Steve Rowland, Hansa’s A&R man, with whom we were supposed to “liaise,” called us on the phone.
“Come and meet me in my London office, boys. We gotta have a talk.”
We went to see him at some swanky place in Mayfair, and as we entered his office he swung round in a big brown leather executive-type chair with “Steve” in big gold letters above the headrest.
He had been apprised of our last abortive session with a “name producer.” The one where I got hit on the head by a London bus on the way to the studio so we went to a pub to get a brandy for the shock and a nice old Rastafarian gentleman had given me a plaster for my bleeding skull. That session had not got off to a good start. Despite the bleeding there was the name producer’s version of witty repartee to deal with, too.
Being a young, inexperienced drummer, I still had difficulty with what is known as “four-limb independence.” Basically this is a difficult skill you have to learn: most drummers’ lead hand and foot are on the same side of the body, and playing different patterns between them is the first big hurdle beginner drummers typically encounter.
Robert had spent endless hours in rehearsal at his house playing along with me while I learned to play different patterns with my right foot and right hand at the same time. A good song to practice this, and another reason why Charlie Watts is a godlike drummer, is “Honky Tonk Women.” Once you can play that properly, you’ve got it. Especially as there are two people playing it on the studio version: Jimmie Miller on cowbell and Charlie Watts on the drums.
During this particular session I was still having difficulty with the technique. The name producer ran the tape a bunch of times and couldn’t resist putting his oar in from the control room.
“Lol?”
“Yes, Name Producer, sir?”
“Do you think you can play a straight four on the kick with a different pattern on the hi-hat? Maybe eights or something? At the moment you’re playing the same pattern on both, mate!”
“Yeah, I’m having a little trouble today but I’m getting it, don’t worry!”
“Lol?”
“Yes?”
“So when you’re wanking does your foot move up and down at the same time, mate?”
I could hear stifled guffaws in my headphones and looked up to see the name producer and recording engineer with their 1970s moustaches cracking up behind the mixing desk in the studio control room. Ha, bloody ha. Stupid tossers! This would never do.
“So,” said Steve Rowland, bringing me back to his office as I snapped out of that last “hilarious” studio memory. “It seems that Trudy and Peter Meisel, the label owners, have heard your last efforts in the studio and aren’t very happy that you recorded some of your own material besides the songs they wanted you to do. Their exact words were, Even people in prison wouldn’t like these songs!”
We didn’t quite know what to say to that. Richard hadn’t booked us any prison gigs—at least, none that we knew about.
“You know,” he continued, “I was pulling for you guys, but I don’t think I can help you here anymore.”
We had recorded “Killing an Arab,” and they in their wisdom had decided they couldn’t release it. Prison material.
Robert’s next move was brilliant.
“Okay, well, drop us from our contract if you want,” he said, “but can we have the rights back to the songs we signed over to you? You know, the ones you don’t like?”
The American looked a little surprised at that. I think he expected us to capitulate and beg to do some more songs we hated for them, just to have a record deal.
“Um, well, I’ll see what they say. Okay, guys?”
Eventually they agreed to let us have our “prison songs” back. I suspect they now wished they hadn’t.
We spent a little while trying to regroup from our first contact with the horrible side of the music business. It wasn’t that we were sad at leaving Hansa—quite the contrary, actually. We felt liberated. In the way of most young men, we had some bravado, but not too much certainty about our next course of action. I think we all would have felt better if it had been us asking to leave and not the other way around.
We did know that a change was needed, and it came in the form of Porl leaving the band. Now it would just be Robert, Michael, and me.
In the greenhouse at the back of the Smiths’ house where The Guru used to grow his organic vegetables, Robert, Michael, and I convened one horribly hot afternoon after rehearsal. Porl’s decision was doubly hard for Robert, as Porl and Robert’s sister Janet had become boyfriend and girlfriend. This meant that a great deal of Porl’s time at the Smiths’ house was spent in Janet’s room.
It’s kind of an unspoken law in most bands that the band comes first when it’s time for band things. Just think John and Yoko. Robert generally tended to avoid direct confrontation unless he had to. In the greenhouse we discussed why Porl wouldn’t work in the current version of the band.
“I’m not being funny, but I’m not sure Porl’s style works with the new songs,” Robert said. “He’s going off to art college in Worthing soon, which means he won’t be able to play any more gigs with us anyway.”
The music was getting more minimal, and Porl’s flamboyant playing style was at odds with that. I think it also irked Robert that some people in Crawley knew Porl as the local “guitar hero,” and that therefore any band he might be in would be “Porl’s band” by default.
That kind of old-school rockist thinking had to go! We weren’t like that. For now at least, we were more a democratic collective.
I don’t remember Robert being particularly vindictive or upset about Porl. He’s not like that. He doesn’t harbor grudges. He can usually think things through in a startlingly logical fashion—albeit his own logic.
