The Glove was a 1983 English musical collaboration and recording project by the Cure’s Robert Smith and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Steven Severin. They released one studio album, Blue Sunshine, in 1983 as part of Severin’s solo deal with Polydor. The latter came up with the band name, the album title and the blue/yellow sleeve concept, as Smith had to leave the project before completion due to prior commitments with the Cure.
History
Smith and Severin founded the Glove during a period when they were under heavy stress in their respective bands, the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
In June 1982, Smith was on the verge of a breakdown, drained from the production of the Cure’s bleakest album, Pornography and its tour, substance abuse, and band infighting that led to the departure of bassist Simon Gallup.
In October 1982, shortly before the start of an important European tour, Banshees guitarist John McGeoch had a nervous breakdown due to alcohol and the stresses of touring, and was fired by the band. Smith was asked to fill in and officially became a member of the Banshees in November 1982. He had previously played live with the band in 1979 on their Join Hands tour, when he replaced guitarist John McKay, who had walked out at the start of the tour. The Cure were the support band for the entire tour, and Smith therefore played two sets per night.
Severin and Smith booked a studio in late 1982. The first song that they recorded was “Punish Me with Kisses”.
In January 1983, two months after Smith rejoined Siouxsie and the Banshees, Siouxsie and drummer Budgie left England to record an album on their own as the Creatures.
Meanwhile, Severin and Smith both started to work on a project called the Glove. The band’s name referred to the enormous flying glove in the Beatles’ 1968 animated movie Yellow Submarine. Their album’s title, Blue Sunshine, referred to the horror film Blue Sunshine, in which people who took the fictional “Blue Sunshine” variety of LSD became psychotic murderers 10 years later. Smith described the recording sessions as “unreal”: “We spent 12 weeks in the studio but actually recorded for about five days. The rest of the time was spent having an endless party to which we invited a succession of people. It was like a station — once they got really out of it, they’d be moved on and the next batch brought in. In between all this we’d record a piece of piano or drum”. During that period, the duo stayed up most of the nights watching “video nasties”, including Dario Argento films.
Since Smith was contractually prohibited from singing with another band (one of the reasons he cited for the 2001 split from the Cure’s longtime label), former Zoo dancer Jeanette Landray (a former girlfriend of Severin’s bandmate Budgie was recruited as the lead singer. Smith sang on two of the songs, “Perfect Murder” and “Mr. Alphabet Says”. With the latter, Smith sang lyrics other than his own.
Other musicians involved in this project were Andy Anderson (who later joined the Cure), Martin McCarrick (who later joined the Banshees), Ginny Hewes, and Anne Stephenson.
In 2005, Severin proposed re-releasing Blue Sunshine. Smith, who had been gradually reissuing editions of the Cure’s back catalogue, agreed, and the Glove remaster was released as a 2-CD set on 8 August 2006 alongside three Cure re-releases. On the second disc, a dozen unreleased demo versions sung by Smith appeared for the first time. To commemorate Record Store Day 2013 a limited edition blue coloured vinyl version of the LP was produced.
Tracklist
A1 Like An Animal
A2 Looking Glass Girl
A3 Sex Eye Makeup
A4 Mr Alphabet Says
B1 A Blues In Drag
B2 Punish Me With Kisses
B3 This Green City
B4 Orgy
C1 Perfect Murder
C2 Relax
C3 The Man From Nowhere
C4 Opened The Box (A Waltz)
D1 The Tightrope
D2 And All Around Us The Mermaids Song (Aka Torment)
D3 Holiday 80
Personnel
Robert Smith: vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards
Steven Severin: bass, keyboards
Jeanette Landray: vocals
Andy Anderson: drums (died 2019)
Martin McCarrick: keyboards, strings
Ginny Hewes: strings
Anne Stephenson: strings
Discography (Studio albums)
Blue Sunshine (1983, Wonderland/Polydor)
Singles
“Like an Animal” (1983, Wonderland/Polydor)
“Punish Me with Kisses” (1983, Wonderland/Polydor)
Robert James Smith (born 21 April 1959) is an English singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. He is the lead singer, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, primary songwriter, and only continuous member of the rock band The Cure, which he co-founded in 1976. He was also the lead guitarist for the band Siouxsie and the Banshees from 1982 to 1984, and was part of the short-lived group the Glove in 1983. He is known for his distinctive voice, guitar-playing style and stage look, the latter two of which were influential on the goth subculture that rose to prominence in the 1980s. Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Cure in 2019.
