Two-time Cure bassist Simon Gallup has taken to Facebook to announce his departure from the band.
In a short public post on his personal Facebook page, Gallup writes, "With a slightly heavy heart I am no longer a member of the Cure! Good luck to them all...". Gallup then goes on to comment on another post, saying, "I'm ok... just got fed up of betrayal."
Gallup first joined The Cure in 1979, and played on the three so-called "Dark Trilogy" albums - Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography - before departing in 1982 after falling out with band founder/frontman Robert Smith.
He rejoined The Cure just two years later and has been ever-present since, apart from brief absences through illness: on the Wish tour in 1992 he was replaced by former Associates member Roberto Soave while suffering from pleurisy, and in 2019 Gallup's son Eden stepped in when he fell ill before a show at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan.
In 2019, 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," he told the NME. "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.".
“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.”
The Cure haven't released a studio album since 2008's 4:13 Dream, although Robert Smith told DJ Zane Lowe in June that the band two albums almost ready to go.
"Probably in about six weeks time I'll be able to say when everything's coming out and what we're doing next year and everything," said Smith. "So we were doing two albums and one of them's very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn't. And they're both very close to being done. I just have to decide who's going to mix them. That's really all I've got left to do."
In August 2019, Smith revealed that the band hoped to finish recording an album that year, and described the sound as “not relentlessly doom and gloom. It has soundscapes on it, like Disintegration."
The previous December, Smith promised, "we’re going in about six weeks time to finish off what will be our first album for more than a decade."
The Cure have not yet commented on Gallup's departure.
