The winter of 1979 was the coldest in sixteen years, with harsh blizzards and deep snow. The country slowly crawled out of hibernation in the spring, and by the summer we were generating our own blizzard by playing all over the UK on the Three Imaginary Boys tour.
Before that blizzard materialized, however, we played a benefit for our old college prof Dr. Anthony Weaver. We felt he had been run out of Crawley College unfairly, and because we admired his stance as an antiestablishment figure, we had a gig arranged in the local community center in Northgate, Crawley.
The building was a drab, utilitarian, pebbledash-finished affair in the heart of a neighborhood of Crawley with a pub, a school, and a church surrounded by row after row of nondescript new houses. It was everything we had planned to escape from condensed into one square mile of suburbia. The community center was much like a school hall, with a small stage at one end where we set up.
As we had sided with Dr. Weaver over the college, the local skinheads would of course be turning up to see what mayhem they could cause that night. But this was not to be like the night of my eighteenth birthday when they had chased Robert and me over the bridge by Crawley station. No, now we were a couple of years wiser and, having toured England, we had a certain notoriety of our own. We had our followers as well as our brothers’ friends—some of whom would certainly be able to stand up to any bothersome National Front skins. Among these was Frank Bell, the Cult Hero singer, and Brian “Headset” Adsett, who would go on to do security for us for a number of years.
After Robert and I had our altercation with a bunch of their followers on my birthday, the Front was never far from our sights in Crawley. Michael even had the misfortune of having to work in the same place as the head of the local chapter for a while. In Crawley you couldn’t really escape their pernicious reach, which is why we were totally unsurprised when one of our crew reported their presence at the community center.
The local paper had turned up to record the bloodbath, and we weren’t long into our set when the fighting started. As we played, I watched one of our crew lift up a small, pimply-looking skin by the collar, still kicking and spewing invective—“I’ll fackin’ kill yew! Lemme go, you wanker!”—before depositing him firmly outside the community center with a helpful boot.
The evening served as a symbolic rejection of all the things about Crawley that had sent us on our journey.
The Three Imaginary Boys tour really started the ball rolling in the UK. Originally booked to play twenty-six gigs, we ended up playing thirty-two, mostly in clubs and small theaters or a college here and there. We had already played about forty gigs in 1979, including the stint at the Marquee, so people all across the UK were coming back to see us a second time.
Even though we had a proper PA, with Nigel; his assistant, Julian; and Mac doing some lighting, we still had to pack away all our own gear. It wasn’t quite the big time yet, but we were getting a good reputation as a live band. We played a lot of gigs in a blur of activity and built up quite a solid following of fans from the ground up. It was a way of doing things in a grassroots fashion that stood us in good stead for the future.
The tour was originally scheduled to end at the Lyceum Theatre on the Strand in London. I had seen other punk bands like Buzzcocks here, so to me it meant we had arrived. However, the promoter of the concert, not being apprised, apparently, of our burgeoning success, had decided to put us on a bill with The Ruts, who had a hit single with “Babylon’s Burning,” to ensure a full house. You couldn’t have put together two more diametrically opposed acts.
The Ruts’ lead singer, Malcolm Owen, took an approach that was the antithesis of Robert’s. He was all skinhead chic and punk swagger onstage, with his Docs and braces. Robert was punk in attitude, but his presentation was vastly different, as was noticed that night by journalist Mike Nicholls who dubbed us “the Pink Floyd of the new wave.” It’s true that we had started to pay attention to the way the lights and other elements of the stage might be used to present ourselves, and in Mac we had found a very capable ally.
Gradually, we introduced different color combinations, using blue lights and white strobes as opposed to the red and orange that was typical of rock gigs. We also had smoke and a little dry ice on-stage. We were aware that we didn’t really move about the stage like some other acts, but The Cure’s sound was somewhat introspective, so we presented a spectacle with our light show.
Looking at the bill for the Lyceum gig, I wondered how we would be perceived by The Ruts’ hard-core fans. I shouldn’t have worried. Like he did everyone else, Robert charmed the frenzied hordes—much to the chagrin of Malcolm Owen.
