Personally, I consider the first gig we did as the band that became The Cure to be the one that we did on December 20, 1976, the Malice gig at our old secondary school, St. Wilfrid’s. True, we had done a gig of sorts a couple of days earlier in the minstrels’ gallery at Worth Abbey for Upjohn’s Christmas party, and a rather strange “performance” in 1973 as The Obelisk, but this was our first full-blown concert.
We had settled on a most unlikely character named Martin Creasy as a singer. He worked as a journalist for the local paper, so we thought he might be able to get us a review. I don’t know if he ever did. I do remember he did a great David Cassidy impersonation.
I had persuaded my mother to purchase a full-length black studded catsuit for me to play in that night. I had seen pictures of drummers and that looked like what you wore. I was going to top off the look with Alice Cooper–style black mascara eye makeup. I loved Alice.
Sitting in the small dressing-room area at the school, I had on the black studded catsuit. I had a black mascara stick in my hand, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t get the right effect; this rock-and-roll stuff was harder than it looked.
Robert’s girlfriend Mary was there. I knew Mary well, as we were all in the same class in school, so I asked her to help me apply the black lines for the desired effect, which she did. I’m sure it looked wonderful and was exactly what I wanted, but I’m glad there are no photographs of that getup.
We started off the gig with our friends Steve Forrester and Peter Doherty (no, not that Peter Doherty) slowly opening the curtains and bringing up the stage lights. We opened with “Jailbreak” by Thin Lizzy, and then Martin Creasy appeared at the side of the stage in a brown three-piece suit! Not very rock and roll. He didn’t last as our singer for long. A nice guy, but not right for us.
It was a suitably awful concert for our first proper gig. We had a couple of “triple songs.” At the time we liked to write songs as triptychs for some reason. I sang my party piece “Wild Thing.” It was a disaster, really, and I thought, “Well that’s that, then!” But it wasn’t.
One night that winter at band practice, Michael, Robert, and I were all sitting around the kitchen table. Porl was up in Janet’s room.
I was idly looking through Melody Maker sipping a cup of Rita Smith’s best tea. (“No sugar, Laurence, it’s bad for you.”)
We had reached a kind of impasse with our songs. We were unsure quite where to go with them, but open enough to want to explore the new stuff that was coming out of punk. We were a little restless.
I saw an advert for The Stranglers playing at a club near us, the Red Deer in Croydon, south London.
“Why don’t we go see this?” I said.
Robert looked up from the book he was reading. “See what, Lol?”
“The Stranglers are playing tonight. At the Red Deer. We should go. Better than just sitting around here. I’ll get us in if one of you drives.”
I had a job, so I could buy the tickets.
“All right, so why don’t I drive up and Michael drive back?” said Robert, suddenly perking up a little at the thought of having a few drinks and watching The Stranglers. Michael agreed to drive home afterward. He was not as keen on drinking during the week as Robert and I were.
I think the gig at the Red Deer was the first punk gig we all went to together. Mary came with us, too. Porl demurred and stayed at The Smiths’ with Janet. Punk wasn’t really Porl’s thing anyway.
When we got there, it was full of all the London punks we had heard about and seen on TV and in the newspapers but never in the flesh. Spiked-up hairdos and safety pins everywhere!
Robert and I pushed our way through the assorted punky types to the front. We watched and danced for the whole gig. Michael sensibly stayed away from the bar. He was driving us home, so he couldn’t get as happily drunk and deranged as Robert and me.
I saw the look of wonder on Robert’s face. “This is more like it!” I shouted over the loud music. We had found a place to start from. We could see a way to get out of the drab environs of Crawley and make real music that was exciting and alive, right here, right now.
A month or so later The Stranglers played at our college, and I got up on stage and danced with J. J. Burnel, the Stranglers’ bassist. I went home minus one shoe as the result of being somewhat inebriated. I had a new-found alcohol supply (200 proof) from the laboratory at work. I would bring a small bottle with me to gigs and pour it into a pint of beer, which now alcoholically resembled a pint of whisky. People were totally aghast at how drunk I was after one beer. If only they knew. I would have been just as wild and enthusiastic even if I wasn’t drinking. I was in love with the energy and sheer exhilaration of the new punk sound. It had lit a fire underneath me and I identified with the stuff they were singing about, the alienation, and the desire to change things. Something better change! This I understood. It spoke to me as eloquently as anything I had ever read. Somehow I just knew it would propel me out of this place. I knew it would be the key to a more exciting and meaningful life. I also knew that I had nothing to lose by following this path. I could see that staying in Crawley would mean I would die there, and probably sooner rather than later. My life had to mean something more than that, didn’t it?
