How did it all begin? I mean really begin?
I came into this world the day the music died. I was born on February 3, 1959, the day Buddy Holly’s plane crashed in a tangled metal heap in a cold, snowy field in South Dakota. The music had died in Horley, the town where I was born, long before that. Horley is a forgotten outpost in the urban hinterland of south London that has struggled for its identity against the capital to the north and the burgeoning new town of Crawley to the immediate south, schizophrenically being neither town nor country.
My early years were filled with that bland grayness so drearily familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to grow up in England in the 1960s and 1970s. Iron-gray skies and unrelenting rain were the backdrops to the postwar austerity that had infiltrated the British psyche. My daily routine as a small boy revolved around three things: family, school, and church. Especially church.
My mother, a devout Catholic convert, had recently made the acquaintance of a new Catholic family who had just moved to our town. In fact they lived a couple of doors down from my grandmother on Vicarage Lane. The Smiths hailed from the even grimmer and grayer north of England and had several children. Richard and Margaret were around the same age as my brothers, but their youngest son, Robert, was the same age as me.
The only Catholic primary school in our region was in Crawley, five miles to the south. In the late 1950s, hastily built housing estates were thrown together in small forgotten villages on the edge of the capital. They were the government’s attempt to relocate families from London’s bombed-out city center after the Second World War. They were drab and utilitarian and were only slightly less dreary than the tower blocks of Eastern Europe. An eccentric combination of estate housing with clumps of genteel country living. Very proper and very English.
On a damp September morning in 1964, my mother threw Robert Smith and me together. A bus had been arranged to take children from the outlying areas to St. Francis of Assisi School in Crawley. On our first day of school, Robert and I stood at the designated stop at Hevers Avenue with our mothers, and that’s when we met for the very first time. We were five years old.
Up until then my world was microscopically small and insular. I was a late baby, born when my parents were both in their forties. They should have been taking it easy, not raising a baby, especially since they had already raised three other children who had left home. Strangely, my parents didn’t have any pictures of my siblings in the house. The only indication that other children had once lived there was a cupboard in the kitchen in which my mother kept an endless supply of well-worn shoes, which I had to wear as I grew into them.
I think my older siblings left the house to get away from our father. William George Edward Tolhurst joined the navy at a young age and found himself on the Yangtze River in China as an engineer on a British naval gunboat when he was only eighteen years old. My father arrived around the time of the Rape of Nanking and saw severed heads and other body parts floating down the river. By all accounts, he returned from the Second World War a changed man. He did the only logically English thing he could do to block out the horrid memories: he drank. A lot. He wasn’t an easy person to be around. He was either a virtual recluse who barely spoke to me, or an angry alcoholic who was prone to loud bouts of shouting.
Although my father was a difficult man to know or understand, much less love, he passed down the musical genes in the family. When he was in his cups he would pound out drunken sea shanties on the upright piano in our living room in a way that would make Tom Waits jealous. He was a gruff man who was full of dark secrets and wild emotions that he kept under lock and key, but when he played the piano, a little bit of light from that locked room slipped underneath the door. I like to think that light is in me, too.
My father and I didn’t have any common ground. A knack for music was his only gift to me. He didn’t know me and I didn’t want to be around him. We were bound by blood and obligation, but I had no way of breaking through to him, and he was too caught up in his own silent world.
It wasn’t just that England in the 1970s was austere; my whole life was bleak, especially around my dad.
Something in the Second World War had beaten any ambition out of my father. I remember finding his naval journal in the back of a dark cupboard one rainy afternoon when I was home sick from school. I read it avidly, as it was full of exciting things he had seen and places he had been. This clashed tremendously with the version of the man I knew as my father. To be honest, I hardly felt I had a father at all.
He seldom shared anything with us except his small house and bad moods. He never took us anywhere. In fact, I can only ever recall one family holiday.
I was about eight or nine, I think. We were staying in a small wooden hut on a forgotten beach on Hayling Island on the south coast of England. I have a gossamer-thin remembrance, of tarpaper mixed with the acrid smell of a chemical toilet. It was like a smuggler’s hideaway on the shore. Looking at the walls, you would see small, translucent cracks between the boards, hastily papered over with felt.
My mother was there, seemingly more or less worn out, as was my Aunty Molly in her flowery summery dress, and my grandmother, known as “Nanny” to me.