In this maelstrom of activity, however, the seeds of discontent were being sown. Touring with Michael was not that easy for Robert. Although they could talk to each other and carry on a conversation, they weren’t really friends in the way that Robert and I were. They didn’t socialize much when I wasn’t around to facilitate matters, which was getting to be both a problem for them and a headache for me.
Robert and I were always able to laugh or get animated or upset at the same things, but Michael was not like that. He always kept his thoughts to himself.
After the tour, we started to plan our next move. Our friend Frankie Bell from Horley had always wanted to make a record. He wasn’t a musician as such, but he was part of our crew and had always wanted to be a singer, so we thought we could help by writing him a couple of songs to sing. We also thought that by doing so we might be able to kill two birds with one stone.
Robert and I had hung out with Simon Gallup quite a bit at the pub in Horley, and we liked him and got on with him. It seemed natural that we might invite him to play on the record we were thinking of doing with Frankie. It also crossed our minds that if at some point in the future Michael wasn’t the bass player in The Cure, maybe Simon could become the bassist of choice for us. We asked Simon to come along and play on the Cult Hero single we recorded with Frankie, but in the back of our minds it was a kind of informal audition.
We all had a great time playing together. Besides the drums I even did some drunken back-up vocals. I don’t think the lighthearted aspect of the recording was lost on Robert. It was a lot of fun playing with Simon, something that had been missing from our gigs on tour.
We did our first gigs in Europe at the end of July 1979. Having only been out of the UK on a couple of school trips, I had what was termed a visitor’s passport: a single-page cardboard document that got me around Western Europe for a year.
Now that I was going to travel further afield, I felt I should upgrade to a full blue passport. Back then the British passport still listed the holder’s job on the front page. I filled in the application and put “musician” under occupation, which felt incredible. I paid the extra fee to have it expedited as we were leaving soon. I got it just a couple of days before we set off for the Netherlands and our first gigs outside of the UK.
We boarded the ferry at Harwich and settled into the trip to the Hook of Holland. From there it was a three-hour drive to the festival in Sterrebos just outside of Groningen.
As the ferry docked at the Dutch port, I stepped off and walked up to the customs control queue.
“Next!” A large, round border guard motioned to me to come forward. “Passport, please.”
I gave him my new passport and he opened it and took a long, hard look, first at my face then back at the passport. For a moment I panicked slightly, wondering if I’d done something wrong. It was hard to tell from his inscrutable face. Then the reason for his close attention materialized. With an accusing digit he pointed first at the passport details and then at my face.
“Musician? Ha! You have drugs!”
He stabbed his finger at the blue pages harder now.
I’d just turned twenty, and while I’m not sure what my boyish demeanor indicated to him, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that I was an opium eater. Not unreasonably, I muttered a feeble, “No sir, no drugs.”
Eventually he could see I was no Keith Richards and let me go. He returned the blue passport and sent me off with a desultory wave of his hand, having made a young English musician quake in his boots for a few minutes. Bastard.
I wondered if this was setting the tone for touring outside of England. The thing about The Cure was that although we were very English, we were open to new experiences and trying to live life fully. We wanted to see the world and all it had to offer.
We arrived in a very gloomy Groningen under a lowering sky. The tiny stage was set up in a park on the edge of town. We were due to play late in the afternoon. As it was summer, there was still some light as we walked onstage. I have to admit that we were apprehensive. Would they like us? Did they know any of our songs?
We needn’t have worried—that was the day we discovered that music is a universal language. The Dutch audience took us into their hearts, and even though it was pissing down with rain while we played, we didn’t care. In fact, we were so enamored with the whole affair that when the promoter asked us about playing a second gig later that night we jumped at the chance.
“Just show us the place!”
He took us to what seemed like a secondary school gym about a ten-minute drive from the festival. A couple of hours later, we had performed our second-ever European gig, all in the space of a few hours. We felt elated. Then the promoter broke the news to us.
