Brazil
The Cure – Brazil – 1987
Maracanã 1987
Robert Smith, líder do ‘The Cure’, fala da paixão de estar no palco e da vida pessoal
The Cure’s South American Diary by Robert Smith – Part II
Wednesday
Hot up and dreadful at 12.30. I read ‘Candide’ until four and then slink down to the bus: there is little surprise when minutes into our journey it breaks down. We decide to co-erce some bemused locals into driving us to the venue, and so “Esto love to takee Curee to Mineirinho Olymnasium” coos Billy stupidly in a nearby garage forecourt. To our complete surprise there are no shortage of offers, and we arrive backstage grandly in VW Beetle, A Ford Escort, and a mini! The hall is an immense air-hangar replete with a seven second echo, and a soundcheck is considered hopeless: so Porl skateboards, Lol smokes, Simon talks, and I watch, as Boris tries to maim-a-local with his newly acquired ‘Bolas’. The Pogues are carousing merrily from the PA as the doors open and the stampede starts, and by 9.30 there over 20,000 people crammed inside. We play deliriously once more in over 100 degrees of heat, but the crowd, not surprisingly, begin to fade. Bodies are carried out by the hundred, but the survivors are still chanting madly as we run away.
We have sandwiches, beer and ‘The Deerhunter’ back in Bill’s room, and agree it has been another ‘funny’ day…
As I lay in bed, I wonder why I feel I can hold onto nothing solidly here…
Thursday
Overca… hot and dreadfully sunny …and much to the chagrin of the ‘Well-oiled-machine’, we decide to travel back to Rio by bus! Upping fast at one we are moving by two, and weaving well into the jungle by three. We stop at Congonhas at four, and are delighted by a hundred miles of jungle from a church in the sun on a mountain top with children and balmy and quiet and very very far away… So we photograph and breathe and regretfully part at six.
There is a growing murmur of hunger which is quietened at seven in the rough charm (?) of the ‘TIA PANGA TIA PANGA’ RESTAURANT(?) where we settle adventurously on chips, mayonnaise and beer…
Then we get shamefully back on the bus at eight, and enter a twilight zone : the jungle is overwhelming – dense and noisy and big – and the journey becomes quite surreal…
I sit murmuring in the back with Simon and Boris, until Lol wakes suddenly sweating, cigaretteless, and very very sour. The bus bounces into Rio with Simon having managed to carpet his entire house from the sale of one very old squashed ‘Major’, and almost at the point of acquiring a day of Tolhurstian servitude for a second. I console him with a quick reminder that we own him anyway, and bed is received at midnight.
To-day we saw Brazil.
Friday
Hoandreadfu.
A refreshed 12, and after a serene three hour poolside Bizz interview over oranges, off to the ‘Maracanzinho’ (Little Maracana) for a soundcheck. It takes us over an hour to drive the couple of miles there, due to the sub-Italian state of roaduser awareness, and we are rushed to combat another seven second echo. As the audience starts to enter and grow, we go back to the bus for some peace and home on the range, but merely argue hopelessly about the correct words to various old folk songs. So we dress up to thrill, turn out the lights, and run out in front – and are stunned. It is bedlam! The 14,000 howling Brazilians we are faced with use their feet, hands, voices, lighters and heads in a bewildering synchronised welcome that looks like a sea of living fire fish and sounds like a million crickets!
The two hour show is a blur, and I am out on the balcony listening to Suzanne Vega at midnight, wondering if any of it was real. I venture down to the beachfront bar to be convinced, and only turn out the light when the sun smiles…
3rd week
Saturday 28 march
I get up at two and it is hot and dreadfully dim, I wish it was sunny! My recourse is Montrose on the bus on the way to the soundcheck, despite what anyone else says…
This evening’s performance is to be filmed for Brazilian TV, and so a lengthy camera check ensues, and we feel like we have already played by the time the door are opened at seven.
This evening’s concert is a much more sedate affair onstage, with more attention than usual being paid to matters of word retention and the like, as we are all very aware of being in the pictures. The presence of cameras, however, seems to incite the crowd to bigger and better acts of passion, and the stage is for the first time intermittently invaded by screaming shadows. We are once more whisked away, and again I find myself perched outside my room on a chair in the air. The others gradually appear, and we decide, at last, to club. We hit Ronnie Biggs first but it is too bright and full, we hit the ‘Ssh’ second but it is too dark and empty, we make ‘?’ by three and smile knowingly…
8am proves us night, but somehow, horribly wrong.
