Lol Tolhurst

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2:14Lowell Tollhurst is the drummer and co-founder of The Cure. He first met lead singer Robert Smith when they were just five years old. Together with their other Catholic school friend, Michael Dempsey, they went on to make dark, brooding music that reflected the isolation they felt as the only punks living in their small English town. As The Cure Sound developed in the 80s, they released a string of three albums that Lowell now defines as the band's quote-unquote goth period. Today, we'll hear Lowell talk in detail about the making of those records. He'll also discuss the book he just released last month called Goth A History, which explores the architects of the post-punk genre, bands like Suzy and the Banshees, Joy Division, and Bauhaus.

2:58In addition to the book, Lowell is also releasing a new album with his old friend Budgie, the drummer from the Banshees. The album's called Los Angeles, and it features an all-star list of guests, including U2's The Edge and LCD Sound System's James Murphy. On today's episode, Leah Rose talks to Lowell Tolhurst about growing up an outcast in post-World War II England, and how he and Robert Smith first bonded over a Hendrix record. Lowell also gives a window into the creation of The Cure's three goth albums. That's 17 Seconds, Faith, and Pornography. This is Broken Record. Line of notes for the digital age.

3:38I'm Justin Richman. Here's Leah Rose's interview with Lowell Tollhurst. Let's start talking a little bit about the books. So you've written two books. Yeah. The first is a memoir called Cured, The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys. the newest book goth a history and i found the writing i've been listening to the the audiobook of cured okay which you read and it's just excellent and it's been my my walking partner now i go on long walks and listen and the writing is so simple and straightforward and feels very uncluttered and there's not a lot of ornamentation and it struck me that it's sort of similar to your style as a drummer.

4:23Yeah. Well, yes. Thank you. You're the first person that's noticed that, and that's why. You're right. It's like I like to be, I wouldn't say minimalistic, but I don't have a desire to make things heavily ornamented, I suppose is the word. And that's true in writing. I mean, if I think of the writers that I really admire, they pay great attention to the the sentence and that's that's how i do i don't you know it's funny i love notebooks you know i i obsessively collect notebooks because i think they're beautiful and uh and i write stuff in it and then you know two weeks later i look at it and i can't what what am i right well i can't read my own writing so uh so i type everything straight away but what i do do is as i as i type it out and i i do it like like music i just let it flow get the idea out and then maybe two weeks later i come back and i have a look at it and go oh okay take that out put this in and i edit it in drumming you know i loved jackie libitz from can because he would say you have to play monotonous yeah and i understand that because it's like the mantra and that's what i wanted to get that's what i wanted to do with the drums i wanted to make you feel that you're part of the whole thing and that required it to be precise and minimalistic same same thing with writing so writers that I really liked were like for this current book goth it was hard for me to find my initial voice because I'm writing about other people I'm not just writing about my own experiences I mean there's a lot of my own stuff in there but I'm writing about other people I want to project the other people's stories in a way that wasn't just purely journalistic.

6:17I didn't want to do that because I can't, because I'm not a journalist. And the way I personalized it was I'd been reading a lot of California writer Joan Didion from the 60s and 70s. And I love the way that all of her sentences are crafted very precisely, you know. So I thought, OK, there's my template. you know so that's very cool but i'm glad that you actually uh you're the first person i know that said that to me so yeah yeah i've really been enjoying it and and i highly recommend the audiobook a lot of times with audiobooks you get sort of like um a narrator who has no connection to the story and they can put on voices when they're reading dialogue and it can be very distracting so i really enjoyed hearing your voice because obviously it's your story yeah it's funny because at the beginning when I did Cured, and I actually recorded both Cured and the current book, Goth, in the same studio because I loved the place that I recorded it in.

7:16And also it's very near my house. But I remember the recording engineer at the end of one day said to me, oh, he said that, you know, normally I'm not really involved with what's going on, you know, just like listening for, you know, pops and clicks and stuff. He said, but he said, is there light at the end of the tunnel with this? I said, yes, don't worry. In the next couple of days, you'll hear that. Okay. Yeah, it was funny. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so I wanted to start off by talking about the Cure's goth period as you outline it in the book, Goth, A History. Right. So the Cure's goth period, as you lay it out, consists of three consecutive albums.

