on or of the love generation?
Some
people out there would do well to start checking their diaries smartish.
'Blue
Sunshine' is also the name of The Glove's first and only album. This
is no coincidence. After all, The Glove - that's Robert Smith, Steve
Severin and Zoo-dancer-turned-singer Jeanette - took their name from the
Blue Meanies' giant fist-cum-executioner in 'Yellow Submarine'. The
same glove, you'll remember that turned back into LOVE when the power of
music overcame bad with good.
There's
either message or madness in these mindgames.
Of
course, both the Banshees and The Cure have always mucked about with the
romantic notion of love, happiest with a relationship to dissect or an
emotion to torture into screaming confessions of guilt; so it should come
as no surprise that when Smith and Severin's plan for a single called
'Punish Me With Kisses' expanded into a feverishly claustrophobic album
project love should end up on the rack.
It
does come as something of a shock however when Smith sits crossed-legged
on the floor of Severin's flat and says "It's quite a happy album
really. It's good that it's gonna be a summer release."
My
mind swiftly retracts in panic... the nightmare in a nursery of 'Mr.
Alphabet'...the brooding cacophony of 'Orgy'... the séance tension of 'A
Blues In Drag'? And then I catch a hint of a smile.
I
should have known, once a Banshee always a...
"We
haven't got together to do this because there's anything trapping us
within the music that we already do". Severin insists in a whisper,
"it's not as if we're trying to escape from a constriction that's
going on in either the Banshees or The Cure because I know that I'm quite
free to do whatever I like within the Banshees and always have.
"The
main reason the whole thing started in the first place was because when I
listened to The Cure, I could understand why Robert was putting a certain
thing in a certain place and that's probably why we get on; the sense of dynamics
and melody was fairly similar to what I was doing within the
Banshees. Like, some of the melodies he was writing for The Cure, I
could see myself writing, so it was really obvious in the end that we
would do something together.
"The
main thing now though is it's a completely different situation, a
completely different way of working..."
Smith
agrees: "I thought it was a real attack on the senses when we
were doing it. We were virtually coming out of the studio at six in
the morning, coming back here and watching all these really mental films
and then going to sleep and having really demented dreams and then, as
soon as we woke up at four in the afternoon, we'd go virtually straight
back into the studio, so, it was a bit like a mental assault course
towards the end.
"I
found, when we were writing the words, that we were picking up on things
we'd experienced within the time of doing the album. Usually I write
about things that happened months ago, so it was really strange working
like that, I mean' God, we must have watched about 600 videos at the
time! There'd be all these after-mages of the film we'd just watched
cropping up in the songs from time to time.
"It
wasn't deliberate, it just happened that way but, after a while, they were
chosen, I think almost as influences. I mean, when we were waking up, in
the half hour or so that we were just like in a coma, I'd put on a film or
a piece of music that was completely different to what we'd been doing the
night before so that it would influence the day. I mean, as we'd set
ourselves the task of writing two songs a day, it was the only way we
could refresh ourselves.... otherwise the whole thing would have
snowballed.
"There
was a strange sort of humour involved all the time we were making
it. It was never like we were really making a record, it was always
just going into the studio and doing something we wanted to do and then,
later, we had to sit down and mix it and make sense out of it. Up
until that point there were just all these little snippets."
"We
just kept going at it," Severin confirms. "We had to make
it sound complete. At the beginning it was just like a dozen, 15
songs completely different from each other."
"Songs?"
laughs Smith, "It sounded like 15 different groups! It sounded
like a K-Tel compilation album. The other thing that influenced it,
talking about snippets, was the amount of junk we were reading, the amount
we spent on idiot magazines and stuff like that! We were making big
murals of these cuttings and pictures and stuff, big Day-Glo
posters."
And
the films?
"Oh,
'The Brood', 'Evil Dead', 'Helicopter Spies', 'Inferno'...I fell asleep in
that and missed the end, didn't I? I was really annoyed... I dunno,
what else?... some divine stuff... 'Yellow Submarine'..."
Ah,
but what purpose these days to such perversions of love? can they
act as anything beyond kitsch, choreographed titillation?
The
love-peace vision of the Sixties has long been reduced by retrospect to a
fashionable quirk and ridiculed for its naivety. Where we should
probably feel ashamed that the youth revolution couldn't do anything
concrete with the inroads it made into personal liberation (except allow
the trappings to be merchandised by peripheral entrepreneurs) we tend to
dismiss the whole ethos as stoned-out lunacy and look to cut-throat
private enterprise as a means of personal, rather than global,
salvation. So much for Sergeant Pepper and Blue Sunshine.
And
even the promise of promiscuity and dark-fantasies fulfilled - inherent in
Severin's chosen pseudonym and Smith's psychotic imagery - are a
confusion, and unwitting compromise, a wry comment on society's accepted
double standards.
There
are some who will see The Glove as little more than a sensational rape
story in a smutty Fleet Street paper; they will miss the fact that Smith
and Severin have, crucially unburdened themselves of all hypocritical
pretence at moral judgement. This is unfortunate.
The
Glove are actually honest in their irresponsibility. They decline to
opine on their subjects/victims and thus, as with The Cure, Banshees and
Creatures, function among the few still bold enough to provoke a reaction
through brandishing artistic license.
The
Glove know love is synonymous with love in the Eighties, that songs about
so-called seedier sides of love are as prolific and clichéd as trad
Moon-in-Juners. But they also know that if sex doesn't shock
anymore, if sexual perversion as been neutered as artistic fuel by over-familiarity,
and if any attitude towards sex, no matter how extreme, can barely raise
blood pressures, then refusing to have an attitude is the only
course open that, at once, shocks and comments.