Early years
Robert James Smith was born on 21 April 1959 in Blackpool, Lancashire, the third of four children born to Rita Mary (née Emmott) and James Alexander Smith. Smith came from a musical family: his father sang and his mother played the piano. Raised Catholic, he later became an atheist. When he was three years old, his family moved to Horley, Surrey, where he later attended St Francis’ Primary School. When he was six, his family moved to Crawley, West Sussex, where he attended St Francis’ Junior School. He later attended Notre Dame Middle School from 1970 to 1972, and St Wilfrid’s Comprehensive School from 1972 to 1977. Smith and his younger sister Janet had piano lessons as children. Smith said, “[Janet] was a piano prodigy, so sibling rivalry made me take up guitar because she couldn’t get her fingers around the neck.” He told Chris Heath of Smash Hits that from about 1966 (when Smith turned seven years old) his brother Richard, who is 13 years older than him, taught him “a few basic chords” on guitar. Smith began taking classical guitar lessons from the age of nine with a student of John Williams, “a really excellent guitarist … I learned a lot, but got to the point where I was losing the sense of fun. I wish I’d stuck with it.” Smith has said his guitar tutor was “horrified” by his playing. Smith gave up formal tuition and began teaching himself to play by ear, listening to his older brother’s record collection.
Smith was 13 or 14 when he became more serious about rock music and “started to play and learn frenetically”.Up until December 1972, he did not have a guitar of his own and had been borrowing his brother’s, so his brother “gave me his guitar for Christmas. But I’d commandeered it anyway–so whether he was officially giving it to me at Christmas or not, I was going to have it!” Rock biographer Jeff Apter maintains that the guitar Smith received for Christmas of 1972 was from his parents, and equates this item with Smith’s notorious Woolworth’s “Top 20” guitar, later used on many of the Cure’s earliest recordings. Smith was quoted in several earlier sources as saying he purchased the Top 20 himself for £20, in 1978.
Smith described Notre Dame Middle School as “a very free-thinking establishment” with an experimental approach, a freedom he claimed to have abused. On one occasion, Smith said that he wore a black velvet dress to Notre Dame and kept it on all day “because the teachers just thought ‘oh, it’s a phase he’s going through, he’s got some personality crisis, let’s help him through it’.” According to Smith, “four other kids” beat him up after school, although Jeff Apter notes that Smith has given several conflicting versions of the story. Apter also reports that Smith put in minimal effort at Notre Dame, sufficient to gain pass marks, and quotes Smith as saying, “If you were crafty enough … you could convince the teachers you were special: I did virtually nothing for three years.”
Smith’s secondary school, St Wilfrid’s, was reportedly stricter than Notre Dame. In the summer of 1975, Smith and his school bandmates sat their O Level exams, but only he and Michael Dempsey stayed on to attend sixth form at St Wilfrid’s (1976–77). Smith has claimed that he was expelled from St Wilfrid’s as an “undesirable influence” after their band Malice’s second live performance shortly before Christmas 1976, which took place at the school and allegedly caused a riot: “I got taken back [in 1977] but they never acknowledged that I was there … I did three A levels – failed biology miserably, scraped through French and got a ‘B’ in English. Then I spent 8 or 9 months on social security until they stopped my money, so I thought ‘now’s the time to make a demo and see what people think’.