We were still going to the record shop in Horley where Simon’s brother Ric worked on Saturdays. Ric Gallup was as eccentric as they come, although he would probably shudder to hear himself described as such. He had half a moustache on one side of his face and half a small beard on the opposite side and one sideburn. It was kind of like looking at a living cubist painting. His attire was also generally quite unusual, too, involving fluorescent dresses with colorful boots to match. Of course, we adored him. He really understood what we were trying to do and he helped lift us out of the doldrums we were experiencing.
“Why don’t you go record a demo of your songs on your own? I’ll give you £50 for the studio time. Better than sitting moping around here, right?”
That perked us up. “Really, Ric?” I said. “You would do that for us?”
“Yes, just go do something, you know?”
He was absolutely right. We had to do something.
We booked some time at Chestnut Studios in Haslemere, West Sussex. In very little time we had a demo tape of “Boys Don’t Cry,” “It’s Not You,” “10:15 Saturday Night,” and “Fire in Cairo.” We made up a bunch of cassettes and stuffed a short letter and a photo taken by Robert’s brother-in-law, John Taw, in some envelopes, then mailed them off to every record label we could think of.
We waited, and then we waited some more.
The rejection letters trickled in one by one. Every label turned us down. Then we got one from Chris Parry, head of A&R at Polydor. He liked what he heard and wanted to meet us!
We arranged to see him in London at Polydor’s offices in Stratford Place, just off Oxford Street. At first, the security guard was quite suspicious when we turned up at the rather grand address.
“‘Ow do I know you are supposed to meet Mr. Parry here like you say, then, lads?”
At that moment, we saw Parry rushing past and he recognized us from our photo. “It’s okay, Chas. They’re with me.” Turning to us, he said, “Fancy a pint?”
We liked him immediately. Off we went to the Lamb and Flag on the corner of St. Christopher’s Place and James Street.
It turned out that Parry really liked our music and was interested in signing us to his own label that he was setting up, as he was leaving Polydor. We were a little disappointed with that. We were still under the impression that bigger was better as far as record companies were concerned. Never mind. It was the only offer we had at that point so we were game. He wanted to come and see us play.
“You have any gigs in London coming up?” he asked.
“Not at the moment, but why don’t you come see us at the Laker’s in Redhill?” Robert said.
“We play there quite a bit,” I added.
Redhill was a few miles farther north from Crawley toward London. We had snagged a gig there ourselves. It was run by old hippies who had their favorite band, The Hotpoints, play all the time. Occasionally we could get a gig with some other up-and-coming acts, like The Vapors, who were following behind local favorites The Jam. It was almost, but only almost, a happening kind of place.
“Yeah, perhaps I should see you in your own environment?” Parry mused absentmindedly while slopping Courage Directors ale over his Italian loafers, which he habitually wore sans socks.
“That would be really the best way to see us,” said Robert.
Robert has always been very particular about how The Cure is presented, so it was important that the first time Parry came to see us it should be in front of our own crowd, on our own turf.
Parry came down to Redhill a couple of months before Christmas in 1978. It wasn’t an elaborate affair. There wasn’t a stage so we just played on the floor, but it was where we were comfortable, which helped us as we got through our set.
Afterward we went over to the Home Cottage, a pub with ridiculously strong beer, and got drunk with him as he explained his idea for what was to become Fiction Records. By this time we had decided that we would probably be much happier on an independent label than with a big company. We had, after all, had the very difficult and demoralizing experience with Hansa. Now we were keen on having a say on the type of music we recorded. So that’s how we got to know Chris Parry and how our true professional lives started. Making life-changing decisions while drinking strong beer!
Parry, who had by now assumed the nickname Bill (it’s a long story) and some managerial duties, decided we needed “toughening up” by playing some gigs around London for a couple of months.
One of the first gigs he got us was supporting Wire at Kent University in the campus dining hall. We figured that we would need a better vehicle to get as far as Canterbury, so we enlisted one of my brother’s friends, the strangely named Jim Crow. He was the only one of my brother’s acquaintances that my mother had banned from our house, because he insisted on wearing a white uncured cowhide jacket, which stank to high heaven. Anyway, Jim had a truck, and he was willing to drive us to the Wire gig and back for a few pounds. We figured it would be fine.
We arrived at Kent University, and as we were walking backstage I encountered Lewis, Wire’s bass player, in the hallway. The thing that struck me immediately was that he had a very, very normal short haircut until you saw the back of his head, which had one long rattail hanging down the back. That freaked me out: the appearance of normality subtly subverted. I never forgot what it said to me about challenging people’s perceptions about what’s normal or not.