This hardly ever happened. My relatives were never in the same room together if they could help it. Weddings or funerals were about it. No elaborate family get-togethers for the Tolhursts. They could stand to be together on a one-to-one basis. Only then could they be civil to each other. We were not like other families. I remember, as I got older and started to hang out more at my friends’ houses, being baffled by the levity and love between the parents to their children, and not just on special occasions but during the course of daily life.
The Smiths were like that. Whenever I went to their house, Robert’s father, Alex, always seemed to be joking and laughing. To be sure, there were some more intense moments like the ones I was used to. I recall Robert getting a clip around the ear from Smith Senior for swearing in his mother’s presence. But these occurrences were few and far between, not a daily tribulation like in my house.
The main difference, of course, was my dad. Father was never included in family life because his temperament meant he would probably upset someone or something. Depending which way the drink had sent his psyche that day, he could be either garrulous or grotesque. This was something most of the family wanted to avoid, so they instinctively limited their contact with “Sailor Bill” (as his drinking buddies at the Chequers pub knew him).
The hut was painted eggshell white and it blended into near invisibility with the wash of gray-blue sky that passed for summer in England. The white noise of the sea and shingle being perpetually sucked up and down along the coast was pierced only by the occasional shriek of a seagull.
The striking thing to me, when I recall this scenario now, is that it’s like a dream of a favorite painting or photo. The scenery is there but somehow the people are missing from the image, like someone stole them from the foreground and only the background remains. I cannot recall any of my brothers or older siblings; to be sure, my little baby sister was there, but she’s an almost ghostly shadow of something not real. I hear in my mind the sounds of my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother talking. Family stuff mostly, but occasionally I felt the unmistakable sympathy of a mother’s love enter the conversation.
My mother, Daphne, unbeknownst to me, was working up to full-blown lung cancer, but in those days her slightly breathless whisper of a voice was the one solace in my young life.
“Laurence, don’t go far, and please mind the tar on the beach. Don’t get it on your nice new summer clothes now!”
“Okay, Mum! Don’t worry, I’ll be really, really careful,” I said with that mixture of childish irritation and loving awe I reserved for Mother.
As I got older she would become more three-dimensional, but during that summer at Hayling Island my love was unequivocal.
I don’t recall any laughter during our holiday, just the forms of the women moving about the cramped hut. I don’t remember where I slept or how it looked through the windows. I barely remember my father being there at all.
If he was, which I doubt, he probably didn’t talk to me much. I can’t recall a single walk along the sand with him or even a kick-about game of football on the beach. No loving connections between father and son to bond over.
I don’t remember any other children playing on the windswept shore, just me scuffing along the pebbled beach in my brown summer sandals with the white crepe soles, short white socks, navy-blue cotton shorts, and a blue-and-white striped flannel T-shirt.
With my ever-present magnifying glass in hand, a present for being in my cousin’s wedding party, I looked at anything I found on the beach, trying to discern what was under the surface of it all. Even in this empty world, I still had a child’s natural curiosity. I was excited about things in the way only a small boy can be. I’m sure I found a piece of driftwood or two and imagined they were swords or telescopes that could be used to scout and defend the seashore. After clearing out the old beer bottles, rusted tin cans, and clothes left behind by tramps, I took over the old decaying Second World War hexagonal pillbox guard post by the golf course as a fort. From there I’d keep watch over the shore and look out across the beach to the gray sea and try to figure out what was missing.
When I walked along the beach, grains of sand would sting my face as the wind came up off Selsey Bill or Portsea Island to the other side. I’m sure I imagined that there were pirate treasures to be had if only I had a map—an adventure I might share with another boy if he had been there—but these things never appeared. No canvas piece torn from a sail with an “x” to mark the spot. No escapade to be had. I yearned for excitement, but as our holiday drew to a close, I realized that if it was an adventure I was after, I would have to seek it out on my own.
Almost by design then, I was a lonely boy.
When I was seven or eight, Robert’s family moved to Crawley, where his father, Alex, had taken a job as head of Upjohn Pharmaceutical. That meant I now took the bus from Horley to Crawley alone. I didn’t really know the local kids in Horley and seldom saw my friends from Crawley outside of school. Robert and I did not have much contact besides the occasional birthday party. The long days of school holidays were the worst. My mother brought books into the house, and they were my closest companions until I was old enough to venture to the local library on my own.
