Sounds great huh? There was one small problem. Caroline (Crawley) and Jem (Tayle) had only played about six shows up until this point. These consisted of fronting small string sections at art openings in London or headlining as an acoustic duo at Music Biz showcases at Dingwalls (a north london pub). Not a great deal of experience as gigging musicians would be one way to put it.

So they fly out to the first show, a soccer stadium in Barcelona, only 70,000 seats. This would be the first time they would be playing with a rock band behind them as well. Well, oddly, disaster struck. Caroline and to a lesser extent Jem were too panicked to play. The promoter took the usual route, threats, pleading, offers of various chemical helpers. In the end the solution was to call in a Catalan mind doctor. He proceeded to hypnotize Caroline and Jem and tell them that they were stars and were going to strut their stuff. And that is exactly what they did. It escalated to the point of almost being a parody of a rock show. It was like AC/DC meets Hendrix meets Fishbone. Not what one would expect from the opening act at a Cure show.

Touring with a large rock tour is a very strange and altering experience. It is a self contained society and all of the rules of the outside rule no longer apply. Anything that you want appears as if by magic. Everyone in the crew and the staffs of the venues goes out of their way. Each band on a tour has a "hospitality rider" which details the bands requested (demanded) needs and wants backstage.

Over the past forty years the tradition has developed for bands to put something on the rider that is outrageous. A band I represented for ten years, Miracle Legion, used to ask for an Islamic Priest. Eight cases of Tequila, silk towels, midgets, long extinct candy bars, dancing girls, encyclopedias (in latin) all have made appearances on riders I've faxed to annoyed promoters. On the whole most of these absurd requests are ignored with a nod and a wink.

As the shows grow bigger the promoters start to go out of their way to provide outlandish items as a way to impress the big stars. On The Cure tour the band demanded an eight course meal for six to be served on high priced china with silver settings. The promoters responded by providing a ten course meal for twelve with silver candelabras , roasted turkeys, mountains of shellfish, cases of early fifties champagne. it was all presented in a large room built of black silk curtains standing by itself in the center of the No Go zone that surrounded the band. Of course, the band never even saw the meal. Being major rock stars they eat out in exclusive restaurants or ordered in room service in the exclusive hotels were they stayed. Each night the whole meal would end up in the dumpster. The only exception to this was the occasional apple that Boris Williams (the Cure's drummer) would pocket on his way to the stage. God you gotta love the rock world. The wholesale waste of food by Musicians that usually sober up enough once a season to spout off at a press conference about world poverty. (by the way the U2 tours were legendary in their excesses)

This surreal alternative dimension breeds madness. It's said that the three week mark on a tour is the time when madness starts to set in. On the Cure tour it started much earlier and was wildly out of control by one month in.

The 1990 prayer tour was the last hurrah for the band that everyone of the 80's knew as The Cure. When the dust cleared (how's that for an easy cliche) Shelleyan Orphan was broken up, the members of the Cure, that is the backing band without Mr Smith, had left the comforting home of Rock Stardom and someone, I'm not sure whom, had booked some time at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios.

In the end a name was picked, Babacar. Now almost ten years on, Robert Smith is once again touring with god knows who, and babacar is now just the only solo record by the members of the Cure and Shelleyan Orphan. Caroline and Jem live in West England as do the other members of Babacar. They all continue on with music and life (I think there is a baby or two). And this record remains as a unique and powerful snapshot.