With Seventeen Seconds we combined elements of music we really admired and gave it our own twist. Both Robert and I really loved David Bowie’s Low album, and Robert was also a fan of Nick Drake’s music. Listening to it years later I can hear those influences in Seventeen Seconds, but more than that, I hear Robert’s musical genius coming through for the first time.
Once we had all the elements in place, we went into the studio. We worked again with Mike Hedges, who by now understood our methods and drives and complemented them perfectly. Hedges was open to new ways of recording and constructing music. He would help us in myriad ways, and I know that we all found him very encouraging and creative.
We still didn’t have much money, so recording time was at a premium. We experimented, and at one point we even tried swapping our instruments with each other to see what would happen. Those tracks weren’t used, which I think tells you what it sounded like. We slept in the old Morgan Studio 1 for some sessions, which was kind of creepy, as it used to be a church. Above the new ceiling was an old, stained-glass roof. When the studio was dark it was visible in a ghostly kind of glow. At 4 a.m. it looked almost otherworldly.
It was a very happy time for me and Robert, as we had a new band with Simon and Matty, and Parry had given us the freedom to record what we wanted. We all helped in the production. When Robert was singing, we were all in the control room giving our input. It felt very cohesive for a while. We were really alive with the music, and I know that Robert felt especially good about being able to produce the album ourselves.
Matty was a competent player but he generally wanted to add more colors to the palette than Robert did. If Seventeen Seconds was going to have a shade, it was going to be very muted, almost monochromatic. At the beginning, it wasn’t such a problem, as we managed to get what we needed for the songs to work their hypnotic magic. Matty went along with it. Eventually, however, he would feel constrained by this minimalist approach.
It’s obvious to me now that one of the main things I got out of being in The Cure was that emotional release and understanding of where I was spiritually at any particular time. The lyrics have always spoken to me in a very helpful and healing way. To me it was our diary. The things we wrote about were personal yet applicable to all, which makes them almost sacred when I reflect on them. Personally sacred, if you like.
In the early days, when Robert had difficulty finishing the lyrics to a song, I would always help out with a sheet here and there of my own words. Even though I was as emotionally damaged as anyone else coming from our time could be, the lyrics had an effect on me, too, despite seeing them come together bit by bit. To me that was the real magic. That was the real purpose, if there ever was one, of The Cure: to serve as the template for a kind of emotional therapy we created with our sounds and fury.
Years later, when people would try to hold us responsible for someone’s depression or even suicide, it seemed to me that they were missing the point. We created these songs to help alleviate those same feelings in ourselves, a horror of the world that we could cope with only by singing and playing our particular music. That in a nutshell is where our English self-loathing and emotional repression really helped create the path forward. I think we were pioneers in that, especially in helping other repressed young men. I have always been both humbled and amazed by the number of people who have expressed that very thought to me over the years. It was certainly one reason I kept in the back of my mind for keeping on when things were grim.
It’s weird to me that all of the various members of The Cure over the years, almost without exception, fell into a category of people halfway between introvert and extrovert. Ambivert is the term. I suppose it describes nearly every one of us at one time or another, but in The Cure I really feel that we were the extreme version of that. Especially Robert. He was either very social and extroverted or entirely the opposite. I believe to a certain extent to perform in front of people you have to have elements of both; otherwise you simply can’t do it.
I’ve never felt stage fright before going onstage, just an excitement to get out there. I believe it helps to reflect and to be introspective at times, but sometimes spontaneity is the better path.
Seventeen Seconds is the first album by The Cure where we were able to start communicating our feelings. Even the cover art, which Robert demanded to have input on, reflects this. The photos of the band were all blurred, which we felt correctly mirrored what we felt our fans should take from the album. We wanted people to focus on the music, the actual songs, not our appearance. For the first time in our career we had been correctly represented both in the album artwork and in the sonic territory of the music. It felt good, and I think if that had been the last the world had seen or heard of The Cure, then we would have made our mark. It meant that much to us.
If there was ever a spark of genius in Parry’s management of The Cure, it was that day in early 1980 when he listened to Robert telling him he didn’t need to come to the studio for the recording, that we could do it ourselves. He realized that by taking his own ego out of the equation and letting us get on with it, he would start us on our way to a place we might never have reached otherwise. I truly believe that. I think Parry understood (or at least hoped) that the band was like a plant that you might kill if you fussed over it too much with overcare, but that if left alone, we just might flourish. Although he would still drop by the studio to hear what we were up to, he rightly surmised that too much attention might kill off the beautiful flowers about to burst forth.
Our first-ever tour of the United States, in 1980, was nearly our last.
First of all, we had trouble getting in. After landing at JFK in New York we were all waiting to go through the usual immigration process. Although things had obviously improved since Ellis Island, I think our appearance and general demeanor was probably disturbing to the “regular Joes” manning the border posts.