7:59Yeah. The first is 17 Seconds, released in 1980. Faith, released in 1981. and pornography in 1982. And these are all albums that you said you were deeply involved with making. Right. So let's start with 17 Seconds. It's the Cure's second album. Do you remember any of the conversations within the band that led up to developing the sound for that album? Because it was quite different than the sound from the first album. Well, I don't want to make up a story because I don't think, you know, it's like when you write conversations in a book a lot of the time I challenge anybody in the world to remember conversations verbatim even from like yesterday you can't it's impossible most of the time I would know okay I know how these people speak about things I know what we talked about roughly so I'm going to construct a conversation from that which will be in their voice and will be correct.

9:03I think with 17 seconds, our first album was really a live set that we had played for a couple of years. And so that seemed the most obvious thing. We go and record that. We can do it quickly. We know what we're playing. And that's how it happened. But for the second album, we finally realized that we had, you know, we weren't just going to record one album and that was it. We had a chance to do another record. You know, most people will tell you in bands that they sort of put everything into the first album and then suddenly think, what are we going to do next? Because we, you know, and usually it's like, you know, you have your whole life to make your first album, like they say, and six months to do your second album.

9:44And we were kind of not really in that position, but we thought, OK, we better do what we really want to get out now, what we were feeling at that time. because, you know, maybe number two is it and that's all we'll have the chance to do. You know, we felt lucky with the first one and people liked it enough to say, well, let's start thinking about the second one. And that was really a great idea that Robert had because he said to, you know, our manager, Chris Parry, would come in the studio for the first album. And for the first album, you know, we were fairly young. We didn't really know what we were doing.

10:20We would look at things and, you know, sort of let them get on with it. him and Mike Hedges, the engineer. So for the second hand, we said, well, you know what, we've seen enough of what goes on and how to do it. We'd like to do it ourselves. And Robert was very insistent about that. We'd like to do it ourselves. And, you know, it's a credit to Parry that he went, yeah, okay, that's fine. You know, his offices were in the same complex as the studio. So, you know, once a week, he would come down and just have a little listen, you know, so he left us to our own devices and as i say in goth you know to me it was a very creative time because we were allowed to do it ourselves you know we were given given the keys to the kingdom and like we can go in and do it so that leaves you to to be a lot more experimental in fact i was i was telling somebody the other week that a lot of bands when they start making you know their second third fourth albums they get this uh idea in their head that they they have they all have separate roles and they have you know i do this you do that and you know that's how we make it work because sort of like the the roles in a household or in a marriage or oh yeah yeah it's any kind of partnership because you know and not unreasonably the theory goes well if it worked once this is yeah this is our formula this is how we do it and i think that's kind of misguided for two reasons because one music's really modern music is really the only sort of art form where people are required to reproduce what they did before in the same way but slightly different you know they're like you know it's like a painter you wouldn't say to a painter well paint me that portrait again but from this different angle that's what i want to see uh you know you you let them do whatever they want to do so for 17 seconds there was one session where we said hey let's just swap instruments so you know i played guitar and robert played drums and we recorded a couple of things most of them were terrible so we decided that we go back to what we all do but we kept some little snippets of it and they're actually on the album in a way you know you don't really know where they are but they're there so that's also freeing in your mind you don't have this thought process that, oh, you know, I have to just do this.

12:41You can put input into different areas. And that's, you know, if you trust each other, that's a good way to do it because then you've not just got, you know, one mind on one thing. You've got everybody's mind on everything and that works, you know, so. And in Goff, you wrote that over the years, there have been a lot of assumptions that have been made about the Cures creative process. And I took that to mean that people just assume that a lot of the songwriting came from Robert. But now you're saying that inspired in part by your sobriety, that that wasn't always the case. No, I mean, you know, as things got further on in the cure, you know, and to the point where I wasn't well enough to contribute like I used to, you know, at the beginning, especially for those first, the second, third and fourth album, they were much more democratic in their approach and it's funny i was talking to perl thompson a little while back and he's he i said oh it tells you how far it was back because i just finished cured and i said he said well you know i i've always known you were a writer you were a writer when we were 15 or 16 and so i thought about it and i thought well yeah you know a lot of the times you know robert's got to sing the words right so you know he has the final say on what he's going to sing because you can't sing stuff that you don't believe but there was a lot more collaboration and just you know general molding of things back then and that you know i would put some words in simon put some words in now and again um it's really guarantees to make things stronger now as things progress and people start you know it also happens you know for people that manage bands and stuff, it's a lot easier if you don't have to deal with everybody in the band.

