Simon Gallup, longtime bassist for The Cure, has announced he has left the band, according to a public post on his personal Facebook page. “With a slightly heavy heart I am no longer a member of the Cure!” he wrote. “Good luck to them all …” In response to a friend asking if he was OK, Gallup said that he “just got fed up of betrayal.” Neither The Cure nor bandleader Robert Smith have confirmed Gallup’s departure.
Gallup joined The Cure in 1979 after playing on Robert Smith’s side project, Cult Hero, and is the second longest-serving member of the band behind Smith. After leaving the band in 1982 during their Pornography tour, he rejoined in 1984 and has played on every Cure album since 1985’s The Head on the Door.
In 2018, Smith told The Irish Times that if Gallup were to leave the band, “it wouldn’t be called The Cure.” In an interview with NME the following year, he said, “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 added: “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. You’ve done so much together, you’ve so much shared experience, you just don’t want to lose friends like that.””
Earlier this summer, Smith offered an update on the Cure’s belated follow-up to 2008’s 4.13 Dream, saying it will be the band’s last. “It’s 10 years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff,” he told The Sunday Times. “And I can’t think we’ll ever do anything else. I definitely can’t do this again.”