“So what are youse guys doin’ in Noo Yawk?” The large man in uniform holding all our passports in his hands motioned to the four of us.
“We’re a band. We’re playing at Hurrah’s,” said Robert.
“A band, really? So what are youse called?” he eyed us suspiciously.
“The Cure,” Robert said.
“Liqueur? Hmmm . . .” he rolled the word around in his mouth like a bad taste. Then the coup de grâce.
“So are youse a faggot band, then?”
Of course we had not the slightest idea what he meant. Popular in wartime rationing, a faggot was a meat dish in England. Is that what he meant? He saw our puzzled faces and offered, “Well, seeing as youse all have earrings in your ears!”
He elbowed his compatriot in the ribs, who chuckled at these effeminate-looking English guys.
After a minute of inspection, he handed everyone their passports—except mine, which he placed in a large red folder.
“Mr. Tollhouse, come with me.”
I assumed he meant me and duly followed. Looking behind me I could see the concerned look on Robert’s face. I was led into a small room with a glass partition through which I could see the baggage hall. The large man opened an even larger book on a table in front of him and scanning the pages he found the relevant section. It seemed one of my youthful indiscretions outside the Maid of Sussex pub while I was still a minor had registered on the US government’s radar. Looking up, he pronounced his sentence.
“Well, we let those other limeys in, The Beatles, so I guess we can let you in, too!”
He closed the book firmly and handed back my passport. A little bemused by this sequence of events but grateful nonetheless, I left to join everyone collecting their suitcases on the other side. Robert had a grin on his face while Parry’s wore a look of relief.
Several days later, someone explained the faggot reference. Aha! As Oscar Wilde would have it, “Two nations divided by a common language.”
We drove into NYC in our rented car and the grandeur of the concrete avenues and buildings overwhelmed us all.
“It looks just like the movies,” I said as Robert slid further into his seat, sunglasses firmly pushed over his eyes as he looked out of the window and took it all in. We arrived at our destination: a small hotel on the edge of Central Park with a coffee shop on the ground floor. We had made it to America.
Having dropped our bags off at the hotel, we walked outside to explore this brave new world.
Growing up in England, we knew little about the United States. Most of what we did know came from the American television shows that had made it to the UK, most notably Dallas and The Rockford Files, with James Garner. We marveled at the fact that Jim Rockford was able to live in a caravan on the beach by himself and had an answering machine. Very cool, but totally outside of our experience in cold old England. Dallas was even more alien to us. Strangely enough, we met Larry Hagman, the actor who played the character J.R., many years later, on the French TV show Champs-Élysées. He probably viewed us as aliens, in our colorful man dresses!
The other touchstone was Marvel comics. They were readily available in England in the 1970s. The stories were the usual good vs. evil stuff and often set in the very city we were in, but what intrigued me and Robert as teens were the adverts in the back for items unavailable or unknown to us then in the UK. Twinkies, for one. So as our first foray into America we set out on a mission to find and consume a Twinkie. It didn’t take long to locate one or figure out why the “Twinkie defense” was used as a mitigating factor in the Harvey Milk murder case. Many years later Robert told me he still had one from our first trip in his kitchen drawer. Perfectly preserved!
New York in the early 1980s, the New York of Mayor Ed Koch, was not beautiful. Run-down, covered in graffiti, and plagued by violence and crime, it was a gritty place, to say the least. We had arrived a few months before John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota by Mark Chapman. The era of Peace and Love was definitely over and, as in the UK, the punk scene had emerged from the maelstrom. You can see the tension in Allan Tannenbaum’s beautiful photo of The Cure standing on Columbus Avenue, being eyed uncomprehendingly by some of New York’s finest out on their beat.
The first gig we ever played in the United States was not in Manhattan but at Emerald City in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on the edge of Philadelphia, on April 10, 1980. To us it could have been Mars. It was that different from our own experience. A former disco club, its patrons spent most of the gig with their plaid-shirted backs to us while nursing their drinks. Robert bravely tried to rally the troops.
“We’re The Cure and this is our first time playing in America!”
Although it could have been a disaster, we won them over eventually. Polite applause turned into whoops and hollers by the end of the set. It was a very small, almost minuscule beginning to what was to become The Cure’s huge success in America.
In Washington, DC, we experienced the sharper side of American life. We were shocked when we pulled into town and realized it was divided into the haves and have-nots, ghettoized in a way we had not experienced before. It was an eye-opening experience. In London it appeared to us that all the races mixed together, but here it felt distinctly different to us in a way that was immediately apparent.
