Simon Gallup has returned to The Cure after a brief intermission

Simon Gallup onstage — (Image credit: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

Bassist Simon Gallup is back with The Cure. The news comes just two months after he announced his departure from the band.

Gallup confirmed his status on the Facebook page of Alice Blue Gown, his new side project. Asked by a fan if he was still a member of The Cure, Gallup simply replied, "Yes I am."

Gallup originally announced he'd left The Cure in August, in a now-deleted Facebook post. "With a slightly heavy heart I am no longer a member of the Cure! Good luck to them all...", he said, before going on to comment, "I'm ok... just got fed up of betrayal."

Gallup first joined The Cure in 1979, and played on the three so-called "Dark Trilogy" albums - Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography - before departing in 1982 after falling out with band founder/frontman Robert Smith.

He rejoined The Cure just two years later and has remained with the band ever since, apart from two brief periods of absence through illness: on 1992's Wish tour former Associates member Roberto Soave filled in while Gallup was suffering from pleurisy, and in 2019 Eden Gallup stepped in when his father fell ill before a show at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan.

The Cure haven't released a studio album since 2008's 4:13 Dream, although band Robert Smith told Apple Music DJ Zane Lowe in June that the band two albums almost ready to go.

"Probably in about six weeks time I'll be able to say when everything's coming out and what we're doing next year and everything," said Smith. "So we were doing two albums and one of them's very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn't. And they're both very close to being done. I just have to decide who's going to mix them. That's really all I've got left to do."

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.