14:30You just have to deal with one person. So, you know, things become that way. And, you know, all credit to Robert. He's a great songwriter and he's got, you know, a lot of good ideas. Personally, I think for The Cure, the best version of the three-piece band was for those albums. I mean, the first one was a four-piece, but it's like the most pure and condensed of that band. And that was much more collaborative, you know. So, you know, that's the thing. It's like I don't want to turn around and go, oh, no, he never wrote anything because that's not true. He's obviously the songwriter. But that doesn't mean that anybody else didn't do it.

15:12I mean, and it went on. We tried different formats of that. You know, when we did Kiss Me, we had so many songs because we'd all, by this time, we didn't do stuff together. We did it separately, you know. So we will have little studios at home and go, okay, six months, and then we'll come back together and we'll see what we've got. And that's the reason that Kiss Me was like a double album. I mean, it could have been a triple album. We had 100 bits of songs to start with, and then we whittled that down to like 35, and then finally to what, 17 or 19, something like that. you know so everybody had some creativity you know and that was what was pretty good about the cure because when you put that all together it's unstoppable you know yeah i was curious about the song play for today yeah so that's the second song on 17 seconds and it's a pretty substantial mood shift from the intro do you remember how that song came together and i seem to remember that we had a sort of rough version of that when when michael dempsey was around but anyway but i know for the lyric it was the first time that i'd felt like i could write a lyric that was uh accessible to my feelings you know because the previous things like three imaginary boys and uh firing cairo and another day they were they were far more impressionistic in the way that I presented things.

16:44So that's it. That's why there's a difference because it's much more to the point and less flowery, I suppose, is the word. And that's a breakthrough, I imagine, as a writer. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't think that at however old I was then, 20, that I even thought about that. I just sort of instinctively felt, oh, well, this is a better kind of thing. This is a better, this is more what I want to say. It's just the only way I knew how to deal with it, you know, write it down. And Robert liked it, and so off it went, you know. So is that like you wrote the entire lyrics, gave it to him, and then he interpreted it as a singer and sort of changed it?

17:31I think I gave him sort of like the basis for it all, and he probably chopped and changed a few things around, Because, you know, people forget, you know, like songs are not, it's not poetry you're writing, it's not prose, it's this weird hybrid in between lyrics. And lyrics a lot of the time work better if they're onomatopoeic, and lyrics work better sometimes if they're not quite grammatically correct, or, you know, certain words you just can't sing, or you could try, But, you know, so that decision was always left, obviously, to the singer. So that's how that worked, really. I imagine you must find it interesting to see what songs resonate with a really wide audience after you release the album.

18:21And do you have any theories why A Forest caught on the way it did? Yeah, it's like audiences don't, by and large, I mean, obviously there are exceptions to the rule. audiences are not looking at you thinking or listening to you thinking oh that was good the way they played that or that was good the way that's put together that it's much more visceral than that you know they it's like it's like it's like drums right most people other than drummers don't really notice what's going on with the drummer but if something's wrong if something goes bad they might not even know what it is but they think oh no something's not right it's something's off it doesn't feel right and they don't know what it is so the point where it works for an audience is is when they understand completely that it's you and your expression right that it's not to do with how well you play or how bad you play no it's it's a terribly overused word lately, but it's authenticity, you know, and that's what they feel.

19:34Do you remember why you decided to bring the drums in when you did In a Forest? You know, we had liked a lot of like the early sort of crowd rock bands, you know, Cannes and Noy. And what I always liked about them was things feel like they're going forward with that motoric beat, but they also seem to stay in the same place as well. You know, So it's like, it's static, but it's moving, you know, and that to us seemed like the thing that we really wanted to express with the drums. So, you know, Mike Hedges was instrumental in getting that sound. You know, he used a lot of different techniques, which we'd never seen before.