“I don’t really have the money to pay for that second show, but if you want to hit Amsterdam on your way home I can get you a hotel for the night so you don’t have to rush and get the night boat home.”
A hotel! In Amsterdam! This was an added bonus. Although we had stayed in a few hotels on the UK tour when it was too far to drive home, these hotels weren’t in towns quite as glamorous as Amsterdam.
A couple of hours later we were in the heart of the city. With our first European gigs under our belts we were very happy. The promoter pulled the van onto one of the little canal roads that circle the city center. It was a very charming place, and I saw a few names on storefronts I had heard of, like De Beers, the famous diamond dealers. I expected the hotel would be just as grand.
We drove across a small bridge and the promoter pulled the van over to the side of the canal.
“Okay, guys, just go around that corner there and you’ll see the hotel. It’s all paid for. Just say your name to the, er, owner and have a great sleep.”
He hurriedly started up the van and waved at us as he drove off at an indecent speed for the small canal roads. He was a local, and probably knew his way around like the back of his hand, I mused.
We went around the corner and walked down to the end of the alley to find a rather nondescript building. It didn’t look like a hotel. Then I saw the door with the clumsily scrawled “Hotel” in white dripping house paint. Surely this wasn’t the place. We pushed open the door and discovered a winding circular wooden staircase going up for several stories. As we passed one landing, an elderly man came out of a door.
“You are The Cure, yes?”
We nodded in the affirmative.
“Floor five,” he said, and handed us the key attached to a rather large rubber ball.
We ascended a couple more flights and found the only door on the floor. Opening the door we were assaulted by a strong odor of what can only be described as eau de urinal. We pushed into the room and found several cots with scratchy gray blankets on them and the source of the smell: an open sewer pipe running the entire length of the room. The overall effect was that of a Second World War POW camp, which, considering the location, it might well have been at some point in time, for all we knew.
We weren’t drunk enough yet to tolerate the awful stench, so we came up with a very reasonable plan.
“Let’s go to a café and get plastered,” I suggested. “It’s the only way we’ll be able to sleep here tonight.” “What a splendid idea, Lol,” Robert agreed. We proceeded to get properly pissed.
Robert had met Steven Severin, the bassist for Siouxsie and the Banshees, at a gig in London, and they hit it off straightaway. That started what I view as a sort of diversion therapy for Robert for a few years.
It was always hard for Robert to reconcile the overt commercialism of the music business with the artistic side. On the one hand, he instinctively knew that The Cure was worth something and had definite value. He was very protective of that and wouldn’t let anyone take advantage of us. On the other hand, he did not really want to do things just for their commercial value. That was not his driving force. He was (and still is) an artist who wants to experience life and live with an intensity that he finds fulfilling. Money and fame were not the point. Every so often he would relieve the pressure that was building up from the record company and commercial success in general by changing course dramatically. To my mind that’s the genius of Robert Smith: to live a life on his own terms while making a living out of it too.
He always said when we were younger that he didn’t want to have a job where he would have to get up every morning and go to work. He wanted to be more self-determined than that. It was not that he didn’t want to work; he just didn’t see the purpose of working at something he didn’t particularly like for someone else’s ends. He’s still like that, but he’s also somebody who has always worked very hard at what he believes in.
Although we had come on the end of the punk revolution and people really wanted to label The Cure “post-punk,” it never felt like that to us. Certainly, we had grown up just a few miles from the heart of the storm, so we absorbed the influences gradually, and not quite at the frantic change of pace that was going on in the capital. This suited us fine, and it was true to our overall temperament. When Robert found something that worked he would stick with it.
He was always a most methodical person. This worked well for us overall. Although it took some time to get the band going, it had lasting value because Robert had thought it through, slowly and deliberately.
The Join Hands tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees was quite a change for us as a band, and it was probably the beginning of the end for Michael in The Cure. The Banshees had somewhat different views and quite a different set of values from ours, which gave us something to gauge our own path by.
