Robert on 'The Top'....

"All these songs on 'the top' album were written whilst taking enormous amounts of drugs. So the sense is somewhat strange...
"The Top" album is, looking back, about the most difficult to talk/write about - a lot of it is me working things out of myself that were very unpleasant and old...
The "modus operandi" would generally be getting up at 6pm, going downstairs to the bar (we stayed in a village pub)!, getting very out of it, going to the studio, getting even more out of it, recording, falling over and crawling back down the hill to sleep about 10am.
This, not surprisingly, leaves me with few lucid reasons or explanations about this particular record. But it was a lot of fun! well...some of it..." (Cure News 10 - December 1990)

"You know how there's the sound of a spinning top on that album? Well, I spent over twelve hours trying to get the right sound! Dave Allen took the rough with the smooth, and spent ages waiting because there was the possibility that I might come up with a good song. I did this sat on a studio floor surrounded by toys and instruments, thinking, what shall I play next? then Dave would come down and go, "are we going to do something this evening?" I would say, yes...and could somebody turn on the lights because I'm dying to go for a piss!" (Cure News 20 - January 1999)

"Just as all authors make at least one bad book, all bands make a bad album. Our bad album has to be the Top" (Gaffa (Danish music magazine Feb.2000)

Is it true that The Top was recorded at the wrong speed?
"What the track itself or the whole album? I probably would have guessed if it was the album. But the track itself, no, not as far as I'm aware". (Simon Mayo Show, BBC 5, September 2004)