Sunday
The poolside beer at three is more the whole dog’s coat, and we skip with relish to the home of football. To see the 500ft electronic scoreboard flash up ‘BRAZIL WELCOME THE CURE’ as we take our seats in the Directors Box is a moment I will not quickly forget, and it takes me more than a few minutes to adjust to the deafening constant drumming that assails our ears. 65,000 fans only half fill the Maracana stadium this afternoon, but it is still an owe inspiring sight, and the two local first division sides, Voscow and Bangu, put on a suitably classy three goal display. Two events mar on otherwise perfect afternoon: the first is an attack by a notorious 20 stone nutter, called incisively ‘THE KISSER’, whose sole function in life is to plant his glistening fat mouth on any visiting ‘celebrities’. Unfortunately his choice today is Simon and I and, needles to say, after some very abrupt discussion, ‘THE KISSER’ is escorted away. The second is the insisitence, by a weasel-like photographer, to flash his flash right in front of my face. After several polite entreaties, and a couple more typically English, I find myself chasing him across the terraces.
He disappears, and I resume my seat, to chum mania and mirth! We return to the hotel in good spirits, and fill my balcony once more, where we proceed to get totally mortal. The day ends in a club specially hired by Polygram for a party in our honour but all I really remember is a cake. Whit. And everyone wearing pastal. Five comes too soon.
Monday
Awake at two. Hot. And dreadful.
Today is a day I decide for a day of book and watching the oscars.
Some go up the Sugarloaf.
I go back to bed, after a very quick look at the sea…
Tuesday
12.30 sees us slipping through the 200 strong throng of hot goodbyes into the twilight coach and away. But true to bus we grind to a halt before one, and not until three means we’re moving again.
I read and sleep and look, ignoring as inhumanly as possible the soft morning of Simon and Porl who have been poisoned in the night by the poisoner…
So it is a strange journey that ends, at 7.15 outside the lbirapuera Gymnasium, Sau Paulo, the venue for the next three nights, and we are less than happy to find the audience streaming in meaning no sound-check.
We wonder about humming and shouting until nine and then we are on. The sound is terrible, like playing in a raging sea, but the crowd don’t seem to mind, and they scream away and any way until we run out at eleven.
We are on the 29th Man-From-UNCLE-special-key-in-the-lift-security floor at the hotel, in rooms once more strewn with flowers, and the confines of the day are beginning to tell. So we go out to Brazil’s only bona-fide Indian Restaurant, the imaginatively named ‘Tai Mahei’, situated in downtown Sau Paulo. And it is glorious! By the fourth pint of lager and the second onion bhajai. we are in another time another place, and everything gradually slips away…
Wednesday
Wake up feeling like it’s Saturday morning in Horley until the curtains go back… and then drifting into Bill’s room for a ‘production meeting’ (ie a well-oiled justification!) and back out and down and along to the sound-check. We play lots of old stuff – ‘Figurehead’, ‘Cold’, ‘Secrets’ – and lots of new. and then dummy up and wait again. We play a very strange set tonight, and I feel I ame not totally onstage – a reaction, I think to the three-nights-in-the-same-place idea.
But once again it all ends happy enough and we flit back to the hotel like sand, where I shower and watch ‘The Handyman’ in action on telly, while various of others retire to ‘The Tavern’ for a bout of ‘London Fog’. Do we take it in turns until four?
Thurday
It is two when we arrive for our final sound-check in the South this year, and at last we manage to segue comfortably ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and ‘Copacabana’. It is a good omen, and our preparations for show times are more excitably erratic than is normal.
It is once more a capacity 12,000 crowd, and as we shiver and shake in the few moments before we go on, I smile beamishly, and wish it could always be like this. Like this…
The concert is glorious, our best of the tour, and we are skipping as we get back on the bus. It is only in Brazil that I have ever seen an entire audience dance and sing from the beginning to the end of a show, and I wonder to myself, is there a secret ingredient….?
We change quickly at the hotel, and then whisk to a restaurant, where we are joined in time by the crew and a mere handful or hundred of others. The night dissolves slowly into a very Latin Club Smith, and there is very little division before…
Friday
…the 8.30 wake-up trumpet blows. And this is where we pay! A flight at ten takes us to Rio where we wait for eight fun-soaked hours in the airport lounge for a repeatedly delayed Aerolines Argentinas 747 for Madrid. The time is spent inventing names and places, singing quietly of dying, and reluctantly succumbing to the awful solution realised by Simon’s frequent and repeated question of “What do you do on a Friday night no no go on what do you do eh what?” We board the plane staggering, and endure, over the next three hours, the most horrendous flight in aviation history. It is sheer torture, and even the stewards and hostesses drop their complacently grinning veneer.