Robert and I both liked the Banshees’ music, and Siouxsie had an undeniable charisma. I always got on well with her and Severin. I admired Siouxsie because she had to deal with a lot of misogynist bullshit. She wouldn’t put up with disrespect from anyone, and I’ve seen her deck a couple of particularly annoying characters on more than one occasion. Rightly so.
However, it’s wrong to characterize her as an aggressive, hardcore punk. Siouxsie has a very caring, gentle side that doesn’t come across right away. For instance, she was always very supportive of girls we would meet on the road who were trying to forge their own way in the world artistically or otherwise. In that way I believe she was the first true punk feminist.
After a couple of warm-up dates in Bournemouth and Aylesbury, we went over to Belfast. The gig in Aylesbury had been quite chaotic, as a bunch of skinheads turned up to try and cause trouble. It’s a strange fact that almost all of the violence at UK gigs back then was in the cities surrounding London. Places just like Crawley.
As we rolled into Belfast off the ferry, it was obvious that we had entered a war zone. Soldiers and policemen were roaming streets that were broken up by seriously bombed-out buildings. As we rounded the corner into the main city center, Parry pulled over and pointed to a policeman standing by a sentry box.
“Lol, go ask that copper the way to the Europa Hotel.”
“No problem,” I said, unbuckling the seat belt and walking briskly over to the policeman.
What I had not seen was that inside the sentry box was a fully outfitted British soldier with rifle in hand. As I rushed up to the policeman the soldier not unreasonably thought this guy in all black might be some kind of threat. He wheeled around, pointing his weapon squarely at my midriff.
“Excuse me, officer,” I stammered. “Could you please direct us to the Europa Hotel?”
Hearing my south London accent, I think they realized I wasn’t coming to attack the sentry post and relaxed a little.
“Go about a mile down that way,” he pointed, “and you’ll see the Europa. It’s the building opposite the bombed-out pub.”
The Europa Hotel had a reputation as the “most bombed hotel in Europe,” having been targeted no fewer than twenty-eight times during the Troubles. I had also heard that bombs were hurled over the security fence with such frequency that the Europa had no rooms on the first four floors. Indeed, when we arrived at the security gate at the front of the hotel, there didn’t seem to be anything on the bottom floors that I could make out except the bar. I suppose the thinking was that if you’re drunk, you’re less likely to mind a little bomb now and then.
The gig itself was going to be a little problematic, as the road crew had fallen asleep in Liverpool, and so we didn’t have any gear. It was then that we met one of the true heroes of the punk movement: Terri Hooley, who had started up Good Vibrations from his record shop and turned it into the hippest label in Belfast. Good Vibrations was responsible for The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” among many others.
Terri was a friend of Parry’s, so he got one of his other bands, The Outcasts, to lend us their instruments for the gig. The gig went well, even though we had to go on after the Banshees, because there was such a delay starting. Thankfully, some of the audience stayed to watch us. Later, at the bar of the Europa, I sat with Terri and tried to drink enough Guinness that I wouldn’t care about the possibility of being blown up. He calmed my worries.
“If you haven’t done anything to anybody you’ll be fine, Lol. They’ll leave you alone.”
This seemed pretty reasonable to me and we continued chatting, or rather I did, because at some point I realized that although it looked like Terri was squinting at me with one eye open, his head was resting on the back of his comfortable seat and he was in fact fast asleep! Later I found out he had lost an eye as a child, and it was the glass replacement that had convinced me he was still awake.
At least he didn’t take it out and pop it in my beer, which I hear he liked to do sometimes. Terri Hooley, a lovely man and a true punk original.
We traveled to Aberdeen the next day, where we were in for another radical change. I should have realized it was going to be an unusual couple of days, as we pulled into the hotel to find the place swarming with policemen and still more soldiers. What the hell had happened?
It seemed that Margaret Thatcher, the then prime minister, was staying at our hotel. Hence the large security presence. Unfortunately, that meant we couldn’t check into our room right away. It was starting to feel like a police state.
