I then really started to embrace rock and roll, so the sex and drugs part started to factor into the equation pretty quickly.
Like most teenage boys, I hadn’t really been aware of girls until I put together the basic facts and biological imperatives. While at Notre Dame I had had a bit of a disagreement with a young Italian chap who decided to take a well-aimed kick at my midriff, which ended with me spending a few days in the hospital having a hernia stitched up. The teen ward was a veritable gold mine of information about what happened when boys and girls “did it.” Of course, I would find out later that pretty much all of it was completely erroneous.
It didn’t take long to walk from my house into Horley High Street proper, where I received much of my rock-and-roll education. I used to go to see what records the tobacconist had in his bargain bin that week, or listen to what was available at the library.
Horley High Street combined family-owned businesses like Bunkell’s the butchers with national chains like Boots the chemist and Woolworths, where Michael and I both worked during our teen years. An old haberdashery stood alongside Collingwood’s department store opposite Radio Rentals. This was where Simon Gallup’s brother Ric worked in the little record department at the back of the shop, which was a treasure trove for us.
This comprised our territory for quite a few years, and we knew all the hidden little paths and vantage points. We could cross town virtually invisible to any adult who might know our parents and report on our whereabouts.
The old single-screen cinema had yet to be converted to a nightclub, and so occasional visits were arranged—Saturday-morning pictures with a B movie before the main feature, and a two-level balcony where you could smoke if you wanted, which we did.
There was one building in Horley with mock Gothic red brick and flat white stone arches that hinted at a semblance of sanctity. However, within lay a rather different type of ecstatic experience than the founders of Horley Methodist Church first envisaged. I forget who it was that imparted the vital piece of information to us about what went on inside the church hall on Saturday nights, but whoever it was set the scene for our future adult lives without even being aware of it.
And so it was that one spring evening Michael, Robert, and I lined up around the edges of the carefully trimmed rose beds that surrounded the Methodist church hall. The water pooling in drops on the dark green leaves of the rosebushes from a late afternoon shower reflected our youthful faces spoon-like in the fading daylight. Above the door at the side of the hall was the glow of a single light bulb illuminating the entrance. Unbeknown to us, herein lay the pathway to teen nirvana.
At fifteen we had already started to change our attire to distinguish ourselves from our fellow teens. In fact, way before we became famous for our all-black attire, we wore all white! Both Michael and I had white hipster flares called “loons,” with matching white shirts. We topped off the effect of all this plain white with scuffed white plimsolls, giving us a less angelic look. Robert had on similar trousers, perhaps the darker ones with ties around the bottom, which his mother had attached for him at his request. (He had a pair of white high-waisted jeans that he also liked.) It certainly made us look different. Over this, Robert wore a long fur coat and a long scarf around his neck. We looked like a strange cult, with Michael and myself as white-robed acolytes to our floppy fringed, fur coat–wearing leader.
We did indeed behave like a cult, as we had our own language and way of being that excluded outsiders. There were other members of our clan, including early Malice guitarist Marc Ceccagno, but the trio of myself, Robert, and Michael was the nucleus.
Inside, things were heating up. Around the edge of the hall sat girls: strange creatures that we had never really considered before, but now felt inextricably drawn to. They fascinated us in a way we couldn’t explain, making us uncomfortable in a way that we really quite liked.
Boys clumped together in small groups at the side, as if there were some kind of bottomless pit that we had to avoid in the middle of the room, with a swirling vortex that might drag us down into the bowels of hell if we crossed the center. We weren’t going to go over there and talk to the girls just yet, but we wanted to. The music became the lingua franca, a bridge to the interaction we secretly sought.
T. Rex, The Sweet, and Slade were the flavor of the times, and the Methodists had thoughtfully supplied a couple of decks to play such songs at a reasonable and respectful volume. If you brought a record along, they had one of the older boys play it on the turntable. If it was the sad, slow song of the time, Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun,” you might ask a girl to dance. Or maybe not, if either one of you thought that was perhaps a little too forward!