Saturday 4 april
It is a very pale, very delicate, very sorry bunch that dissipates into the Madrid Transit Area early on Saturday morning, and our kisses goodbye lack a certain force. The others are going home to London, while I am forced on to Paris for press, and my wave is consequently more than bitter as they recede dimly into the gloom. It has been a tiring holiday in the sun, but a good one, and now…
© Melody Maker e Rui Mendes
The Cure’s South American Diary by Robert Smith – Part I
Three imaginary weeks
1st week
Saturday 14 march 1987
Get up at 9am after four hours sleep and hallucinate bitterly as the way to Heathrow. We are all there, smiling wanly save Bill (Chris Perry, Fiction head, tour function unknown), who is as usual late. Despite this obvious attempt at burying us early, we make our flight to Madrid (dle) with a good three minutes in hand…
We land in Spain at seemingly the same moment we leave London, and check into a nearby hotel to continue sleeping. What we actually end up doing is playing ‘Name that tune’ on Lol’s nauseating new Casio synth all through the afternoon and by the time we are on ‘See Emily Play’ the mini bar is looking bare.
We return to the airport at 8 and board the Aerolineas Argentinas 747 for Rio and Buenos Aires. I grit my teeth and settle back and so it begins…
Sunday
After a wonderless nine hours of drinking, talking, reading and fitful crashing-into-the-ground sleep, the plane lands in Rio. It is then cleaned, refueled, and, after a two hours delay, flown on to Buenos Aires. We land at 9am, local time, feeling less than well: it is hot here, and dreadfully sunny, and everyone is wearing shades. After being subjected to several brutally officious checks, we are led through a side door and into a waiting car: there are people everywhere, and we are followed all the way into the city by a bizarre motorcade of horn-blowing-screaming-waving cars. Buenos Aires is like the outskirts/underskirts of Mega City One, an unsettling mixture of the old and crumbling and the almost half-completed, out of which rises, suddenly, rudely and anachronistically, the enormous mirrored edifice of the Sheraton Towers – our home for the next four days.
There are around 500 people milling about outside here, and as we pull up, they surge towards us: Not quite feeling up to love and conversation, we jump out and rush into the hotel, and I realise that I am feeling most peculiar…
Six hours in bed does the trick, and 5pm sees Team Cure poolwide and beer. Gradually feeling restored, we decide to go out and mingle. The 100 or so people still waiting around outside are a friendly bunch, if almost totally incomprehensible, the exception being the head of the until-then-unknown ‘Official’ Cure ‘Bananafishbones Club’, who is gushingly clear in a Fawlty Towers sort of way. We have our photos taken endlessly before going off for a very sedate Italian (?) meal, and everyone gets to bed by 12. A strange day…
Monday
I awake from a delirious sleep at 11 and immediately put The Chiefton on. The curtains are opened and closed at 12: it is too hot and dreadfully sunny. I write a few letters then meet up with the others downstairs: today is press day, and over the next few hours we try to respond honestly and earnestly to questions of Killing An Arab, Maradona, Killing a Thatcher, and mental health etc, etc.
It is brave and interminable and the escape is quick and sneaky – and we land in my room once more for a reviving stroh rum!
Again braving the crowd, we go back down, get into the car, and speed off to the Ferro Carril Oeste football stadium looks remarkably like Loftus Road, and stepping out onto the glowing floodlit pitch, a lump jumps in my throat…
A football suddenly appears, and we are off and singing, but the game does not last long and Team Cure soon disintegrates amid a forest of blatant handballs and cries of ‘cheat’. The Argentinian participants feign benign ignorance…
Our soundcheck lasts a couple of hours, and ends around 10, and with a rowdy visit to Ristorante Fish, the day at last closes on the 24 th Floor at the hotel, mooning softly…
Tuesday
Struggling up at 1, drink several pots of coffee, and we go back to the ground: It is hot and dreadfully sunny, but we soundcheck to perfection for another couple of hours and then disappear beneath the stand into the visitors dressing room. I do another couple of interviews and am given on Argentinian Team strip, a bunch of blood-red roses, and a message from a man who looks insanely the same as Tootsie…
And then the sound of breaking glass.
There has apparently been some ‘confusion’, we are told, over ticket sales – 19,000 people have them, but only 17,000 can officially enter the ground, and, in consequence, there are more than a few irate punters trying to get in by other methods: a full scale riot ensues, with numerous police cars rolled, several security dogs killed, and a hot dog man suffering a heart attack before we go onstage.
For almost two hours we play amidst deafening bedlam, before rushing off, screaming, into the car and away. It is a while before our heads stop shaking, and we end up having an early breakfast in the bar before bed…
Wednesday
I pull open the curtains to the inevitable too hot and dreadfully sunny people camped outside, before rushing into Simon’s room for milk and gossip. We leave for the football stadium at 3, and as we start a short final soundcheck, the sun hits 100 degrees. We melt down into the change room and, between interviews, listen to Nick Drake and Billie Holiday. The noise above increases inexorably, and we look nervously at each other as we are told that tonight, disregarding another ticket ‘confusion’, there will be ‘no’ trouble’ …
The crowd surges forward as we go onstage, and despite the higher barricades and extra police (or more exactly because of the higher barries and extra police), battle begins. By half-way through the set there are several uniformed men on fire, with most of their comrades taking shelter under the stage from the ceaseless and merciless rain of coins, seats, stones and glass.
