‘Something had to break — and it was me’

Former Cure drummer Lol Tolhurst talks to Ellie O’Byrne about sorting himself out

“IT WAS a kind of madness; a three-ring circus. Something had to break, and it was me,” Lol Tolhurst, former drummer with and founding member of The Cure, describes with candour the moment he realised he was out of control, while the band were recording their eighth album, the aptly named Disintegration.

Tolhurst, friends with frontman Robert Smith from the age of five, was about to get booted out of the band, file a bitter and ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against Smith and spend the better part of a decade sobering up and sorting himself out.