I started to buy the 45s that Ric Gallup brought down from London to his shop in Horley and snatched up the new punk records that came out every week. I changed my clothes to fit in with the scene. Straight-leg, jumble-sale trousers and pointy boots. I wanted the world to know that I had found the way, that I was a true believer.
After a couple of aborted attempts at finding a suitable singer (Gary X, anyone?) we eventually co-opted our mate Peter O’Toole (no, not that Peter O’Toole) as our vocalist. He was a Bowie fan and a really good footballer. Both suitable qualifications to be our singer.
Robert had seen an advert in Melody Maker from Hansa, a German record company looking for English groups. We sent them a tape and a photo and they invited us to Morgan Studios in London to audition for them.
When we got to the studio they said, “Just stand by the instruments and play your songs, boys. We are going to film you now, okay?”
That sounded strange to us—didn’t they want to record our songs, too? Never mind, we did as asked and went through two or three songs while they got all the footage of us that they wanted. We didn’t really know what to expect and it was exciting to think we might get a break here to make a record.
Out of the darkness at the back of the studio, an American voice said, “Okay, that’s great, boys. Just one more set of shots for us under these lights over here please.”
It was Steve Rowland, Hansa’s A&R head. We went home slightly mystified by the whole process, but as total neophytes we had no reason to think that this was not the normal process for “getting a record deal.”
A few days later, we got a call. “Congratulations! We have decided to sign you to our label!”
Well, that was surprise! We didn’t expect it to be quite so fast. Apparently we, along with David Sylvian’s Japan, were signed from these auditions. We felt quite amazed.
If our audition was weird, things soon got even stranger. They sent us lots of old songs to cover, like “The Great Airplane Strike” and “I Fought the Law,” and then booked a studio for us with a “big name” producer. It didn’t make sense to us that we were recording other people’s songs. We sent them cassette tapes of our songs, which they ignored. That seemed odd, too. Didn’t they like our music? It was an ominous sign, as we would soon find out.
We finally got a gig at the Rocket in May 1977.
We were now all eighteen, so Fred, the Rocket’s landlord, wouldn’t fall afoul of the child work laws or something. Clever old Fred.
He actually didn’t ask us outright anyway. Rather, our friend’s band Amulet, fronted by ex-Malice guitarist Marc Ceccagno, couldn’t do the gig they had been booked for at the Rocket, so, sensing an opportunity to actually get us out there in front of real people, I called Fred.
“Er, yes . . . the Rocket public house?”
The phone was answered by Fred himself in the voice I presumed he usually reserved for outstanding creditors.
“Yes, hello, Fred? I heard that Amulet can’t play the pub this week. They all have bad colds, they asked us to fill in for them?”
Fred sounded a little suspicious, “And what are you lot called, then?”
“Easy Cure.”
We had literally pulled the new name for the band out of a hat. After our disastrous gig at St. Wilfrid’s it seemed like a wise idea to change the name, but we couldn’t agree on one. Robert hit on a solution. He had seen something about Bowie or William Burroughs cutting up phrases from their writings into strips and reassembling them into new prose or song lyrics. So we cut all our own lyrics up and put them into a hat. The first fragment we pulled out would be the name of the band. It seemed both democratic and punky all at the same time.
We sat in the small hallway of the Smiths’ house, by the harmonium we sometimes utilized for the triptych songs we were currently making.
“So the first bit of lyric we pull out of the hat will be our new band name, right?” Robert asked.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
Robert reached in and pulled out a small, white, screwed-up scrap.
“What’s it say?” Michael and I asked.
“Easy Cure,” said Robert, who looked a little crestfallen that one of his word fragments wasn’t the plum pulled from the pudding. “Easy Cure” was from a lyric that I had partially written.
“Anyway, fair’s fair, so Easy Cure it is!” I thought out loud.
However, Robert got his way later on, because we changed it to The Cure, which he thought sounded much more punky and now than Easy Cure, which sounded more hippie-fied.
I couldn’t really argue with that. I wanted us to be more punk anyway.