We were directed to a spot at the back of the car park by a small hedge. I hadn’t been able to relieve myself since we’d got off the ferry from Belfast. As it was now early evening, I got out to pee next to the hedge under cover of darkness. As I luxuriated in the feeling of release, I noticed several small red dots surrounding me. Nonplussed, I looked up to the roof of the hotel where the lights seemed to be coming from. Then I spied them. Three or four police marksmen with their infrared sights trained on me!
It seemed my penis had gotten me into trouble yet again. I waved at them in a vague hope that they might see that what I was doing didn’t pose a threat to the prime minister’s security. It worked, as the red lights went off and nobody came to cart me off to jail.
Later that night, after we’d settled into the hotel, we discovered that politicians were much worse behaved than any rock band. Several drunken members of parliament were whisked out of the bar by various members of their staff very much the worse for wear. I made a mental note not to vote for any of that lot in the next election!
The next day there seemed to be a strange undercurrent when we arrived at the Capitol Theatre for the soundcheck. Where were Kenny Morris and John McKay, the Banshees’ drummer and guitarist respectively? They didn’t seem to be in the building, as Siouxsie and Severin did the soundcheck on their own.
It turned out that they had all been at a record-shop signing earlier that day and had had an argument with the owner about giving away free copies of the Join Hands album. Kenny and John stormed out of the signing and got on the next train back to London, leaving the tour in jeopardy.
We went on at our allotted time and played our set. Afterward, Dave Woods, the Banshees’ manager, came up to us.
“Do you think you guys could go back out and play some more songs? I don’t think the Banshees are going to be able to play tonight!”
Robert said that we would, and after Siouxsie and Severin went out and told the audience the bad news we went back on and played some rough versions of songs we were writing, most of which didn’t have lyrics yet. Then Siouxsie and Severin joined us onstage for an improvised version of their song “The Lord’s Prayer.” It was a very chaotic evening.
Later that night, we all hung out drinking, and Robert nobly said he would play guitar if they needed, and I offered my services too. We all wanted the tour to continue. However, for the moment, it was going precisely nowhere.
We went home and into the studio to record “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” which would be our final recording with Michael. We also slotted in a headlining gig at a new pop festival in front of 10,000 very enthusiastic Dutch fans. We were making our own inroads into Europe.
While we were recording, Siouxsie and Severin turned up to the studio to ask Robert if he would help them out by playing guitar for the final tour dates. They had a new drummer in Budgie from The Slits, so now they were ready to continue.
Continuing that tour was difficult for Michael and me, especially for Michael. I was naturally more easygoing with the Banshees than Michael, who could come across as standoffish. Although I suspect that had more to do with his deteriorating relationship with Robert than anything else.
I also took a more pragmatic approach to what was going on. Although I thought it must be tiring and mentally exhausting for Robert to have to play our gig and then turn around and play the Banshees’ set, I always felt in my heart of hearts that Robert’s real loyalty lay with what we were doing with The Cure. Even after the tour, when he got more involved with the Banshees, I never felt that he would end up in that camp forever and ever. He needed somewhere to put the stress he felt as leader of The Cure, and playing other people’s songs relieved him of that pressure.
The one thing that we did learn from the Banshees was to be far more assertive than we had been as we began doing business in the new world in which we found ourselves. Siouxsie and Severin had to struggle in the early days of punk to get the Banshees taken seriously, but they had quickly learned to assert their opinions, to inject their art into the equation, and it had worked. It took us a while to learn to be that insistent about our wants and needs. We were, after all, nice polite middle-class boys who had never been exposed to the cut and thrust of the nasty old music business.
Although the Banshees may have made all kinds of plans to keep Robert in the band, that wasn’t ever going to happen. I knew Robert too well. He needed to have his own thing, and the Banshees were never going to be that. He needed to be the captain of his own ship, not just a trusted lieutenant.
We were at the Smiths’ house back in Crawley when Robert presented a cassette for us to hear.
“These are some ideas I have for the next album,” he said as he inserted the tape in the player.
He asked me if I remembered that fucking awful night in Newcastle and I nodded. Robert had been in a fight with three businessmen inside our hotel lift on the Join Hands tour, while Michael and I were fast asleep. He was badly beaten but used the energy and pain from that night to write his feelings into songs for the next album.