It was dark in the recesses of the room and that meant you might be able to sneak a kiss, or maybe more, from one of the more forward girls. The room filled with the smell of teen lust and cheap perfume intoxicating us all, and like bees to the honeypot, we were drawn. The lights suddenly went on in the wooden hall. Our blinking eyes tried to focus and squinted at the minister in the middle of the room.
“Ah, boys and girls, now we come to the best part of the evening . . . prayer time!”
We were agog—prayers? After the minister had chanted a few sentences, and we had mumbled in reply the call and response, thankfully the lights dimmed and we went back to our furtive fumbling at the room’s periphery.
Out in the church car park, more discoveries awaited.
“I’ve got a bottle of Dad’s home brew,” Robert said. He produced a screw-top glass bottle from inside his voluminous fur coat and we scooted around the corner at the back of the youth club to look at the brown fermented liquid.
“What’s it taste like?” I asked.
“Bloody brilliant,” said Robert with a big grin, before offering me a slug. I knocked some back and it hit me again, that wonderful feeling I had first experienced at my brother’s house. I still liked it.
We decided to walk down the street toward the town center. After the shops had shut, this was really a ghost town. There were a couple of restaurants: one Indian and one Chinese takeaway. Many years later I wondered how the proprietors of these places avoided jail time, having dealt with the drunken youth of Horley after the pubs had shut. Their patience must have been extremely tested.
The soft glow from the cinema beckoned in the distance, the light filtering through the twin distorters of alcohol and a steady drizzle that was coming down. We stumbled up to the front of the cinema and saw the night’s offering. We decided against going in and turned back to the youth club. It was just finishing up, and outside a gaggle of boys and girls (as well as a few parents) warily eyed Robert, Michael, and me as we swayed a little in front of the door. In the distance, I heard 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” for the first time and my heart broke. Robert had already met Mary Poole, the great love of his life, but for me love’s path was to be far more torturous.
Her name was Sarah and we met at the Methodist.
I had noticed her one Saturday night, with her long hair and petite figure, and got talking to her. She lived about three miles from me in the countryside with her mother, stepfather, and younger brother.
She went to school in Horley with Simon Gallup, a kid I vaguely knew around town. Years later Simon told me that once Sarah and I started going out she had embellished my reputation as a hard man at his school, so much so that when he saw me in town he would cross over to the other side of the street! I’m surprised I didn’t get in more fights after that.
We had been going out a few weeks when her parents saw me with her outside the Methodist when they came to pick her up one Saturday. They then decided, based solely on my appearance, that I was obviously not the right sort to be squiring their young daughter about. They had also seen the company I kept—that strange boy with the long fur coat and his friend with the motorbike and long hair. We were obviously bad news.
I called her the next day at her house. Her stepfather picked up the phone, and when I identified myself, he warned me in no uncertain terms to stay away from her. I realized it was going to be tough seeing her again. It didn’t stop us, of course. Teen love is never thwarted for long.
Michael had a small motorbike, a Fantic Caballero, a strange Italian moped that looked quite a bit mightier than its 50cc engine would have led you to expect. No matter. It would suffice.
We concocted a daring plan: Michael would take me to Sarah’s house in the nearby countryside and under cover of darkness he would drop me off. I would hide in the bushes until a suitable moment arose, then I would sneak up to her bedroom window on the ground floor and make my presence known by tapping gently on the window, at which point she would leave her parents’ house and we would be united in love.
Of course, as in the best-laid plans of mice and men, it didn’t turn out to be quite as straightforward as that.
The first time Michael dropped me off, her mother appeared silhouetted against the front door of the house as the light from the hallway shone out across the vast front lawn. Beside her, a large German shepherd sniffed the air suspiciously in my direction. It was enough for me to postpone my amorous adventure that night.
A couple of days later Michael dropped me off at Sarah’s home again, and this time I figured the coast was clear, as the house was in darkness. I slid on my belly on the grass across the lawn up to the window frame and furtively tapped on the leaded window. No Sarah, no sounds, nothing. A couple of minutes later I tried again, and this time I was a little more insistent, but still no answer.