The Wire gig was a revelation to all of us in many respects. They seemed so much further along the path of their creativity than we were feeling. That point wasn’t lost on Robert. I feel that day was when the germ for the minimal sound that came to fruition over the next few years was planted in our psyches. Not as a slavish copycat sound, but rather just the idea that we could deviate from the straight-ahead rock-and-roll standards and utilize a different set of rules to describe our musical journey. That definitely interested us. After all, wasn’t that what punk was about—a call to revolution, a changing of the old guard?
I remember watching Wire play, all monochromatic attire with Colin Newman, Wire’s vocalist, holding a black Synare synth drum in his hand and occasionally hitting it with a single drumstick. They had just released their second album, Chairs Missing, which was a lusher version of their debut, Pink Flag. The simplistic arrangements with the icy-sounding synthesizer were very enticing. We took note. Our performance was strong, but we knew now there was more to do. It was a revelation to us, especially Robert and myself.
As incredible as the gig had been, we nearly didn’t get home alive that night. Jim had decided to put the truck’s very large spare tire unsecured on a little shelf above the passenger compartment. A sharp turn on the way home dislodged the tire and, but for the grace of the universe, The Cure story might have ended that night. The huge lump of rubber missed our necks by inches.
We were due to support Wire again at the next gig they had in London. We decided we should go in something else rather than the murderous Crow-mobile and got another friend to drive us to London. Unfortunately, his van broke down and we missed playing the gig entirely.
Parry was furious, and told us in no uncertain terms, “You have to be more professional.”
We countered with the fact that it was very hard to be fully committed as we were all still having to hold down jobs and attend classes, and that we would love to have the wherewithal to “go professional” and be able to be musicians full time. We just put it out there and hoped that Parry would hear what we were asking of him. The night dissolved into more talk and beers and at one point I thought maybe, just maybe, I heard Parry say yes . . .
The next day my phone rang. It was Robert: “So it seems that Bill is making good on his word. He’s going to advance us some money so you don’t have to go to your job anymore, Lol!”
We had discussed what we would do if we actually got signed again after the Hansa debacle. I never gave up on hoping we would do something, but Robert was certain of it. He saw no other way but for us to continue and keep the band alive. He was determined to prove everyone wrong, determined to show the world what we could be.
“We should probably divide it up over the course of a year to give ourselves some money every week, right?”
Robert was talking about the contract that had arrived from Parry, and in it the advance for the first year. Although it was not a fortune, it would enable us all to take out £25 a week to live on, and the rest we would put toward some new gear to play with. That was just like Robert. Pragmatic and selfless. Although he had gradually become our leader, he didn’t want to take all the credit or all the money. First and foremost, he wanted the band to succeed, and so he put forward the most logical plan to keep the band alive and keep us all going.
He knew that I wasn’t in the best situation to support myself without a job, so he made sure we all got enough to survive. My mother received the news less enthusiastically, reasoning that my income from my job was £50 a week, so this was a substantial drop. In the end, though, she saw the look in my eyes and knew this was really what I wanted to do, more than anything in the world. Ultimately, she relented and gave me her support.
“I expect to be sitting in a grand box when you play the Albert Hall!” she said.
If I have one regret in my life it’s that she didn’t live long enough to see that happen.
I was walking down Albert Road in Horley in the middle of the afternoon. A Tuesday, perhaps? What was surprising to me, as I had always been at college or work on weekdays, was how quiet everything was. Nothing and nobody about. A movement behind a curtain here and there signifying a disgruntled dog or pensioner, but that was it. I was doing the right thing by getting out of there. Although £25 a week wasn’t much, I was being paid for playing music! For doing what I loved! It was a very strange feeling, like a frozen ocean beginning to melt with the spring thaw. Suddenly I could see that all we were led to believe about the world was only one way of looking at it. You could actually follow your instincts and do something boldly creative, and still be able to exist! It was a very alien concept to me, as I had always felt that artists existed in another world, one that I loved but was only able to view from the outside like a fairy tale—slightly surreal and not quite whole.
Even though Parry had booked us some time in a studio in London and we had recorded a double A-side single “Killing an Arab” and “10:15 Saturday Night,” we’d had to record it at night while I was still working. To make our first single seemed like an impossible dream to me, but it had happened, and now I could play music full time.
Gradually, very gradually, it was dawning on me that you could be anything you wanted to be if you really wanted it badly enough. If you were prepared to go the extra mile and forgo other so-called pleasures. We had been rehearsing three times a week every week for three years in Robert’s house. It didn’t seem like a chore because we loved what we were doing. Now it seemed to be paying off a little.
I continued down Albert Road and into the equally deserted High Street. No, I wouldn’t be sad to get out of here. I could feel the pull of the unknown.
The white van was piled high with our gear and off we drove to Morgan Studios in Willesden, north London. It was where we had auditioned for Hansa, but now we were returning to make our first album! It felt magical and real all at the same time. We had been in studios before, but this was different. Real bands recorded here, real bands with records out and a history that we knew. The places we had been in before were more like hobbyist versions of studios, with spare rooms used as drum booths and walls covered in old bits of carpet. Good enough for demos, but something a little more professional was needed for our first album.
