After four decades in The Cure, bassist Simon Gallup has announced his departure from the group. Gallup took to social media to break the news, writing on Facebook, “With a slightly heavy heart, I am no longer a member of the Cure! Good luck to them all…”
It sounds as though there may be some bad blood between the bassist and his former bandmates. When someone in the comments section of his Facebook post asked if his reason for leaving was health-related, Gallup replied, “I’m ok…just got fed up of betrayal.”
Besides frontman Robert Smith, Gallup was the longest-serving original member of The Cure, having joined the group in 1979. He left briefly in 1982 after a disagreement with Smith but rejoined in 1984, and he stayed with the band ever since, save for a brief health-related hiatus in 1992. Smith has yet to comment publicly on the bassist’s departure, but the group’s keyboardist Roger O’Donnell tweeted about it with a reference to former Cure drummer/keyboardist Lol Tolhurst, writing, “A friend just told me they saw Lol in the Guitar Centre buying a bass???????”
Back in 2019, Smith addressed his relationship with Gallup in an interview with the NME. “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,” he said.
“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,” he continued. “When you have friends like that, particularly for that long, it would take something really extraordinary for that friendship to break.”
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