Every band has its share of ups and downs, moments in time when it feels as if either the stars are aligned in your favor or you’ve been cursed forever by fate. Good or bad, it always comes down to a handful of events that make or break a band. For The Cure that time was the winter of 1979.
To support the release of our single “Killing an Arab” backed with “10:15 Saturday Night,” Parry had booked us for a solid month of gigs, including dates at the Nashville Room, the Hope and Anchor, and the Marquee. This was the holy trinity of London’s constellation of clubs, of which the Marquee was its brightest star.
The Nashville Room was a grim little place that reeked of stale beer and cigarettes. Despite its respectable neo-Gothic red brick Victorian façade, the Nashville Room was punk-rock central. At any time during the day you could find lads with spiked-up hair decked out in drab-looking raincoats drinking at the long, chipped-up mahogany bar, tracing anarchy symbols with their boots on the sawdust-covered floor.
It’s a good thing it was just three of us, because the stage was unbelievably small. At the back of the stage, a small door led to a dressing room that looked like a holding cell in a police station. A single bare bulb illuminated a small stained sink and not much else. This is where we hid until it was time for us to go on. Lined up along the bar was a crowd of surly-looking skinheads, stamping their feet and pawing the floor with their boots. They looked more like a herd of bulls than boys.
This was exactly what we were afraid of.
“Killing an Arab” was inspired by the novel The Stranger (L’Étranger), written by the French existentialist writer Albert Camus. In the novel, the protagonist, for reasons he doesn’t understand and cannot explain, shoots an Arab on the beach. Although the song is a treatise on existential angst and has nothing to do with racism, or indeed killing, it can attract the wrong type of “seeker.”
That’s what happened at our gig at the Nashville Room. A bunch of National Front skinheads had turned up, hell-bent on making trouble. Underneath their tough veneer they were disaffected young punks like us, but instead of making a go of it they blamed others for their troubles: namely, foreigners. They were anti-anything that wasn’t a hundred percent white Protestant British. With a song like “Killing an Arab” these blokes were probably expecting to see a kind of Nazi skinhead band. They were as disappointed to see us as we were to see them. These were exactly the kind of small-minded yobs we’d fled Crawley to get away from.
We piled onto the stage and eyed one another suspiciously. Our punk outfits had evolved somewhat since the early days. Robert still wore a full-length gray raincoat and big blue brothel creepers, and his hair was cut in a kind of floppy Tom Verlaine fringe. I’d traded my wannabe Afro for a sort of scruffy shag, and I wore a white shirt with black drainpipes and a skinny tie. Michael wore a striped T-shirt and jeans with Converse trainers. The overall effect was somewhere between old rock and new wave, and decidedly un-punk. We were changing both the look and the music at the same time.
This didn’t sit well with the skins, and their fears were realized when we started up our set with “Boys Don’t Cry.”
We braced ourselves for the worst as the expressions on the skinheads’ faces turned from confusion to anger to hate. Here comes the ultra-violence, I thought. This was nothing new, after all. Looking like we did, we never backed down from a fight, and Robert took the brunt of it. We were always coming to his rescue. I don’t mean to suggest that he wasn’t capable of defending himself, because he was. There was a part of Robert that was almost dreamlike in the way he seemed to have his head in the clouds. But Robert wasn’t from cloudland: he was from Crawley, and if you messed with him he wasn’t going to back down. If you messed with me or Michael he always, always had our backs.
As the skinheads prepared their assault on the stage they were held back by a bare-chested skinhead with an enormous tattoo of a gleaming eagle on his sweat-covered chest. He moved toward the stage, clapping his calloused hands together and smiling from ear to ear. Bloody hell! He liked us!
His companions were a little dumbfounded by this development. Did their leader, the biggest and most intimidating member of their tribe, really like this poofy-looking band from bloody Crawley?
He did, and his enthusiasm proved to be infectious. Soon all the skinheads were dancing to “Boys Don’t Cry.” Robert looked around at me and grinned broadly. Breathing a sigh of relief, I let the elation I felt at this moment take me higher. We’d won the first battle and no bones had been broken, but the war was far from over.
Number 90 Wardour Street was easy to miss. Soho. The heart of London’s sex trade. Depravity central. The only clue as to its importance was a small pale neon sign that jutted out across the pavement in the fog: the Marquee. To those in the know, its light shone out like a beacon. The Marquee wasn’t just any old place. It was perhaps the most important venue in the history of European rock-and-roll music. From the street you had to go down a long corridor lined with old yellowing posters of everyone who had ever played there. That gave us the chills.