20:14And I don't think a lot of people used them at the time even. So, and he was young like us as well, you know, so we had open minds about what you do. You know, he wasn't stuck with like, oh, no, this is how you record drums. You can't do anything else. We were open to doing it a different way. I think also, like somebody said to me the other night, it's, you know, the lyric. I thought the title, Robert did the lyric, but the actual lyric, if you think about it, is a sort of encapsulation of everything, goth and romantic, if you think about it. It's like there's this sense of mystery, there's this sense of, you know, loss at the same time, and it's all there in one very succinct lyric.

20:55So I think that's what people respond to, you know. Yeah. You described your drumming style on the album as you play a monotonous half man, half machine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's Jackie Liebich from Japan. That's his quote. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I thought that it was a drum machine listening to. A lot of people did. Yeah. That seems sort of like it would be hard to keep up, especially playing live. Yes. Very hard. But, you know, the thing is, it's like practice. People think, sometimes they watch drummers who are very flamboyant, and they think, oh, that must be very hard. And sometimes it is. But most of the time, that's a bit like a sort of a sideshow trick, you know?

21:42It's like, I once saw this thing with Ginger Baker, and he said, you know, people think I'm playing things really fast, but what I'm doing is I'm playing lots of quite simple things, but on different limbs slightly shifted from each other and it gives the impression of going really fast and that you know i know that's very difficult to do because you've got to think about everything all at the same time yeah but um in terms of physicality you know it it sounds faster than your body is actually kind of doing it's hard to explain but it kind of it sounds like that In drumming, I always tell people, if you're doing it right, you could play for hours and you'll just feel elevated.

22:27You know, you can walk off stage, have to wait three or four hours and you'll feel fine. If you're doing it wrong, it's like running the worst marathon of your life. And, you know, at the end, you're like, you can't sit up. It's really like dancing. You know, you just have to remember, OK, well, that wasn't right, but it has to move to here now. That has to move to there. and as long as you can get in that yeah you'll you'll be fine you know but that's the trick the trick is to learn how to do that it's like you know i watch guitarists a lot and i think to myself how do they know just instinctively where their fingers are going they're not looking and it's but it's just that you know you have to it's like malcolm gladwell in his book out outliers he said you know some people think it's a bit dismissive but i don't think it is he said like the difference between being good and being great is like 10 ,000 hours of practice.

23:21He's got a point, you know, because if I think about it, at the beginning when we started The Cure, we spent the first three years at Robert's house just playing like three times a week. It was more of a social thing. We'd just meet there, you know, play, go down the park, come back, play a bit more. But that's where we got our 10 ,000 hours in, you know. Before we move on from 17 seconds, is there any other stories you want to share? anything from that period overall that's important to know? I don't know. I think more than anything, like I say in Goth, it was for me, and I think I can say it for everybody else, it was the discovery of our own ethos, really.

24:01It was the discovery of who we really were and that we could be who we really were and do something with it, whereas before we felt a bit more constrained. That's really why when I think about it, when Robert is a bit dismissive of the first album, it's because it wasn't wholly our involvement. It was like, yes, it was us, but it was us put through this filter of a different thing, mainly through the manager. Yeah. And he had just signed the jam to Polygram. So he was like, that was in his mind. I'm going to do another version of this three-piece band, and it's going to be a pop band. And, you know, it's kind of different.

24:45But, you know, I think the other good thing is it was a time where there was, you know, I don't discount the fact of being in the right place at the right time either, you know. There was much more of an openness to letting things evolve rather than like, okay, we're going to do that this year, and then work, then we have to try something completely different. There was more time to do things, I feel. We have to pause for a quick break, and then we'll come back with more from Leah Rose and Lowell Tollhurst. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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28:13I can do it with my eyes closed. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise, lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the runway. I'm looking at this thing, see? Listen to No Such Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. we're back with more from leah rose and lowell tollhurst speaking of evolution when you were going into faith the next album yeah what was the thought on how the sound would build or change i think for faith we wanted it to be you know at first it just we wanted it to sound a bit more uh well like it ended up sounding a bit bit more not dramatic but a bit more glacial i suppose really and it didn't really do that at first you know we had some sessions and it was like you know we've been on the road a lot and that was the problem for a lot of bands you know like you have a successful album and then you have a successful second album then you're on the road forever and ever and then you're committed to do another album you're like okay we better do another album now well how are we gonna you know where are we gonna find the time to do it i don't know people say oh they write on the road i never found the time to write on the road you know you're probably exhausted well you know road time is a whole different world right you know like people would say to me oh i'll call you next wednesday and i'd say yeah i'm gonna be on the road then so it may happen or it may not you can't really organize that that that kind of thing so if you for Faith, Faith started off being a bit rushed and then some things happened you know, my mother got very sick and it was obvious she was going to pass away Robert's grandmother as well and so that focused our mind a bit more on what ended up to be the main sort of topic about it, you know and you have to think that me and Robert and Michael Dempsey, but you know, by that time he wasn't there me and Robert grew up Catholic you know which is kind of a different proposition in England because you have to remember that Henry VIII dissolved all the churches because, you know, the Pope wouldn't let him get divorced for his sixth wife or whatever.