“So what kind of music does Easy Cure play?” asked Fred.
I panicked slightly. I hadn’t really thought about that one. We just wrote songs from our own experiences and thoughts. I don’t think we thought about labels, although we were certainly influenced by the current rash of punk bands we were now seeing whenever we could. In addition to The Stranglers at the Red Deer and Crawley College we saw Buzzcocks at the Lyceum.
“Um, well, we do some of our own stuff and a few popular covers,” I offered hopefully.
“Yeah, well, they like to hear something they know, so play something they know,” said Fred, hammering his point home. “Be here at 6 p.m., start playing at 6:30–7 p.m. You play two sets and you have to finish before last orders at 10:30 p.m.”
To this day I’ve no idea what they paid us. I probably didn’t take it in, as I was just so happy to get our first proper paying gig!
And so it started. Paying our dues in the Rocket at first to the regulars, and gradually, over the next year or so, to increasingly varied audiences from the area as word spread.
Of course, we had to play some covers, as Fred had predicted. “Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull, made completely punky by leaving out the long piano intro and flute(!), was one I recall that was particularly liked by the Rocket’s older patrons.
Gradually we honed our set to include more of our own material, crammed together on that tiny stage in the corner of the pub, and learned what every band must learn if they hope to establish themselves as a real band.
We perfected the subtle signals between us all to enable the songs to come out sounding right and keep the show rolling along with intensity and power. We learned our stagecraft on that small stage all through the year, in between seeing some of the best bands of the punk revolution.
We played about thirteen gigs at the Rocket. It felt like we were there so often we were practically the house band. At every gig there were more people, and we grew in confidence as we honed our sound.
In the autumn of 1977, Peter left the band. We had played a gig at the Rocket on September 11, and after the gig he told us it was his last.
“Hey, chaps, I think I have a different calling. I’m, um, off to a kibbutz in Israel.”
“Really?” I asked him somewhat incredulously. “That’s what you want to do?”
“Yeah, Lol, that’s the plan.”
I was a little stunned. After all, we were just getting properly started. In retrospect it had been obvious the last few months that his heart wasn’t in it anymore. We wished him luck and looked around for another singer to replace him. It was frustrating, to say the least. We were starting to express our own ideas, finding our own raison d’être, and now we were in desperate need of a good front man to convey that to audiences who didn’t know us at all.
Then Robert did something that really changed the whole course of The Cure. Up until then I don’t think Robert had thought about being the guitarist and the singer, but I think he realized right then, when Peter left, that if he was going to make a difference in this world, if he was going to be able to get across what he wanted to say, he would have to be the front man, he would have to take that on.
I have a theory. There comes a day when every single one of us is confronted with the abyss. Sometimes it’s a heart-wrenching breakup. Sometimes it’s the loss of a loved one. Some have it early and some people get it late, but we all have that moment when we look down and there’s nothing fucking there. People want their rock stars to go further out on the edge and hang out there for a bit, take a good long look at that abyss, and then transmit what they find there through their art.
Ian Curtis did it. Kurt Cobain did it. So did Robert Smith, except he didn’t just look at the abyss, he was on intimate terms with it. He had things he had to say about the darkest parts of the human experience, and people were either attracted to that or repulsed by it. He’s been like that for as long as I’ve known him. Even at the very start, he had stuff he needed to say. He tried to fight it. I think that’s why he picked up the guitar, so he’d have something to put between himself and the abyss. In the beginning, he tried to hide behind it. He was just the guitar player. When Peter left and the band wasn’t working right and the music we were playing didn’t match the vision he had for it, he assumed the duties of the vocalist. We were still teenagers, but even then he knew what it meant, what he was getting into. It’s one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen anyone do.
The Rocket was where Robert taught himself how to front a band, how to be in the center of the storm and love being there.
In that dismal little room in deepest Sussex, a whole new future was started.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. After trying to get going for most of 1977 as Easy Cure, we were looking to expand a little beyond Crawley and environs. While we had played some other gigs besides the Rocket, it was nothing too exciting. I mean, where the “eff” was Effingham Park?
Michael’s brother-in-law Richard, newly married to his older sister and no doubt wishing to ingratiate himself into the Dempsey clan, had hurriedly hatched an idea to get us gigs further afield.
One day he came round to rehearsal with Michael and cornered us.
