‘Like the Three Tenors, but with drummers’: Budgie, Lol Tolhurst and Jacknife Lee on their supergroup rebirth
Lol Tolhurst and Budgie will never forget how they first met. It was 1979 and the Cure were supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees when the latter’s guitarist and drummer sensationally quit. Tolhurst – who had cofounded the Cure in Crawley, Sussex, with school friends Robert Smith and Michael Dempsey – remembers that the band was just two gigs into its first big tour when “everything fell apart”.
That night, the two bands joined together for a makeshift performance in Aberdeen before Liverpudlian and former Slits drummer Budgie (born Peter Clarke) was hurriedly drafted into the Banshees lineup, immediately being asked to help choose from several hopeful young guitarists.
“Who were all terrible,” he laughs. “Myself and the Cure were all holding up score cards, like Eurovision song contest judges.” In the end, the tour carried on when Cure man Smith stepped up to play guitar in both bands. “There was a lot of camaraderie,” smiles Tolhurst, speaking by video from Los Angeles, with the similarly bespectacled, blond and cheery former Banshees drummer sitting beside him. “Me and Budgie have been friends ever since.”
In the Banshees and the Cure, the pair’s innovative drumming helped create the foundations of post-punk, goth and some of the 80s’ most inventive pop. Today, the pair co-host an entertaining podcast, Curious Creatures, where guests such as Shirley Manson and LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy discuss issues from psychedelia to “discovering leather pants”. Now, Tolhurst and Budgie have teamed up with megaproducer Jacknife Lee to form an unusual sort of supergroup.
Featuring guests ranging from U2 guitarist The Edge to veteran civil rights campaigner Lonnie Holley, their debut album Los Angeles is edgy, percussive, clubby, electronic and noisy, but not remotely like the Banshees or the Cure. “When we started, it was more like that,” admits Tolhurst. “But we realised we needed to be different.”
The unlikely project started over lunch in LA with yet another post-punk drummer, Bauhaus’s Kevin Haskins, when Budgie (who now lives in Berlin) was in town playing drums with John Grant. Semi-jokingly, Tolhurst suggested doing “something like the Three Tenors, but with drummers”. The trio began work (initially with a singer) after another drummer pal, Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, lent them his home studio. “Next to his Bentley and his Harley,” chuckles Budgie. But it wasn’t working; then Haskins left to tour with Bauhaus.
“At that point we were … not desolate, but a little despairing,” Tolhurst sighs. One night, he poured out their troubles to a neighbour, Jacknife (born Garret) Lee, who offered to listen to what they’d recorded. “Then,” remembers Tolhurst, “in true punk fashion, he said: ‘You need to rip everything up and start again.’ I was probably in tears when I called Budgie. I went: ‘Budgie, I’ve found our man.’”
For Lee, the timing was uncanny. His first gig had been the Banshees on the Kaleidoscope tour when he was 10, and long before producing megastars such as U2 and Taylor Swift he’d started out in Dublin garage-punks Thee Amazing Colossal Men. Lately, he’d grown bored with the music business. “Pop music’s become more of a capitalist race than a creative one,” he says on a separate video call. “I realised I was having more fun teaching a class at my kid’s school on how to make hiphop than I was in my job.”
He’d also become intrigued by the current intersection of pop and the avant garde typified by Kendrick Lamar. With this in mind, he invited Tolhurst and Budgie to his remote Topanga Canyon home studio which the latter describes as “a grotto filled with vinyl”, encouraging them to listen to music that inspired them when they were young: T Rex, Kraftwerk and Roxy Music. Not to copy, but “to remember what it felt like hearing these things for the first time”.
As they experimented with drums, guitars, synths (which they’d played in their respective bands), found sounds and even an AI voice machine, Tolhurst was reminded of the Cure days when they would “go round to Robert’s house three nights a week and just play what came out of us”. The Edge, a Banshees fan in his teens who now lives nearby, needed no persuasion to join in, but didn’t bring U2 guitar riffs. “People forget that Edge has made records with Jah Wobble and [Can’s] Holger Czukay,” Lee says. “He’s done loads of stuff like that away from the ‘day job’ so was really interested in getting back to exploration.”
The idea of guest vocalists came about after LCD man Murphy liked what they were doing and offered to sing on it. Subsequent guests were encouraged to “lose their ego” and come out of their comfort zone: in Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie’s case from wanting “more guitars”.
73-year-old civil rights campaigner turned artist Holley sings Bodies with a startling primal growl. “I love working with Lonnie because he doesn’t know who anybody is, he only knows Bob Dylan” grins Lee. “Every time I asked him anything he’d talk about moving to Mars. I asked: ‘Are you avoiding something?’ He said: ‘Run the music’ and started singing. Afterwards he told me how he’d been one of 27 children. His mother swapped him for a bottle of whiskey with a milk nurse. He grew up in a brothel. When he was eight, the milk nurse died. Lonnie was hit by a car and was in a coma for three months. He went from hospital to a prison-like slave camp, where his mother found him and took him back.” As a child, Holley had been given a rocket-shaped toy pedal car. “Which he associated with escape. So that’s what he’d meant by Mars”.
The album title Los Angeles reflects the different singers’ varying and sometimes critical takes on the city of angels. On the excellent title track, Murphy sings “Los Angeles eats its young”, whereas Lee explains that Starcrawler singer Arrow de Wilde, who sings Uh Oh, is “like a grandchild of the Cramps. She gets all that kitsch and vampiric stuff. ‘We’re gonna eat your flesh and spit it out.’ So she turns it into something fun, join the game, the all-American dream.”
In his candid autobiography, Cured, Tolhurst calls Los Angeles “the place where people go to be discovered or destroyed”, but for him it brought salvation. By the 1990s, he was a mess. After playing on all the classic Cure albums up to 1989’s Disintegration, he’d been sacked by the Cure owing to alcoholism, bitterly regretted a vengeful, drawn-out court case against his former bandmates (which he lost) and his marriage was over. When his American first wife returned to the US with their son, he followed, determined to be a better parent than his own alcoholic father.
“I realised that if I stayed in England I’d be that sad bastard in the pub who everyone avoids and then just dies,” says Tolhurst, prompting Budgie to jokingly but endearingly touch him on the shoulder and say: “I’d have been there for you Lol.” On arrival in LA, Tolhurst drove into the desert and after three days experienced an epiphany. “I realised I could leave all the regret and anger I’d been carrying round with me in the desert. I could talk to people for the first time in months and the very day I came back to the city I met my future [second] wife.” Sober for more than 30 years, he’s lived there ever since.
Budgie never actually moved to LA, but the city offered valuable sanctuary after he’d quit drinking and experienced the end of both the Banshees (in 1996) and his 15-year marriage to Siouxsie. “I’d lost myself completely,” he admits, his Merseyside accent defying years of living abroad. “But someone put their hand out and I suddenly thought ‘God, I’m alive.’” Now remarried with children, he admits that Gillespie’s lyrics to their new single Ghosted at Home unwittingly tell his story. “Especially the lines, ‘The sins of the flesh come back to haunt you’ and about ‘flipping and flopping.’ Because I did a lot of that every time I went to New York. Usually with someone else and falling into a skip.”
For years, neither of them could bear to listen to their famous former bands. Tolhurst formed Presence and Levinhurst but then suddenly in 2011 – after reconciling with Smith – he toured with the Cure again, performing their first three albums. “I know exactly what my obituary will say,” he smiles. “But why deny it? I’m proud of it but now I’m