Parry had a small office in the studio building out of which he was intending to run his new independent label. He had one person working with him. Indeed, she worked with him until the end—Ita Martin, a transplant from his days at Polydor. I always liked Ita. She had to handle many different personalities over the years, and she was a good match for Parry, too.
We had arrived in the early evening; apparently some other band was recording during the day, so we had the night shift. This was a studio where bands like Yes and The Who had recorded. In fact, their recordings were in the tape library.
Walking into the main room of Studio 2, I was struck by all the shag carpeting, even over some of the equipment. The pervasive smell of incense and weed hung in the air. Still, the gear all looked top-notch—not that we had any idea what most of it did. The 24-track recorder was probably the only thing we had half a clue about and, as to the rest, well, it all looked very complicated.
Over the next year we would become educated in the technology of the studio and become more involved in the recording process, especially Robert, but for now we were content to trust Parry as producer and the young engineer he had hired, Mike Hedges.
Hedges was a tall, imposing man with a shock of red hair, but most importantly, he liked us and understood what we wanted from the beginning. Sometimes the studio can be a fraught place where the interaction between the engineer/producer and the band becomes a minefield of conflicting ideas and needs, but I always felt we worked well with Hedges.
We set up our equipment more or less like we had while working out the songs in Robert’s house, with me in the middle of the room and Robert to one side and Michael to the other. It’s funny because I feel I have always been the go-between for Robert and Michael, and even to this day I facilitate communication between the two of them. Some things never change.
I was lucky enough to be using a kit that belonged to Rick Buckler of The Jam, which Parry had somehow finagled for a few days because he deemed my new blue Premier kit “not really up to the job.” I had acquiesced without much fuss, as Rick’s kit was a nice new black Yamaha. It sounded great. Parry, however, having been a drummer in his day while growing up in New Zealand, always wanted to fiddle with the drum sound, and so started a regular recording ritual until we were able to take over and do it ourselves. We tuned and tried out many different snares. I think Robert and Michael both showed immense patience as this process went on and on and on. Nine times out of ten, we ended up using the first version we had tried.
It didn’t take long for us to record the basic versions of the songs for Three Imaginary Boys. After all, we had played and rehearsed them so many times before we went into the studio. With the exception of “So What,” we had all of the lyrics worked out before we got to the studio. For that song Robert just had a sugar bag and read off the back of that, along with a sheet of lyrics I had given him. Very Dadaesque, I thought.
Mainly it was just a case of getting the best version down on tape. There was no cutting and pasting digitally back then, only the most basic form of tape editing, which involved immense skill in judging just where to cut the tape and glue it back together. Hedges was young and aware of new studio techniques, but also old-school enough to be able to splice tape together properly. After the initial instrument tracks were recorded, we listened to them and then Robert sang over them. The idea of overdubs, that is, rerecording over existing tracks, was fairly alien to us, but we experimented on a couple of tracks and added overdubs in the form of an extra guitar here and additional backing vocal there.
Then that was that! We had no idea how to mix on such a complicated desk, so we pretty much let Parry and Hedges get on with it for the first tracks. I think this is why Robert doesn’t rate Three Imaginary Boys as a “good” album by The Cure. We were left out of the mixing process, so I understand why he feels that way about it. I still love the songs and I know he loves some of them, too. Otherwise he wouldn’t play them still.
We spent most of the time when we weren’t playing either at the back of the room drinking beer or in the little café at Morgan Studios, which was like a small, exclusive club for musicians, with people like Gary Moore and Iron Maiden hanging about. Being the new wave, we generally kept to ourselves and avoided the large Marshall cabinets lurking in the hallways of the studio, which were liable to shriek uncontrollably if you got too close. Apparently, the best place to record metal mayhem was in the hallway. Who knew?
We slept at Parry’s house, since we didn’t have an awful lot of money for a hotel. He had one room with two beds for us, so we slept two to one bed, and the other bed was for the lucky one who got his own space. No glamour in rock and roll, kids.
We tried to add our two cents’ worth to the sessions, especially Robert, who reasoned—not unreasonably—that Chris had signed us based on the demo we had made. We were ignored, as we were his new signing and he was running the show. He had just signed The Jam, who had had some success, so his views prevailed. He couldn’t have been much older than his late twenties, but to us he came across as adult. He was certainly more worldly, so we acquiesced.
We were new to this and we didn’t really know where we stood, so we took a more passive role. We watched and waited. We were determined to learn the ropes so that the next time we recorded an album it would be different. That freedom was coming, even though we didn’t know it yet. Still, it finally felt like we were on our way, getting somewhere at last.
Wherever that might be . . .