30:45So he decided, well, I'll come out, I'll just form my own church, you know, which sounds kind of familiar about things that are happening, you know, in the world now. But anyway, that's what he did. So consequently, all the Catholic churches in England were sort of taken over at that point. And it was sidelined, really, Catholicism in England. So one of the reasons that the cure even started was, you know, I met Robert at school, but I didn't go to school in the town I grew up in because I had to go to the next town because there wasn't a Catholic school in the town I grew up in. So, you know, I kind of knew Robert because he used to live next door to my grandmother at first, but then him and his dad and his family moved like one town on.

31:29So we went to the same school and that's how, you know, we started everything. But, you know, I think, like I say in Goth, not only did I feel an outsider because of the things I was thinking about and the way, you know, I think most teens feel a little outside of stuff. It was exacerbated by the fact that I was already an outsider to most English people, you know, because I didn't go to Church of England in the town, you know. So in summer vacation from school, when I was 14, I didn't know any of the kids in my town because I didn't go to school with them. And I wasn't old enough to drive and I wasn't old enough to really take public transport myself and get around and stuff.

32:14And it was too far to ride on my bicycle. So I'm stuck in my town for the whole summer with nobody. the library was my friend because in england back then you had you got one ticket for the library and you could take three things out on that ticket well i had somehow i finagled three tickets so i got nine items every week you know and i would get like a bunch of books and they also did records you know records so i got records and i listened to every i didn't care what record it was i just take the next three records the next three records and i just listened to everything that summer while reading.

32:52So summer vacation in English schools at the time was nearly three months. It was like, that's really what started me on the whole road to everything because I had this intensive, self-imposed course because I had nothing else to do. I remember you talking about in Cured that early on you and Robert bonded over a Jimi Hendrix record that you had both heard. so was he the first person that you were really able to talk about music to yeah absolutely i mean you know the good thing like uh middle school which i think in england was like from 11 to 13 right so it was a little experimental instead of instead of keeping like you know go to one class and then the bell rings and you go to the next class they had to think okay you were you know certain guys certain pupils if you were at the top end of the class or whatever you could go and do your own project in the library, which would be, you know, sort of compilation of history, geography, English, and, of course, religion, because it's a Catholic school.

33:58So draw all those things together. We did a project. So me and Robert were in that and a few other people. I think Michael Dempsey was in it as well. And, you know, we'd sit in the library and we'd do our work, but we'd also talk about stuff. And he was the first person I knew, other than myself, myself that had heard that record so so i'm like oh you like hendrix right so yeah so we we sort of bonded over that you know and then then i was like getting you know going backwards and forwards swapping records backwards and forwards and just ideas from that so that's that's really how that's how most bands start i mean i talked to a friend of mine james murphy from lcd sound system and he said to me when you start playing music you try to make songs like the people you like you know like you like them you try to make a song like that and the way you get it wrong because you always get it wrong because you don't have the same technique or the same influences or even the same understanding of how to play it the way you get it wrong is what becomes your sound you know that's kind of how the cure started we we would do songs that were like in the beginning we did these like triptych songs which were like 10 minutes long three different sort of you know intervals of stuff uh and they were like really bad versions of stuff that we listened to there was some like psychedelic stuff in there and then bands like the buzzcocks came along there was some stuff that was a bit more a bit simpler and things but there was all kinds of things that we we sort of threw in and that's really what influenced us and and we would write these songs and then i think the change came when we thought about doing something like boys don't cry we're like well we can't do these 10 minute epics anymore we're gonna do like try and write a three minute pop song you know and and that's where it all came from but obviously the basis of that is informed from the earlier stuff and i think some of that stuff made it onto uh i think we did a compilation join the dots or something i think some of that's on there like like rough form you know and they're quite embarrassing really listening to them now yeah there's sort of like i think winter i think that's on there we did a whole season section as well you know so here's an interesting story at one point you know it's a small town on the outskirts of the big city crawley yeah so you know it's like being in los angeles and living in the valley there was only one other band in town which was fronted by Neil Gaiman the writer right and I remember you know he would have costume changes like playing in the pub and he would have costume changes and things which was very you know exotic for the time I read something recently where he said you know I decided to become a writer instead because you know the only other band in our town was The Cure you know so we just stopped you know but he obviously went on to do something really really good you know but um yeah wonderful you know and he found his own creative force but the whole thing about it was was that um you know you take that stuff and it becomes your own right your own sound you know and then you know for us especially because we weren't in london we were able to sort of mature on our own without too many outside things coming in.

