Parties Room with Roger O'Donnell

In 1996, a simple, even so surprising thing, happened. The Cure frontman, Robert Smith, he smiled.
Why surprising, do you ask? It was Smith, as attest the books of history, which had an important function in the gloom rock of the eighties. Now, more than a last decade, Smith is, in fact, showing his teeth in the last band advertising photos.
Perhaps he is smiling because the keyboarder Roger O'Donnell, that left the band in 1990, came back to the group. "I leave under difficult circumstances", O'Donnell says. "I had decided that wanted to give a time of the trips and of being in a group. Really, he wanted to try to do something own, to do a little change. Then I just made an solo album with keyboards. But, after some time, my fingers began to scratch for touring and to be again in a band, I sent my solo album to Robert and said: "If you need some help in the album call me". And after three months it was what he did".
The initial plan was that O'Donnell flew from Toronto to England and played piano in three or four music, but after one or two days of work he decided to stay. "I said: It is that. I will not leaving. I came back to stay" (laughs).
The Cure new eclectic work, adequately entitled Wild Mood Swings, was not recorded in a studio of commercial recording, but in a solar one. "With the coming of ADAT and cheap tables of good quality, the bands have the opportunity to place together all their setups of home studio", O'Donnell says. "That was what Robert decided to do. He bought five ADATs and a great table Amek, and searched for a place to set up them. He made contact with an furnishings agency and it offered the actress Jane Seymour's house, what was very funny. The house had been built by Henrique VIII for Jane Seymour, in one century that I don't really know. It was very entertaining. We used the library as a control room and the parties room as a live room".
Stopped at the library, O'Donnell recorded his parts of keyboards directly in the Steinberg's Cubase." That was The Cure's first one. When I leave the group, there was not any computer to the view, except mine. When I came back, there was Macs for everywhere!". Roger's main controller for the sessions was a Kurzweil PCBB, with E-mu EIV and Proteus modules in the receiver out.
Now that The Cure is on tour, the O'Donnell equipment includes a Roland XP-50, a BIV totally loaded, an interface MOTU MIDI, a mixer Yamaha ProMix and "a small effects Zoom box, that I am using for distorted organ sounds".
(Greg Rule - April/96)