According to Dave Bowler and Bryan Dray, biographers of the Cure, the school expelled ex-Malice co-founder Marc Ceccagno along with Smith, whose new band, called Amulet, played the December school show. Smith has given conflicting accounts of his alleged expulsion: elsewhere saying that he was merely suspended, and that it was because he did not get along with the school headmaster, and, on another occasion, claiming that he was suspended “because my attitude towards religion was considered wrong. I thought that was incredible”.
The Cure are an English rock band formed in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1978. The band members have changed several times, with guitarist, lead vocalist, and songwriter Robert Smith being the only constant member. The band’s debut album was Three Imaginary Boys (1979) and this, along with several early singles, placed the band in the post-punk and new wave movements that had sprung up in the United Kingdom. Beginning with their second album, Seventeen Seconds (1980), the band adopted a new, increasingly dark and tormented style, which, together with Smith’s stage look, had a strong influence on the emerging genre of gothic rock as well as the subculture that eventually formed around the genre.
Following the release of their fourth album Pornography in 1982, the band’s future was uncertain. Smith was keen to move past the gloomy reputation his band had acquired, introducing a greater pop sensibility into the band’s music. Songs such as “Let’s Go to Bed” (1982), “Close To Me” (1985), “Just Like Heaven” (1987), “Lovesong” (1989), and “Friday I’m in Love” (1992) aided the band in receiving commercial popularity. The band have released 13 studio albums, two EPs and over 30 singles to date.
The Cure were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
List of the Cure band members
Robert Smith – lead vocals, guitars, six-string bass guitar, keyboards (1978–present)
Simon Gallup – bass guitar, six-string bass guitar, keyboards (1979–1982, 1985–present)
Roger O’Donnell – keyboards (1987–1990, 1995–2005, 2011–present)
Jason Cooper – drums (1995–present)
Reeves Gabrels – guitars, six-string bass guitar (2012–present)
The Cure discography
Three Imaginary Boys (1979)
Seventeen Seconds (1980)
Faith (1981)
Pornography (1982)
The Top (1984)
The Head on the Door (1985)
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
Disintegration (1989)
Wish (1992)
Wild Mood Swings (1996)
Bloodflowers (2000)
The Cure (2004)
4:13 Dream (2008)
Associated acts
Malice
Easy Cure
Siouxsie and the Banshees
The Glove
Fools Dance
Levinhurst
The Magazine Spies
Babacar
Presence
Shelleyan Orphan
Steven Severin (born Steven John Bailey, 25 September 1955, Highgate, London, is an English musician, composer, bassist, producer and co-founding member of Siouxsie and the Banshees. He took the name “Severin” from the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch character who is mentioned in the Velvet Underground song “Venus in Furs”. Severin had earlier considered “Steve Spunker” for his stage name. After the split of Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1996, Severin created his own label RE: and released several instrumental albums via his official website. In the late 2000s and the early 2010s, he regularly performed live in solo, playing music over footage of silent films.
Discography (solo albums – productions)
Visions (1998)
Maldoror (1999)
The Woman in the Dunes (2000)
UnisexDreamSalon (2001)
London Voodoo (Original Soundtrack) (2004)
Beauty & The Beast (2005)
Nature Morte (Original Soundtrack) (2006)
Music for Silents (2008)
Eros Plus Massacre (2009)
Blood of a Poet (Cold Spring 2010)
Vampyr (2012)
The Vril Harmonies (2017)
Innocence and Blood (2017)
#002fa7 International Klein Blue (2017)
23 Wounds Of Julius Caesar (reincarnation) (2019)
EPs (solo EPs – productions)
SleeperCell (Lumberton Trading 2010)
Circles of Silver (Lumberton Trading 2010)
Hours of Gold (Lumberton Trading 2010)
Idols of Glass (Erototox Decodings 2011)
Wand of Flame (Erototox Decodings 2011)