37:20Yeah. I was watching when The Cure was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Trent Reznor said that your style is instantly recognizable and it's very sonically distinct. And I just wonder, like you're saying that you try other things and then you settle on a sound and it just sort of comes to be. But it's really incredible if you think about it. yeah I I have two ideas about that you know when we were doing us to do the Hall of Fame at first you know Robert wasn't too keen about it he was like wow was you know what is it what is it you know how does it work is it some kind of you know it doesn't seem like it would be appropriate and I said no you're wrong I said because I've lived here by that time I'd lived here a quarter of a century and i said you know all the you know the goth kids that lived in a little town in the middle of nowhere i said they would love it for us to be on there i said because it would be vacation for them you know they would go okay look see i was i was i was right about them they you know did something good and eventually i sort of won him over and we did it and it worked but the best thing for me was you know they said well who would you like to induct you and we were thinking about ask Trent because he comes from that line and we understand it and so he said yeah and when he got up there he said the first thing he said was I grew up in small town USA, Mercer, Pennsylvania looking out over cornfields and this music coming through college radio was the way I escaped and I looked at Robert and I was like yeah see look that's exactly what I'm talking about and so that's why when I got up on stage gave a big hug you know because uh it's like that's that's the truth you know even today you know I spent 40 years going around America I can walk into any small town in the states and I can spot the five or six kids who are going to be goth straight away you know like if I walk into the cafe or something I go yeah then what do you see what do you what do you see and what do you sense it's it's a way of being and you know they're usually reading a book or something so you know they're not looking at their phones all the time you know i can see them they don't have to you know they don't have to look goth and that's why it pains to explain that in the book goth's not just you know the way you look and the way your hair is and it always amuses me as well if i'm passing through those places something and i do see some real goths you know that look i've got like now they've got the whole you know kit and caboodle as they say they put everything and they've got the uniform and if I walk past them and they don't recognize me that always gives me a little chuckle you know because I myself you don't know but you know here's where it came from and and and so you know which is a nice thing for me but um yeah the thing for the cure sound like a few years ago I was looking at like when google earth came out and you could go and you know walk around every street so I'm sure I did what a lot of people did I went and walked around where I grew up, you know.

40:31And that amazed me as well. Yeah, I called Rob up and said, or wrote to him or something. I said, you know, it is no surprise to me at all now, you know, 40 years later looking at this stuff, the reason we sounded the way we did, because it's all there in the dark, dank countryside, in the streets of the town we grew up in. It's there. Yeah, you described the slate gray skies. And I was going to ask you, what environmental factors, how does that seep into the music or what influence does that have on a sound on a band sound i think that always makes things very uh soft focus i had my recent trip to london for for goth i i got off the plane and they had a car to pick me up take me into town which was about you know an hour's drive and we're driving through the streets and it's like, it's really gray.

41:25It's about five in the afternoon, really gray. And it starts to rain. And it's that sort of London rain that goes sideways and stuff, you know, and I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, this is where it comes from. In both of the books, you talked about how you and Robert's home lives were so very different. And he came up in a happy well-to-do home with very supportive parents who let the band practice early on. And your house was completely different. It was more disjointed. It was glum. Your dad was emotionally vacant. And you said that a lot of Robert's writing you thought was a combination of everyone in the bands, the early bands experiences.