“Every band has a manager, right?”
“Er, yes, I suppose so,” we said.
“Look at these, then!” And out of his pocket he triumphantly pulled a wad of business cards.
On inspection, it had his name and, in large letters, “Manager of Easy Cure.”
Then, much to our chagrin, in even larger letters, “Available for weddings, parties and all your entertainment needs.”
He looked expectantly at our faces.
“Well, what do you think, lads?”
“They’re business cards,” said Robert diplomatically. I knew what he meant; we were not really in the business of anything yet.
“Oh, and I’ve got us our first engagement,” he said, positively beaming at this point. “Orpington General Hospital!” You could have knocked us down with a feather at that moment. I couldn’t have imagined a less rock-and-roll venue than a general hospital.
“Yes, the annual hospital staff dance on New Year’s Eve!”
That sounded ominous. “Playing to a lot of pissed-up hospital porters!”
“It’s okay,” he protested. “I told them you play some of your own stuff and do covers of popular songs.” That last bit fell with a loud thud into the room.
It’s true we could play a few covers—we did so at our gigs at the Rocket—but I doubted we had enough for a dinner dance at the hospital or if any of them were even suitable. Then he dropped the decider.
“They’ll pay us £100! And all the beer we want!”
The money was a much more abstract concept to us, but free beer was extremely enticing.
“Okay, how long do we have to play for?”
“We only have to do two sets of an hour each.”
Hmm. We were lucky if we could play for forty-five minutes at the most, so to do that twice? Would we be able to just swap things around a little and play a sort of combination of songs so the audience wouldn’t notice that we were playing the same tunes again?
The day of the gig duly arrived and we drove with Michael’s Woolworths van to Orpington General Hospital in the southeast corner of Greater London. The hospital was originally built by the Canadian government at the turn of the twentieth century. It saw a lot of action in the First World War treating Canadian and Allied troops, and became central to the town’s life thereafter.
By now many of the original Victorian buildings had been replaced by the faceless 1970s architecture so common around the south of England: lots of brick and glass in the blandest possible combinations. A minimalism without charm or thought. Just plain dull. No wonder we wanted to escape. Even though we had grown up in this area, the small portion of Surrey/Sussex that we inhabited had many more intriguing facets than this. It was such a forgotten area. There was very little in the way of true progress; rather, a sort of Band-Aid approach that prevented everything from falling into ruin kept the locals at least marginally interested in living life and not starting a revolution. We had other ideas about that.
Richard met us at the entrance to the hospital to ensure that the security guard at his little hut would actually let us in without calling the police.
He had dressed up a little for the occasion in what he took for rock manager’s attire: a silk bomber jacket and a chain with a large medallion on it hanging rather incongruously over his nice sweater—knitted by mother, perhaps? A bizarre combination.
“Okay, lads. You should definitely play a few songs they know just to keep them happy.”
And suddenly it dawned on us that this might not turn out quite as we had intended.
We took the gear out of the van and trooped into the empty dining hall, where we were to perform in a couple of hours. Tables were set up for dinner, which we were assured would be removed “for dancing” later on. Dancing? We weren’t sure we had anything that would accommodate dancing. A rough pogo up and down or a lurch to the left or right maybe, but actual dancing? No, not really.
I had set up the Maxwin kit (finished in a lovely Naugahyde sparkle) and started to tune the drums when I noticed Richard running across the dining-room floor, the medallion flying behind him.
“‘Ere, Lol! You’ll have to keep the noise down. It’s disturbing some of the punters . . . er . . . patients!”
Good lord. How did they expect us to play later on? He read my thoughts.
“In a couple of hours they’ll all have had their meds and will be out for the night so it won’t be a problem then, but right now some of them might get a little agitated, if you know what I mean!”
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came to mind, and I had visions of the Chief running through the dining room and throwing a water fountain through my precious Maxwin kit.
We finished setting up in silence and adjourned to the little side room they had set aside for us to use as a dressing room.
“I’ve drawn up a rough set list,” Robert said.
Robert has always handwritten The Cure’s set lists ever since I can remember. He tends to find a method he likes for most things and sticks with that. He has that self-sufficient punk ethos. Even now.
The set list was probably in his neo-child’s script. People ask me if that’s always how he’s written and I can sincerely tell you that even when he wrote what I consider his first lyric back in Notre Dame middle school (an ode to footballer Rodney Marsh), his penmanship looked the same. There is no artifice with Robert. What you see is what you get, that’s who he is. Some find this disturbing, but I always found it comforting.