The Who. Jimi Hendrix. The Rolling Stones. David Bowie. The Clash. To us it was a kind of temple, the inner sanctum of English music, and we were about to make our mark with a month-long residency: every Sunday night in March. The actual club, however, was dark and dismal-looking. Enormous black bass cabinets on either side of the stage took up most of the space. Like the Nashville Room, the dressing room had only one entrance, which was through a door at the back of the stage.
Once inside we were confronted with the sheer awfulness of the facilities. The walls were as damp as a cellar and covered in graffiti from other bands. At the far end of the sloping-ceilinged room was a famously vile bathroom where the glamour of rock and roll went to die. It felt like you could catch hepatitis just by breathing in the air.
Despite the depressing accommodations we were agog with excitement. Nothing could dampen our enthusiasm. We were playing a residency at the Marquee! We even got to handpick the opening acts for each gig. We selected up-and-comers like ourselves who didn’t fit into other scenes, so projected the right tone. The bands were The Scars, Fashion, and Local Operator, but on that first night none other than Joy Division opened up for us. Despite this it was a disappointing opening. We played our hearts out to a half-empty room.
Between Marquee gigs Parry had us playing all over England, usually on the venue’s “punk night.” The first of these was the Lafayette Club in Wolverhampton, run by a large and gregarious character named Vernon who was always dressed in an impeccable tuxedo. He treated us like royalty and so we thanked him on the sleeve of our first album.
Our performance at Bournemouth Town Hall made the local news: “Girl Bites Off Boyfriend’s Ear at Punk Show” was the headline the following morning. At Isleworth Poly, the skinhead with the eagle tattoo and his band of jolly skins turned up and served as our protectors from other not-so-jolly racist thugs who were intent on making trouble. When a huge brawl broke out, our ally “calmed” things down by whirling a wooden crutch he’d liberated from some guy with a broken leg, clearing a space between the skins and the stage. As local security had fled at the first sign of trouble, we were grateful for Eagle’s presence. Robert invited our protector to come to the rest of our gigs at the Marquee, and he did, joining the swelling crowds that grew larger and larger for each gig. I think he took a fancy to Robert. Many people did. People were captivated by him. Charmed, in the literal sense of the word.
At Kingston Poly, the student union informed us that we couldn’t perform our single “Killing an Arab.” We got permission to play it after Robert calmly took several of the students aside and explained the song’s literary origins. They were embarrassed, but grateful for the explanation. It wasn’t just the skinheads who thought the song was racist: so did the college students! If Robert could have taken every listener aside and explained the song to them, we wouldn’t have had so many difficulties starting out. Talking his way out of trouble was something Robert was very good at, something he had a lifetime of practice at.
Night by night, gig by gig, we were winning crowds over. On the final night of our residency, I was standing outside on the street in front of the Marquee. In the lull between soundcheck and doors opening, I went out to have a smoke. Behind banks of dark gray clouds the sun was setting, and a gentle London drizzle softened the streetlights and the neon signs in the windows offering “Escort services.” By the door of the club, there was a poster inside a glass case that listed all the gigs that were coming up. Our gig that evening was the only one with a “sold out” sticker plastered across the band’s name. Big John, the club’s bouncer, had just placed a white board on the ground outside the club. In large black letters the sign read, “HOUSE FULL.”
I stared at the sign in amazement. In a few weeks we had gone from being unknowns playing to half-empty rooms to this—whatever this was. We’d done it. We were becoming known in London. My reverie was interrupted by a couple of people walking up to the door of the club.
“House full for The Cure? Really?” they snorted incredulously.
“Yes indeed, gents,” Big John nodded as he turned them away. “Sold out.”
They moved on down the street as perplexed by this turn of events as I was. I went back into the club smiling from ear to ear. I looked forward to sharing the story with Robert after the gig, when the gear was put away and the club had cleared out. I could imagine Robert having a laugh as we polished off the room-temperature beer and cold curry in the dressing room before we went out to conquer the rest of England, Europe, and the world. It was the kind of story he liked. People were always underestimating us, Robert especially, and we thrived on it. Yes, indeed, I could imagine him saying, a mischievous smile lurking behind his beer glass. Sold out by some poofy blokes from bloody Crawley . . .