Unfortunately not all of it is accurately thrown, and Porl is the first of us to be hit: the longer this goes on, the more bitter we become, and when a coke bottle cracks me full in the face during ‘10.15’ I stop the song and go a touch beserk. We end with a gloriously punky thrash through ‘Arabs-a-go-go’ and then we are away. Outside the ground is not unlike downtown Beirut, and we are more than relieved to reach the sanctuary of the hotel. I go to bed shattered, the others spending varying amounts of time in the bar while I dream of murder…
Thursday
Get up feeling fresh at 11.30 and leave for the airport at one after a short but spirited ‘Reuters’ interview and a protracted farewell session outside with the crowd. The flight is bumpy and uncomfortable and it is a relief to touch down at 5.30 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. After a lengthy bout of form filling we are in through a 300 strong crowd and out onto a 40 seater coach! We drive bouncily to the hotel where we are confronted by even more people screaming hello and firing blinding flash as we dismount and squeeze into reception.
A quick visit to our flower-filled rooms is followed by the inevitable TV and press conference debacle. It is the usual 60 minute quiz, and then we eat: the food is fish and it is very fresh and yummy, as, we discover, is the local liquor, ‘Pinger’, though by the second bottle the round table has surely started to spin… so bed is late… late…
Friday
Up at 12 for the hot and dreadfully sunny. We do a couple of interviews, a photo session up a ladder: and then retire to the piano bar for coffee and waiting. We eventually go to the venue, the gloriously named Gigantinho, to find it is a strange hibrid of Brixton Academy and Wembley Arena. Everyone, however, is getting jarring but inexplicable 120V shocks, and the atmosphere is a strange mixture of apprehension, anger, and lethargy – the crew having been up most of the previous night trying to solve a multitude of problems.
We soundcheck for an unbearably humid hour, and then slip backstage to watch and wait as the doors opened and the crowd steams in.
By nine the building is a seething mass – the capacity is an “official” 12,000 – and the heat and the noise as we walk onstage is the most overwhelming that any of us have ever experienced in our lives. It increases gradually through the two hour set, and we are utterly devastated as we are rushed off, outside, and into the coach.
We return to the hotel in silence, and I go to bed: the others drag themselves out to eat, but claim calmness…
2nd week
Saturday 21 march
Up ‘Clean’ at 12. Hot and…
We do several more interviews and photos before returning through a growing crowd outside to the ‘Gigantinho’. We run through some obscure old songs, and some savagely under-rehearsed new ones, before settling down for the wait, Marc Almond and some ‘Washboard Rhythm Kings’ helps us to kill it, before we walk back out again at nine.
If anything, the response is even more manic than the night before, most of the audience correcting me as I forget the words to ‘The Blood’. We have oxygan before the encores and I counter them with ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’ “Ha ha – got you all there” I whisper as I float back down into the coach, and a siren escort whisks us home. After a shower and a beer I snap back on – and Shirley Bassey and Nancy Sinatra sing into the night; but I am gorgeously oblivious by four…
Sunday
The wake-up thudding on the door starts at 11 and continues remorselessly until my emergence at one. It is hot and dreadfully sunny. Seeing Lol over coffee however cheers us all up, and we sign autographs spiritedly outside for an hour. Then we jump back on the bus and again drive bouncily back to the airport. There is a delay during which Roy Walker runs us through his ‘My wife’s a red head, no hair, just a red head’ chestnuts over a Sunday lunchtime pint before… “We are flying down to Rio”…
We arrive at 6.30pm and go by car to our new home – The Copacabana Beach Hotel, a very posh building indeed, and one which serves to emphasise chillingly the poverty we have seen on our drive from the airport.
We eat thoughtfully before the cocktail bar erodes the pictures of dirt, and end up talking about the world in Simon’s room.
Tuesday
Hot and dreadfully up at 12. We mooch through nutters to the beach, and stand as happy as vampires while Undy clicks. Having kicked goodbye, we flee to the airport where there is once again, a draining delay. We have a brief confrontation with Ed Greek, his son spoiled Bastard, and their dog Johnny Jumble, before boarding what we are told is a plane but what actually turns out to be a 36,000 ft roller-coaster ride. We finally land in Belo Horizonte, and discover no bus, so we wait once more in the bar. Finally getting to the hotel at 7pm. I immediately ordered an iced cervezo, a slice of pizza, and a Portuguese dubbed Hammer horror film on the telly. The others slip out to gorge, but manage to have their rooms burgled while away… I am not unhappy to find myself suddenly asleep, dreaming I am a child-minder…
© Melody Maker
THE CURE 