In the pale moonlight illuminating this midnight scene, I saw the solution. The top window of the bathroom was open a little, and there was a flat roof directly below that. I would vault onto the roof and crawl through the window, then once in the bathroom I could find my way down to my beloved’s room. Perfect!
It was only once I was halfway through the small bathroom window that it occurred to me that several unpleasant things might happen now: her dad, or worse, the large German shepherd, could intercept me. Neither seemed a particularly wonderful way to end the day.
Somehow, I managed to make it through the small aperture and into the bathroom with one leg in the toilet bowl and the other on the pale pink furry bath rug. Pulling my foot from the bowl, I shook the drops of water off. In the dark, I could just about make out the door to the landing. I tiptoed out and started gingerly down the stairs. The moonlight filtered in through the windows, casting a ghastly shadow of my creeping form on the wall.
Once at the bottom of the stairs I froze. The large black dog was right in front of me. I braced myself for the inevitable biting and howling, but nothing happened. I glanced down at the large black form and noticed its tail wagging. Thank God for that! I patted it on the head and carried on, now accompanied by my canine companion. I pushed open Sarah’s door and walked inside. I shook her gently awake, and she gasped when she saw me at her bedside.
“What are you doing here, Lol?”
“I thought I’d come see you for a stroll in the moonlight!” I said, trying to cloak my burglary with amorous bravado.
“Okay, sure. Why not?” I was gratified to see she was smiling now. She was game for an adventure, it seemed.
Sarah got up and dressed quickly, and we let ourselves out via her bedroom window. We wafted along in the yellow moonlight across the large lawn at the front of the house and into the muddy country lane at the bottom. We walked across a couple of fields and into the woods until we reached our destination: the pillbox on the edge of the woods. Once inside we were shielded from the elements. It was a little too far off the beaten track to be noticeable from the road. It had not been infiltrated, and there were no signs of creatures or other midnight revelers.
And so it was on a cool October night, in a pillbox on a bed of autumn leaves, that Sarah and I finally did what all young people in love eventually do. In case you were wondering, that’s where the “Pillbox Tales” song title originated as well.
Although the Rocket in Crawley was the pub where the seeds that became The Cure were planted, there was another pub that we used to hang out in before that: the Cambridge in Horley.
The Cambridge epitomized the teenage rebellion of the late 1970s more than anything in our heads. I still look at it as the place where I came of age.
We graduated from the Methodist church youth club once we started seriously thinking about drinking, music, and girls. Sex and drugs and rock and roll were better suited to pubs than dances at the church. The pub was little more than an annex to a rather seedy-looking hotel on the outskirts of Horley town, but it was the place where I started to discover the darker, secret side of the world.
Inside, the Cambridge bore a resemblance to one of those terrible Spanish/British bars on the Costa Brava: all horse brasses and stuffed donkeys with sombreros. Tasteless doesn’t begin to describe it, but most importantly, no adult would dare go there, especially none of our parents or our parents’ friends. For them it was to be avoided at all costs. The occasional out-of-towner driving down to Brighton from London might make the quite easy mistake of thinking it was a normal pub, but once inside they realized their mistake and beat a hasty retreat. The ones that didn’t were usually up to no good, looking for jailbait and such.
I came to realize much later that there was a strict demarcation inside the pub that was very similar to the kind of groups found in American high schools. You only sat at the table that represented your particular subgroup. There were “the smoothies” or “casuals.” The nearest American counterpart would be “jocks”: people who dressed in designer logos but were unintelligent, loud, and prone to vomiting over their fairly vacuous-looking girlfriends. Now, I believe, in the UK at least, they are called “chavs”; back then they hadn’t been given that name yet, but the behavior was the same. They generally didn’t talk to or mix with us in any way, which I think suited everyone. We sat at our own table with what I would term “the outsiders.”
