The Cure's Lol Tolhurst, Banshees' Budgie Join Hands in 45-Years-in-the Making Goth Supergroup

When Lol Tolhurst x Budgie — the Jacknife Lee-produced supergroup helmed by the post-punk drumming legends respectively known for their work in the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees — take the stage at Pasadena's Cruel World festival this weekend, it'll be a full-circle moment for them in more ways than one. And it will be a moment nearly a half-century in the making.

"I only remember this because there was photographic evidence — I think it was outside Morgan Studios or Battery Studios in Willesden, in London," Tolhurst vaguely recalls of his fateful first meeting with Budgie back in 1979. "[The Cure] got asked to open for the Banshees on the Join Hands tour, so we all met up for a sort of get-together. And there's a picture of me, Budgie, [the Cure's then-bassist] Michael [Dempsey], Sioux, Robert [Smith], and [Banshees bassist] Steve Severin, all sitting on the back of this truck."

The Banshees' original recording lineup had just imploded only a few dates into Join Hands tour, on that album's actual release date. Guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris abruptly quit after the band got into an altercation at a record store event in Aberdeen, skipping out on the Banshees' soundcheck that night at Aberdeen's Capitol Theatre. "They were seen running for the train with guitar in hand. They left their tour passes pinned to the pillows of their Holiday Inn hotel room beds," Budgie chuckles. "The tour went on hold that night, and it kind of goes down in history that Siouxsie and Severin had to announce they had no band, and the Cure came back onstage to join them."

Smith stepped in as the Banshees' guitarist to help the band perform an extended version of "The Lord's Prayer" that disastrous Aberdeen evening, and after that bizarre gig, the future of the Banshees was in doubt. That's when Budgie, who'd just finished drumming on the Slits' Cut album, received a last-minute invitation to be Morris's possible replacement. He'd been recommended by admirer and fellow drummer Paul Cook, of the Sex Pistols, who was roommates with Nils Stevenson, the Banshees' manager at the time. "[Cook] had just heard the Slits album and said, 'Hey, the drumming's good. Give this guy a call.' I got the call and my first response was, 'Well, that's crazy. Which band is this for again? Siouxsie and the Banshees? But they're on tour — the ads are in all the papers!' And [Stevenson] just went, 'Well, yeah. So... can you do it?"

Budgie traveled to London for the audition, stumbling upon a scene that he describes as some sort of awesomely Goth version of The X Factor, "with a lot of unlikely characters in the rehearsal room and the Cure sitting in front of us with scorecards." Budgie, who is now considered one of the greatest and most unique drummers of his generation, of course received high scores that day. And as he recalls, "less than seven days sitting in the rehearsal room just once," he was on the road with the retooled Banshees and opening act the Cure.

Also among the unlikely characters present at Budgie's Banshees audition that day were nightclub impresario/Visage frontman Steve Strange and future Adam and the Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni; the latter had been a member of the Banshees' earliest lineup, playing a 20-minute "Lord's Prayer" improv with them at their debut gig at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976. Pirroni didn't rejoin the Banshees once McKay quit; Budgie recalls that on the same day that he successfully auditioned to be Siouxsie's new drummer, "Severin turned to Robert [Smith] and said, 'Fancy playing guitar with us? Please do!'" And Smith accepted. But in an alternate alt-rock universe, Tolhurst might have actually ended up in a band with Pirroni.

"Here's a little-known fact: I was nearly in Adam and the Ants," reveals Tolhurst, who, in another full-circle development, will now be playing Cruel World this weekend on a bill that includes Adam Ant. "I met Adam... we used to see him around town, and at the Hammersmith Odeon one night he said to me, 'I'm going to do a new version of the Ants [with Pirroni]. I need two drummers. Are you interested?' And I said, 'Thank you very much, but I have this band the Cure that I'm doing, and it's fine.' So, I avoided narrowly having to wear the stripey makeup!"

Smith also stayed committed to the Cure, after Join Hands tour wrapped, but Budgie became a permanent Banshee, and eventually became romantically involved with Sioux and married her in 1991. And the Cure/Banshees connections continued over the years. Smith played with Siouxsie and the Banshees again from 1982 to 1984, appearing on their Hyæna LP, and he and Severin recorded as the short-lived side-project the Glove with lead vocals by Jeanette Landray, a dancer who'd choreographed Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Slowdive" video.