“I got a lot of ideas that night and I’ve been working on them.”
With that he pressed play on the machine. As I listened, I was amazed by the minimal beauty of the songs. Some had lyrics, but not all of them. They were sparse sketches that he had done mostly using his guitar and the electric organ in our practice room. He utilized the rudimentary drum machine on the organ for rhythms and recorded it all on a small tape recorder. It was a departure brought on by our exposure to the bleeding edge of new music, like Wire and the Banshees. However, I felt that more than the Banshees, the real influence was Wire. Their subtly shifting minimal punk soundscapes were far more in line with what we were thinking and doing than the more bombastic drama of the Banshees. Lyrically, we were like neither of them, to my mind, but musically I see the connection with Wire.
As much as I liked the new songs, Michael was fairly noncommittal.
Inside this preview of what would become Seventeen Seconds, I heard a glacial sonic landscape that mirrored my own lonely feeling at the time. I don’t think Michael related to it on that level, so perhaps to him it felt like a step in the wrong direction. I felt he wanted to do something more melodic and intricate than the song fragments Robert played for us suggested. I, on the other hand, connected immediately, even though they were just skeletal ideas, the bones of the songs to come.
Underneath all of that, the real problem for us was that we were English boys from suburbia. Somewhere out there on the road things had changed for us, but we didn’t really have the emotional tools to deal with each other’s feelings in a constructive manner. Instead of talking about the different ways we felt about the songs, we kept the conversation polite and stuck to discussing their mechanics. We chose a very English way of dealing with our emotions: by not dealing with them at all. We figured if we ignored our problems, they would go away. This mindset was the biggest barrier to the continuity of The Cure as years went by. It destroyed far more than it created.
Before long the gulf between Robert and Michael had widened. If we had all been less emotionally stunted, perhaps we might have worked out our differences. Maybe it’s just a product of youth, and experience is the only way to get beyond that point.
In any case it fell to me to tell Michael about the rift that had opened up, and the fact that Robert felt like it wasn’t going to work out anymore. To his great credit, Michael has never held any kind of grudge about this with me. I think he realized this was inevitable, although it couldn’t have been easy. I know it wasn’t easy for me.
I also think that in a way it was a kind of relief. The pressure had built up so much in the preceding months that it was impossible to go on without some kind of change. This was the first time that I saw Robert’s stubborn side. I don’t think he planned Michael’s removal. I never believed he was as Machiavellian as that. But he definitely had an idea of the direction in which he wanted to take the band, and he was determined to stick to his plan until someone proved him wrong.
He did call Michael after I had made the first inroad and told him that if he wanted he could keep The Cure name and we would start a new band. It didn’t turn out that way, obviously.
Robert and I went around to Simon’s house and asked Simon if he wanted to join the band. Of course he did. We knew that he would fit in well with us both musically and socially.
We thought we should change things a little. We were aware that Parry had this image of us as a three-piece power pop trio and we definitely wanted to disabuse him, or anybody else, of that viewpoint. From the very early days, Robert always defied expectations. Not in a bloody-minded way, but to keep himself vibrant and connected to what he was doing. He’s never been one to sit and rest on his laurels. That would be anathema to him.
Robert and I discussed what we could do to make things different. When we listened to the Seventeen Seconds demos Robert had made, it seemed like a good idea to introduce some other instruments to the songs, as they were almost begging to be colored in a little. One of Simon’s friends was Matthieu “Matty” Hartley, who played keyboards. I had seen Matty around town with various different colored hairstyles, and both Robert and I thought he could add something to the songs. We wanted Simon to feel at ease within The Cure and figured that if his friend came along it would make him more comfortable in the band. There was bound to be a little fallout from Simon’s old band for leaving to play with us, and we thought if he had his mate with him he would probably weather the flak a little better. The music scene was changing, moving forward from straight-ahead punk thrash and into new territories. We felt we were at the forefront of whatever was coming next.