The Cambridge had a Pong machine and the occasional DJ among its attractions, but most of all it had beer and girls, which was why we went. Michael would turn up on his motorbike, Robert would occasionally drive over in his gray Mini, which was his first car. It had been some other color, I seem to recall, but on a whim he had decided to paint it gray. Unfortunately, when it was first sprayed, the paint had not dried before he took it for a spin to show it off to his girlfriend Mary, his secondary school sweetheart whom he’d been going out with since he was just fourteen. Being autumn, the leaves from the trees that were blowing around stuck to the wet paint. Pretty soon it looked like he was driving a small hedge down the road.
It was actually at the Cambridge that the mysterious leather jacket we all wore in The Cure’s early photos first appeared. It belonged to a rather damaged biker called Arthur who felt comfortable enough to sit with us at our table. One day he gave me his leather jacket (for reasons I don’t recall), but we knew that a black leather jacket was not just a coat, but also a flag, and so Robert and I took turns wearing it. We knew the power it possessed.
This being the late 1970s, what with the deprivation and unrest in England, there was always an undercurrent of violence at the pub. Add hormones and alcohol to the mix, and fights frequently erupted, turning the Cambridge into a cauldron of pain. Mostly the fights took place outside in front of the faux-leaded-glass windows with faces pressed against the glass, anxious to have the outcome be in their group’s favor.
These events always ended the same, with the combatants fleeing once they heard the police car’s siren coming up the driveway, into the caravan park behind the pub and onward to freedom. Or so they thought. Many of them made the mistake of returning a little while later when they thought the coast was clear. Some even tried to disguise themselves by changing their blood-soaked shirts. The police would be hiding among the trees, waiting for the guilty parties to return. It was almost as much fun watching that scenario play out as anything else.
However, there was still the overwhelming sense that nothing was really going to change unless we were prepared to change it ourselves.
Michael and Robert and Marc Ceccagno had been playing music in St. Edward’s church hall for a few weeks and invited me to come see them one night. There was no audience. They were just jamming and seeing what they could come up with. They already had a drummer. His name was Graham, and he was a nice enough person and a reasonable drummer, it seemed to me. Nevertheless, I knew I had to be the one. These were my friends, we grew up together, and we hung out together. I should be the drummer in the band. Thankfully, it felt right to Robert and Michael, too. Graham was such a mild-mannered person that he made no objection when I asked him if I could sit behind the kit.
I had “borrowed” a snare drum from school and was doing the exercises in Buddy Rich’s book in my bedroom. I also took drum lessons on Saturdays from a guy named Andy who played in bands on cruise ships like the QE2. I could already handle some simple beats.
I sat down and played with Robert, Michael, and Marc. It felt right straightaway. I played the drums in a style that was stripped down and simple, but with passion.
Marc wanted more complexity, like that of his jazz-rock heroes, so I don’t think I was his cup of tea. Soon enough he would form his own band called Amulet.
That left Robert and Michael and me. The three of us melded in a way that hadn’t been obvious in the ensembles we had attempted in the music room at Notre Dame or our other attempts in the band room at St. Wilfrid’s, our secondary school. Now we felt that we had something going here, and started to work in earnest on what would become The Cure.
I had persuaded my mother to accompany me to the local music shop, which was called Down Under, as it was in a basement, to purchase my first drum kit. It was covered in a hideous brownish-gold sparkly finish. A basic four-piece with spindly cymbal stands that had a nasty habit of collapsing when the cymbals were hit. It would do for now. My mother had to act as my guarantor and the kit was overpriced, but I didn’t care. I would have spent all I had to get the drums I loved back then.
We established a pattern of practicing our instruments at Robert’s parents’ house three nights a week. When they had company, we relocated to the church hall at St. Eddie’s. Father forgive me for I have sinned, and these are my sins. While at the church hall we noticed that they had a bar. Unfortunately for us, they also had it all locked up with a screen across the bottles of spirits, which were suspended upside down with spouts you had to push to get a measure.
Being teens, we devised an ingenious solution. We got a long stick to maneuver one of the glasses underneath a spout, and poked the stick through the screen to push the spout in. Then, by fashioning a long straw made up of several interlocking straws joined together, we were able to drink for free. We liked rehearsing at St. Eddie’s.