In the summer of 1970, I obtained the keys to unlock the prison of my perpetual boredom. The library allowed members to check out books and records. Soon I was taking home as many as nine LPs a week. I spent the summer listening to blues, folk music, anything I could get my hands on. My curiosity had been sparked, and when I exhausted the library’s collection I went on forays to Horley’s only shopping street, where, for some bizarre reason, the local tobacconist kept a bargain bin of records for ten shillings apiece.
The Fugs’ It Crawled into My Hand, Honest, was my first selection. Songs with titles like “Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel” and “We’re Both Dead Now, Alice,” spoke to my preadolescent imagination. I hurried home, clutching the record in its brown paper bag like some kind of contraband. I loved The Fugs and the anarchic spirit of those proto-punk songs inspired me to seek out more American artists, like Steppenwolf and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Nearly fifty years later, I can still remember every lyric on every track on Axis: Bold as Love.
That autumn I went to a new school, an experimental Catholic middle school called Notre Dame that had been started by a social reformer named Lord Longford. The kids from all the Catholic primary schools in the area ended up at Notre Dame, and I struck up a friendship with a boy named Michael Dempsey. By now my hair was nearly as long as that of my rock-and-roll heroes, and Michael figured that anyone with hair as long as mine must be okay. My freak flag was flying and we connected over our love of music.
Notre Dame was everything St. Francis was not: liberal and forward thinking. The pupils were given more freedom, and lessons were presented in a radically different manner. Subjects were bundled together as “integrated studies,” and instead of teachers lecturing in front of a blackboard, we worked together in groups on various projects. We were given an extraordinary amount of freedom, and students who showed extra promise were permitted to work on their own. I usually found myself in the library with Michael and Robert. It’s true: we were all excellent students.
One day Robert cornered me in the library and whispered, “You like Jimi Hendrix?”
“Hendrix? I love Jimi Hendrix! I’ve got a huge poster of him on my wall!” I told him that I was also a member of his UK fan club.
Robert’s eyes sparkled with recognition. “Me too!”
“You know, I bet nobody else in the school has even heard of him!” I said.
“Well, my older brother has some Hendrix stuff. Are You Experienced? is bloody great, actually!” Robert enthused.
“Yeah? I bought Axis: Bold as Love for a pound in Radio Rentals!” And with that our bond was reignited.
During lunch, we were allowed to use the art room to play records on the old turntable there and I became the unofficial DJ. I played LPs that people brought to school, but of course I had my favorites. My old friend Robert and new pal Michael were usually there to listen and offer their choices for me to play. Pretty soon it transpired that not only did Robert and Michael listen to cool music, they were trying to learn how to play it, too. Once a week they were allowed to go into the music room and use the instruments. They also had a stereo system, and Robert would plug in his electric guitar
and play through the speakers.
“Do you play anything, Lol?” said Robert.
“Yes,” I lied. “The drums?”
“So maybe you want to join us the next time Michael and I get to use the music room?” Robert asked. “I think they have a drum kit there. Pretty certain I saw it in the back of a cupboard last time we were there.”
“Um, okay, all right. I’ll be there!”
I rushed to the library that day and checked out Buddy Rich’s book of snare drum rudiments. Back at home in my bedroom I pulled out the drumsticks my elder brother had left me before emigrating to Australia. I read the book and banged away on my pillow. The next day we returned to the music room together, where I dug out the old drum kit they had at the school. It was a start.
When people ask me when The Cure began, I often point to that day in 1972 at Notre Dame when Robert, Michael, and I jammed for the first time—the very same line-up that recorded our first single, “Killing an Arab.” In fact, the cymbal I used on that song was stolen from the old school kit!
But in my mind The Cure began much earlier than that, on a gloomy rainy day in 1964 with the mists swirling all around. It began the moment the school bus pulled up to the stop at the top of Hevers Avenue and the doors swung open with a hiss. Neither Robert nor I wanted to get on that bus. We didn’t want to leave our mums and go to a strange school in another town where we wouldn’t know a soul. I probably would have started crying if Robert hadn’t been there. I can hear my mother’s voice even now, gently urging me along. “Hold Robert’s hand now and look after each other.”
Robert took me by the hand and led me onto the bus. It was the first of many journeys together. If only in my imagination, we are still those boys.