So we had a new band and some new songs. It seemed like a good idea to put the two together and go play some live gigs for people to get a feel for what we could do. We went on the road with our labelmates The Passions and The Associates on the “Future Pastimes” tour. I think that’s the reason Seventeen Seconds is such a fully realized album. We had fresh new musical minds working on the songs, as well as time to figure out what worked and what didn’t in a live setting. We began with some shows in the UK. It was the first time we had played songs that were not fully formed for quite a while. We’d been playing the same set during the Three Imaginary Boys and Join Hands tours, so it was refreshing to have new songs to play and experiment with.
Shortly after the UK leg of the tour, we were on a ferry, going off to conquer Europe proper. The wave had crested for punk and we were going to be the new sound. We could feel it. The tour was hard but great; I felt people got what we were doing. However, as I would soon find out, it wasn’t to be all joyous good times.
We played in Eindhoven in Holland for the first time as a fourpiece. Afterward, it seemed appropriate to celebrate, which we did. I drank so much red wine I felt like I wanted to die. Somehow I ended up lying in my shower with the water running over my face, trying to make sense of what had happened to me. I felt so bad from drinking. It didn’t seem like fun anymore, but I also didn’t seem to be able to stop. It was very scary, but I didn’t see the connection between my alcohol intake and that dark, depressed feeling I carried around with me afterward, which made me want to drink even more. The chaos and pain kept building and building until it exploded. Once again, Robert came to my rescue.
I think it’s called a “glassing.” That’s the common term for what happened to me. I was not overly concerned with definition; rather, I was acutely aware of a sharp pain on the left side of my face just below my eye. I instinctively put my hand up to the place where the pain emanated from, finding a warm, sticky ooze on my fingers combined with broken bits of something crystalline. It took a few seconds for it to dawn on me that my attacker had smashed a Pilsner glass into the side of my face, which had then peeled open like an onion under a paring knife. I glanced downward to see my once pure-white shirt wet with brilliant red blood. In shock and anger, I sobered almost instantly to the realization of what had just been done to me. I grabbed my assailant by the shoulders and flung him backward, furiously jettisoning him away from me and back into the dark orbit of the club.
Propelled by hands I couldn’t see, I staggered toward the small bathroom, where, as I looked upward into the hazy, mottled mirror, an awful picture awaited. My facial features were contorted and swirled in red like a Francis Bacon portrait. They were almost howling at me from my murky reflection. I dabbed a proffered towel on my stinging face to staunch the blood flow, but soon a bloom of red poked through this too.
“Shit!” was all I could manage.
This required a bit more attention than I could give it. Suddenly Geil, the local record company guy, spun into the bathroom with me.
“Come, Lol. I’ll take you to the ER. You need to get that fixed up,” he said. I glanced up from where I was watching drops of red fall into the white porcelain sink.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I managed to croak under my breath. I was in shock and shutting down a little. Geil anticipated my next question.
“Robert knocked that asshole clean out! Security have him now and he’s going straight to jail, I promise you.”
Robert, my boyhood friend, teenage companion, and now adult defender, had meted out punk justice and protected me. Once again.
We raced through the damp, dark streets of Ghent, Belgium, in Geil’s car to the ER. Once we were inside the brightly lit hospital, it became evident just how much blood had spilled from my slashed face. One of the crew had rustled up a T-shirt from merchandising for me, so I removed my blood-soaked shirt and deposited it in the nearest bin.
It had started out as a celebration of the end of the tour. The Cure, together with our road crew, had been invited to Ghent’s only alternative nightclub to drink and dance the night away. It was a great chance to wind down after a long, arduous year of touring. We had played an exhausting 125 gigs that year. It was the night before Christmas Eve, and we were to go home at last the following day. I had been talking to a couple of Belgian girls who had been at the gig, and was getting pleasantly drunk, when a swaying individual to my side had grabbed hold of my drink and taken a hearty slurp from it. Although I was somewhat irritated by his oafish behavior, I chose to ignore it. The record company was paying for the drinks, so what did I care? I just ordered another one. However, the oaf had other thoughts and was now turning his drunken attention to my companions. He roughly pulled one of them toward him, at which point I intervened and pushed him away. He fell awkwardly and drunkenly backward over an empty table, glasses flying everywhere.