"Jeanette and I were actually a couple back in Liverpool. She came down to London with me," Budgie reveals. "That whole ["Slowdive"] dance routine with the eye makeup and the canes, that was Jeanette's choreography. She put us through our paces at the dance center in Floral Street, in Covent Garden at Pineapple Dance Studios, places like that. So, that was a strange one, because it was very close to home. I don't know why [Smith and Severin] chose Jeanette [for the Glove], because she was a dancer, not a singer. ... It was strange. Siouxsie and I were over in Hawaii doing Feast [the debut LP by the Creatures, Sioux and Budgie's own side duo], and we heard that Robert and Steve had gotten together. It was all kind of weird. And we came back with a finished album, and they were still at it."

It's surprising, given this long and convoluted history of bandmate-borrowing, that it took so long for Tolhurst and Budgie to join hands in their own Ants-like double-drummer project, far from London, in sunny California. It wasn't until November 2023 that they dropped their debut album, Los Angeles (credited to Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee). And it turns out that in yet another alternate alt-rock universe, it could have been a triple-drummer project, boasting yet another Cruel World festival legend.

Tolhurst, Budgie, and fellow iconic post-punk percussionist Kevin Haskins were brought together in 2019 by fellow drummer and "The Trap Set" podcaster Joe Wong, and, as Tolhurst explains, "Initially, [the Los Angeles album] was the three of us; we sort of hung out and we did some stuff. But then Kevin had to leave. He was getting emails from Mr. Murphy." (Tolhurst is referring to Peter Murphy of Haskins's own seminal on/off Goth band, Bauhaus, who played the first Cruel World festival in 2022. Haskins played there in 2023 as a member of Love and Rockets, and returns this year with Tones on Tail.)

Tolhurst and Budgie then decided to shelve their early recordings with Haskins, which were produced by longtime NIN collaborator Danny Lohner and partially recorded in the home studio of Tolhurst's '80s drummer pal Tommy Lee. "It kind of sounded like what you would expect a record by the Cure guy, the Banshees guy, and the Bauhaus guy, produced by the guy from Nine Inch Nails, to sound like," Tolhurst says drily, while Budgie describes that still-unreleased material as "very Goth" and an "amalgamation of early Cure and Creatures... very spirit-of-'77."

Instead, Tolhurst and Budgie looked to the future. They started their own podcast, "Curious Creatures," and started over as a musical duo in U2 producer Jacknife Lee's Topanga Canyon studio, which Budgie calls "a very special place, a real crow's-nest hideaway with fairy lights." Eventually they were working with a "wishlist" of all-stars like the Edge, LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, Starcrawler's Arrow de Wilde, IDLES' Mark Bowen, and harpist Mary Lattimore.

It remains to be seen if Lol Tolhurst x Budgie's Cruel World set will feature any of those special guests, but Tolhurst envisions "two different versions" of the live band: "the all-star version, which is, like, let's get as many people as we can, and then what we call the 'suitcase version,' which is just me and Budgie and a few suitcases." After a May 9 pre-Cruel World warmup club gig at the Casbah in San Diego, Tolhurst, Budgie, and their suitcases will officially hit the road May 20, opening for the Miki Berenyi Trio — a tour that kicks off, of course, in Los Angeles.

L.A. has been Tolhurst's home for 30 years, and he and Budgie both individually visited the city of reinvention during rough times when, as Budgie puts it, "life as I knew it had come to an abrupt halt." (Tolhurst had been dismissed from the Cure and was separating from his first wife; Budgie's marriage to Sioux was ending.) "Los Angeles was a kind of savior, in a way," Budgie, who is now remarried and resides in Berlin, recalls. "You could just disappear, almost."

"L.A.'s contradictions is the reason I stayed, because when I first came here, a lot of people said, 'If you go there, either you're going to get discovered or you're going to get destroyed.' And neither of those things happened to me. I found acceptance and I found love and a lot of understanding. I was able to reinvent myself quite a bit," Tolhurst muses. "And so, listening to [our Los Angeles album], it just makes me feel like that's part of the journey. When I arrived here, I was probably the same guy that was making the Cure-type, Banshees-type, Bauhaus-type music. And now fast-forward and you come out this other end, and it's this supersonic version of everything you've ever thought. Yes, it sounds like Budgie — it can't not sound like Budgie playing the drums — and it sounds like me, but it also sounds completely different.

"This was really the culmination of a lot of things in our lives, and it's worked out really well because we've been through very similar things," Tolhurst concludes. "So, it felt really spiritual, really strong, really good to do it — before we get too ancient and can't pick up some sticks."

Lol x Budgie perform at L.A.'s third annual Cruel World festival Saturday, May 11, at 4:05 p.m. on the Outsiders Stage. Other acts on the bill, besides the above-mentioned Adam Ant and Tones on Tail, include Duran Duran, Ministry, Simple Minds, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Heaven 17, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, and the Mission U.K.

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