I looked it over—a few cover songs, but mostly our own fledgling material. “Killing an Arab” and “10:15 Saturday Night.” Nothing really suitable for a dinner and dance.
I wondered how the audience would take to us. There were nurses, porters, some clerical staff, and assorted balding, middle-aged men. They definitely did not seem like the sort of punky young people that would appreciate our particular noise.
How right I was.
We were required, it turned out, not only to play two sets, but to start off with some “light instrumental music” to accompany dinner.
So I pulled out my felt beaters, and Robert, Porl, and Michael gently riffed and noodled away in what we thought was an approximation of “light instrumental dinner music.” When I looked out into the audience I saw the sort of expressions I imagine greeted John Cage at the premier of 4’33”, his avant-garde silent “piano” piece, which he debuted in Woodstock in 1952. That should have been our first clue. A sneering disbelief that would eventually manifest as anger.
Dinner over, we turned our attention to performing “properly” and playing “songs for dancing.” About fifteen minutes into our set, I realized something was not quite right and the night might not be the easy money we had at first envisioned.
Michael’s brother-in-law was standing at the side of the stage, twitching. At first I thought it was a sort of understated pogo, the type a hip young manager might be expected to perform at the side of the stage, perhaps in Madison Square Garden or CBGBs. But no. It was his way of trying to get our attention without being too obvious, which of course made him seem just plain mental.
Porl sidled over to the edge of the stage to get whatever news it was Richard wanted to impart to us, nodding as he spoke to him. It didn’t look good. There wasn’t much dancing happening on the dance floor they had made by clearing the dinner tables away. Many couples were sitting around the edges of the room in their party dresses and such, trying to ignore the din coming from the stage. Mercifully, our set break came.
“So, yes, ladies and gents,” Richard broke in. “Easy Cure has to take a break now.”
I turned around to see Richard clutching a microphone in one hand and gesticulating wildly to us with his free hand to get off the stage.
“They will be back in a while with more super hits for you to dance to all night,” he said, an air of desperate hopefulness in his voice.
We convened in the little side room, and as he closed the door behind us, we sat on the small couch. He perched on a wobbly metal folding chair.
“Well, I thought they might be a little more receptive to you, lads, but the general consensus is that they want something more along the lines of Tony Orlando and Dawn—you know, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’?”
We all looked at each other, bewildered. We vaguely knew of the song, but I didn’t think any of us knew how it went or how to play it. Big problem. Then Porl spoke up.
“Hmm, yes, well, I used to play that in my cabaret days.”
I did not know Porl had had any cabaret days!
“Anyway, you have fifteen minutes before the next set so work something out to keep the natives happy, all right?” Richard pleaded.
All eyes turned to Porl. Robert spoke first.
“So teach us ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon,’ then.”
There followed the fastest learning of any song in the history of music, the only problem being that Porl couldn’t remember a part of the song, probably one of the most important parts: the second verse! Undaunted, we went back onto the stage, with slightly glowering faces surrounding us.
“‘Kay, well, now we are going to play a song you all know and love.” We started into the song, led by Porl’s gestures to change chords here and there. Then it happened. Just as people were starting to like us a little. I could see them mouthing the words silently as they danced, but the chorus just carried on and on with no second verse. Like one gigantic moment of coitus interruptus. I could see the audience’s nervous faces unsure of quite what was wrong or what they were hearing. It must have felt like a record stuck in a groove permanently going round and round on the chorus.
Eventually we had to admit defeat and stop. We all looked at each other questioningly and then just bashed on with the rest of our set. Nobody danced anymore. I could hear the grumbling over the sound of our guitars.
“Call that bloody music?”
“Just sounds like noise to me!”
It was going to be a long night. Eventually we got to the end of our second and last set. I think someone chucked a bottle at us. We packed away our gear. Robert had driven up behind the van with Mary, in the hedge Mini, and went out to the car park with her just after the gig, followed by several disgruntled patrons. They pursued them to their car and provoked a fight with Robert. Nothing new there then.
I don’t think we even stopped to collect the money. Just hightailed it out of there fast. Not a very auspicious start to Richard’s hopes for us as the new cabaret sensation of the south coast.