Then it happened. He sprang madly to his feet and grabbed a glass, and I felt a quick, sharp punch as the glass exploded into my face. It took a second or two to register just what had occurred. It was like a car accident in that way, and then reality returned and slapped me very hard indeed.
The sight of the doctor brought me back from my waiting-room reverie.
“Okay,” he said in perfectly balanced English. “Looks like you’ve been in a war! Let me take a look, please.”
He peered at my mangled face and brushed away the hair that had matted into the blood.
“Is it bad?” I asked.
“I think we can fix you. It will look like you’ve been in an old-fashioned fencing duel, but that’s okay for a man’s face—gives him some character, no?” He laughed a little nervously.
I didn’t think it was very funny.
“You’re very lucky. It missed your eye by about a centimeter.”
I pondered what I’d just heard. I was worried and suddenly very cold. I shivered uncontrollably as I followed Geil and the doctor into a sort of surgical room.
“Lie on the table on your back, please.”
I complied and a sheet was placed over my face like I had just died. I noticed a small hole in the cover through which I could just make out the doctor’s hand with a pair of forceps. He pulled broken bits of the beer glass from my cheek.
“I’m going to give you a shot for the pain, but you’re probably fairly numb anyway.”
I couldn’t help but notice the strong smell of alcohol in the air. I figured it was probably me rather than the doctor, or maybe the solution that he used to irrigate my shredded face. The first of fifteen stitches pierced my torn flesh. Mercifully, the shot he’d administered worked and the pain was dulled. It still felt like someone was pushing fishing line through my cheek. Which was, I suppose, fairly close to the truth. I relaxed and let the medic do his work. At least I was alive, right?
“Bloody hell! Is he dead?”
I came out of my narcotic fugue to hear the voice of Elvis asking the doctor about my apparent demise. Not “The King,” I hasten to add, but our roadie of the same name. That would have been way too much Demerol even for me.
“No, Elvis, I’m not bloody dead,” I rasped from beneath the covering sheet. I didn’t blame him for thinking I’d died. It probably looked like the doctor was working on a corpse. I felt cold, bruised, and much, much more sober.
“I’m so glad you’re alive, Lol!” Elvis exclaimed in his broad Yorkshire accent. Our crew was like an extension of the band. We had spent so much time with them over the past few months, crammed together in hotels and smaller backstage areas where the gig was the only thing we were all focused on, that we had become brothers of a sort.
Eventually the doctor finished his expert needlework and I was encouraged to sit up. I felt a little woozy at first. He handed me a small mirror in which to inspect his handiwork. This struck me as perhaps a little cruel, but I was still in enough shock to take the mirror and look. Like cuts from a fencing foil, a couple of straight slashes to my left cheek were now held together with black threads barely visible through translucent tape. The doctor’s handiwork was obscured by redness and swelling. At this point I sensed the slightly nagging, irascible voice rising up inside me: I needed a drink.
I bade farewell to the good doctor and thanked him for his work. Geil, Elvis, and I walked out the doors of the ER.
“Where to, Lol? The hotel?”
My voice was a little hesitant at first but found its confidence. “Umm, no, I think I’ll join everybody back at the club.”
My companions looked a little dumbfounded, but Geil quietly started his car and we pulled out of the car park past the big red neon sign that read “Hospitaal” in that double-voweled Flemish way and back onto the two-lane motorway toward the center of Ghent and the club.
As I walked in I heard gasps from various people. I ordered a drink and soon everything was like before. Sort of. Looking across the bar, I caught sight of my rather macabre features in the mirror at the back of the room. The bruises were starting to show. Tomorrow I was bound to look much worse. I decided to drink until I no longer cared how I looked or felt. And so I did. It was three in the morning on December 24, 1979.
Merry bloody Christmas, everybody!