On
the surface 'Blue Sunshine' sounds like thrills for thrills' sake, a
journey into the tunnel of love that took a wrong turn into the house of
horrors. But underneath, there beats a subliminal pulse, a desperate
motive, and a frantic desire to test out ways of working within the
confines of pop with contributing to its malaise.
Severin
and Smith want to join in the game, but play by their own secret
rules. They want to do something with their fame. Where others
make commercial success the be-all-and-end-all of their existence, the
Banshees contingent was to use it as a weapon. Hence the splintering
of the group into offshoots. Experiments with the attraction of repulsion.
"It's
basically an album and that's where it's gonna stop," says Severin of
The Glove. "But then, that's what The Creatures is, just an
album. We haven't got the time to promote ourselves the same way The
Creatures did because they've been waiting for us to finish all this so we
can go in and work on a new Banshees album although the more time The
Creatures are seen to be around, the more people think 'What's happened
with the Banshees, have the split up?' and all that kind of
nonsense. So, we're just gonna do the minimal amount so people know
it's out and then just concentrate on other things."
"To
me it seems perfectly natural to be involved in so many different
areas," says Smith, "But it still seems odd to other
people. Funny that..."
Severin
agrees: "Surely the only way you keep going is by still being
relevant, I mean, something has always happened in between Banshee albums
to make the next one interesting for people to listen to. They
expect to hear something different because a certain event has happened.
"I'm
sure we'd be more popular if we churned out the same thing all the time
simply because that's what other people do - just do something to death
and then go to America and crack it because they're five years behind...
all that kind of nonsense. I mean, when John and Kenny left the
Banshees in 79, I think there's actually a quote where I said groups were
finished and we weren't gonna be a group anymore. Well we are
because we feel the Banshees, as an idea are still perfectly valid.
It probably gets more valid as it goes along but there's no reason why
that idea can't spread to any kind of limits.
"I
mean, there's three completely different phases to the Banshees; the first
two albums where we were really a solid group, where everybody had their
say and it was like a real iron fist. Then there was 'Kaleidoscope',
which isn't too dissimilar from what we've just done, the way me and Sioux
dictated everything that was going and slowly it all came together though
we still didn't have much of an idea except for the Banshees past to work
on. And then we got back into another group, although we tried to
keep the elements we'd learned from being a duo.
"When
it got to the stage where it was looking as though everybody - including
the people in the group - wanted it to be a group per se, that's when we
had to throw it apart again. 'Dreamhouse' came out of that wanting
to just like... BANG!"
The
trap is, of course, that in ensuring your own working environment remains
vibrant, it doesn't necessarily follow that what you produce will be valid
to anybody else. Just because Robert Smith plays a lot more
keyboards than guitar on The Glove album doesn't necessarily mean the
album's any good. Severin is acutely aware of the problem.
"The
idea that The Glove could get away with anything vanished very quickly
because it became a real responsibility to get it to sound not
indulgent. I think what I wanted was for it to have more of a
specific personality than, say, the Banshees or The Cure. I mean,
the Banshees have a set, almost concrete image that, no matter what we do,
we're kind of stuck with on a very superficial daily paper 'ice-queen and
doom and gloom' level.
"I
think we've nearly got to an idea of what me and Robert are like as
people, our relationship. It goes back to what Sioux and Budgie said
about The Creatures, about how, when you've got four people and an
original idea, it's almost inevitable that the idea is gonna get altered,
not necessarily distilled, but definitely altered by presenting it to a
bunch of people who have very strong ideas about what they want to
play. So.... things like 'Blues In Drag' is the kind of thing I'm
most pleased about because, if the Banshees had approached that from the
beginning, it wouldn't have ended up like that.
"I
just wanted to do something a bit... softer, a bit more... introverted,
probably. That's what I wanted to achieve: the kind of things that
are exclusive to our friendship because it's completely different to the
two groups. Whether we've achieved that I don't know but, without
prompting, everybody I've played this to has almost immediately said it
sounds really fresh and added to that by saying that everything else
that's coming now is really horrible.
"I
just think that, last year, something like 'Fireworks' being in the charts
was unusual and this year, when a Banshees single gets in the charts it'll
be even more unusual because the climate's just horrific!"
"Chartwise,
so much of it is down to melody," Smith intrudes, "although... I
know that's hard to believe, looking at the charts at the moment.
All you need is a song that you can sing, a song that you can
remember. You find yourself humming most of The Glove songs but, at
the same time, they're not pop songs. I like that about it.
It's the same with the Banshees singles that have got in the charts,
they've always had melody, but they haven't had melody like anything else
in the charts - they're rarities. There's few people who can still
do that... so few in fact, it's unbelievable."
The
Banshees coterie are more valuable now than ever because, in a musical
climate that encourages safety and contrition, being different for being deferent's
sake is one hell of a virtue. The Banshees/Glove/Creatures'
particular genius is that not only do they advocate constant change but
they remain fertile and unbridled rather than cynical or calculated.
"We
haven't a clue what the next Banshees album is gonna be like,"
Severin chuckles, "if you stuck The Creatures album and The Glove's
together, I don't think anybody could know what is coming next from the
Banshees. There's a certain amount of glee involved in that but it's
not contrived at all."
"No,"
Smith agrees, smiling. "Just manic."
Paul
Burshce 03/098/83
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