The Cure Bassist Simon Gallup Announces Departure From Band
The Cure bassist Simon Gallup announced Saturday that he is leaving the band after nearly 40 years with the goth-rock legends.
“With a slightly heavy heart I am no longer a member of the Cure ! Good luck to them all,” Gallup wrote on Facebook. When asked by a fan if the exit was health-related, Gallup responded, “I’m ok… just got fed up of betrayal.”
The Cure and singer Robert Smith have not yet commented on Gallup’s departure. However, the band’s longtime keyboardist Roger O’Donnell tweeted after Gallup’s announcement, “A friend just told me they saw Lol in the Guitar Centre buying a bass???????,” a nod to former Cure drummer/keyboardist Lol Tolhurst who left the band in 1989, Slicing Up Eyeballs reports.
Gallup, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 alongside his Cure bandmates, also deleted his own Twitter account.
While Gallup wasn’t the Cure’s founding bassist, he joined soon after the release of the band’s 1979 debut album Three Imaginary Boys, which featured bassist Michael Dempsey. Gallup appeared on all three LPs in the Cure’s “Dark Trilogy” — 1980’s Seventeen Seconds, 1981’s Faith and 1982’s Pornography — before mounting tensions with Smith led to his exit from the Cure in 1982.
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Two years later, after the Cure had released The Top without Gallup, Smith asked the bassist to rejoin the group in 1984, which he did; Gallup remained the band’s bassist ever since. The band last studio album was 2008’s 4:13 Dream, but Smith told IndieLand in 2019 that the band have been working on a new album inspired by the 1969 moon landing.
In a 2019 NME interview, Smith talked about Gallup’s importance to the band. “For me, the heart of the live band has always been Simon, and he’s always been my best friend. It’s weird that over the years and the decades he’s often been overlooked. He doesn’t do interviews, he isn’t really out there and he doesn’t play the role of a foil to me in public, and yet he’s absolutely vital to what we do,” Smith said.
“We’ve had some difficult periods over the years but we’ve managed to maintain a very strong friendship that grew out of that shared experience from when we were teens. When you have friends like that, particularly for that long, it would take something really extraordinary for that friendship to break.”
