‘The locals thought I was in a Satanic cult’ GREAT ESTATES
The kitchen at Dulford House in Devon is festooned with colourful rosettes strung on a ribbon above the Aga, with paintings on an old pine dresser. It’s a quintessential country-house scene, but not the one that is conjured when the owner is the former guitarist of rock band The Cure.
Perry Bamonte joined the band in 1990, first as a gofer running odd jobs before briefly playing the keyboards and then moving to the bass guitar; he remained with the band until he left in 2005. “I wasn’t fired as is reported on the internet, and we’re still good friends,” he’s keen to underline.
In 1998, after the band had released their album Wild Mood Swings (1996) and while they were working on their next, Bloodflowers (2000), Bamonte spotted Dulford House, which was built in the Thirties, in Country Life magazine. Somewhat improbably, given the band’s goth rock image – baggy black clothes, backcombed hair and heavily kohled eyes – it was the sight of a peacock appearing from behind a hedge in the garden, displaying its tail feathers, that sealed the deal. “I just thought, ‘I know where I’m living’. I didn’t wait for the survey and paid the full asking price,” he says.
The locals weren’t at all sure about the arrival of their new neighbour. “I’d agreed a completion date with the vendors, but when it neared, they rang me in a panic saying they couldn’t yet do it,” explains Bamonte. “Idling in the newsagents at Heathrow, I spotted an article in a magazine that said that buying a house on that date was actually a bad omen, so – more as a way to reassure than anything else – I mentioned this to the owners. Weeks later, when I got the keys, the Chinese whispers that had whipped around the village said that a rock star belonging to a Satanic cult had moved in. It took a while to dissuade them of that.”
That Bamonte was drawn to living in a country house, and one in Devon, isn’t as unlikely as it first seems. The Cure’s erstwhile drummer, Boris Williams, had a house in Devon, which was used to record demos in the Eighties. Later, the band rented old country houses and converted them into recording studios while working on albums. One of them was St Catherine’s Court, an Elizabethan mansion near Bath owned by the actress Jane Seymour. She sold it in 2007, reportedly after disputes with neighbours regarding late-night parties. Whether or not The Cure’s creative juices contributed to this isn’t known: “We led a very nocturnal lifestyle; somehow, the night time is more conducive to doing creative things,” adds Bamonte. For that reason, he didn’t blink at the idea of commuting to Devon after gigs in London. “Dulford is just five minutes from the M5 motorway, but you can neither see it nor hear it. It meant that if I left London after work around 2am, without any traffic problems I’d be home in under three hours, which worked well for me then.”
Bamonte spent his very early years in Basildon, but grew up on the Essex coast. He had no formal musical training, and says his later success as a musician was more a case of being in the right place at the right time. “I went to a secondary modern with very little music on the curriculum, but was fortunate to hit 16 or 17 just when punk rock happened. It was an amazing time: there was an explosion of talent and ideas – it was an art movement – and you didn’t need to be that talented as a musician to play in a band.”
Having been exposed to pop music as a child, he laments the way that the musical genre has gone today. “It used to be a youth movement. When you brought home a record that your parents absolutely hated, you knew you were on to something. Now, I see three generations of a family all watching shows like Britain’s Got Talent and enjoying the same music. It’s just not the same.”
Music has taken a back seat these days. Since leaving the band, Bamonte’s passions have developed into fly fishing and painting, both of which he now combines in his role as artistic director of a new quarterly journal, Fly Culture. The antithesis of what he describes as the “grip-andgrin” angling magazines, which boast about the size of the catch, this is about the art of tying a fly, casting the line, and standing on a river bank at dawn. “My dad first took me coarse fishing when I was a boy, but it was [lead singer of The Who] Roger Daltrey who let me fly-fish on his lakes in Sussex. I got – excuse the pun – hooked.”
Bamonte and his wife, Donna, are selling five-bedroom Dulford House, which comes with a three-bedroom cottage, as well as a tennis court, a swimming pool and a little over three acres, because they are now
‘Everyone knows Robert Smith, but the rest of the band had near total anonymity’
“rattling around”. They are looking for a smaller house with land where Donna can continue her work rehabilitating and retraining racehorses. While the original 18th-century manor house was demolished in 1931, the 10ft-high boundary wall still stands, granting the house considerable privacy. “Not that I came here to escape the paparazzi,” says Bamonte. “One of the benefits of being a member of The Cure is that everyone knows Robert Smith, but the rest of us had near total anonymity.” The mile-long boundary wall, the large garden, proximity to the Jurassic Coast and good schools all paint the picture of a perfect family house. It’s not listed, except for the entrance gates, and remains true to its Thirties design. “It’s ideal as a family home,” he adds. “Somewhere that the children can roam all day long outside in the garden, playing football or climbing trees. That’s what we hope will happen, in any case.”