We stopped at a fast-food restaurant to get lunch. Since arriving in the United States we’d been overwhelmed by the sheer number of options for everything, so naturally we wanted to try as much as possible. Our bus pulled up and we went inside to eat. Afterward, Simon and I were standing outside the place for a minute or two chatting and smoking. A man walked up to us, pointed at Simon, and hissed, “You’re on my death list, man!”
Simon turned to me as he hadn’t quite heard what was said.
“Lol, what did he want?”
“I don’t know, Si. Directions?” I said, diplomatically.
I didn’t want a street fight to erupt right here in unknown territory. We got back on the bus. I felt a chill. It seemed here in the United States things were pretty polarized. You were either with us on the bus or off the bus.
Back in New York City we played our first gig to the New York cognoscenti. There was a difference in how the UK and US punk scenes evolved and this was evident at that first Hurrah gig. In the United Kingdom, punk was more of a cultural/political movement—it had to be, given the circumstances—whereas in the United States it felt more like a social/fashion happening. It was confusing initially for both sides. There was a heckler who shouted something strange about “pissing on Portobello,” and Robert answered him in a perfectly reasonable way.
“We don’t understand. We’re from England,” or words to that effect. We played some songs from the first album and Seventeen Seconds. By the third gig I felt like we had weeded out the people who came and didn’t understand or like us, and I remember the last gig being pretty good, like there could be something here for us. After the gig I sat in the bar and then got up and danced to “Ready, Steady, Go” by Billy Idol, a new transplant to NYC apparently. Looking in the mirrors around the club dance floor, I felt a certain synchronicity.
Of course, this being New York, we had our first brush with the celebrity circuit. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, along with David Johansen of The New York Dolls, turned up to our first-night gig at Hurrah’s. I had a badge for Seventeen Seconds on my lapel that had been abbreviated to “17 Secs” to make it fit.
“17 Secs?” David Johansen said as he peered at the badge. “They call me sex seventeen!” he grinned at me, and I laughed. It broke the ice somewhat. Gradually, it seemed we were getting to know the United States on equal terms. The relationship was to be further cemented in Boston. We played the Underground, a club that was in the basement of a building owned by Boston University. It was a strange venue because it was an L-shaped corridor, with the stage area at one end of the L-shape, which meant that half the audience could hear us but weren’t able to see us play.
Here we had our introduction to some new American music in the shape of Mission of Burma, whom we immediately liked. We felt a kinship with them. This meant more to us than meeting Debbie Harry and Blondie, or even The New York Dolls. To my mind they were the precursors of bands like Sonic Youth. They were pioneers.
The gig was filmed by a guy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a rather unique setup, with three cameras filming in separate primary colors and one in black and white. Viewing the footage many years later, I am utterly amazed at how young we were. After the Boston gig, we went back to the film guy’s rooms at MIT and viewed the stuff he had shot that evening. It had a very surreal quality with the four cameras being mixed together. We watched it for a very long time and drank the rest of the night away, toasting our first US tour.
Sometime later I looked out the window of the room and noticed that the sun was coming up. We decided we should get back to our hotel, as in a few hours we had to drive down to New York to catch the plane home. Incredibly, “A Forest,” the first single from Seventeen Seconds, was on its way to becoming a minor hit, and we were required back in the UK to play on Top of the Pops.
As we careened unsteadily along the road in our rented car, we realized we had a flat tire. We pulled over and decided that we had better change it, as we still had to drive the two-hundred-odd miles to New York later that day. We all piled out of the vehicle and proceeded to take the tire off. Somewhere we found the jack and took the nuts off the wheel. Manhandling the spare over to fit on the wheel took quite a bit of dexterity, considering how wasted and tired we were.
“I’ll put it on, don’t worry,” I heard Robert say, a little slurred. Then I looked over and noticed he was putting the hubcap back on by kicking the edge with his boot. Unfortunately, his thumb was still under the hubcap, but for some reason he didn’t notice.
“Shit,” he shrieked. “That hurts!” and he proudly displayed his bloodied left thumb.
We all piled back into the car and drove to the hotel for a few hours of uneasy slumber. The alarm rang in my room and I summoned all the energy I had left and stumbled into the shower to try and wake up for the drive to NYC and then home. Miraculously, the tire on the rental car was still inflated, so Parry slipped behind the wheel and we started the four-hour or so drive to the airport. Pushed together in the back seat, we all slumbered on and off for the next hour or so.
“I’m going to stop for petrol, boys.” Parry’s New Zealand–accented voice brought us back to the present day.
We pulled over at the next gas station.
“Excuse me, chief.” For some reason, Parry always called people he didn’t know “chief.” Perhaps it was a Kiwi thing.
“How far to the airport?”
“Which airport would that be, sir?”
“JFK, of course,” Parry replied, slightly irritated by the question.
“Well, I’d say you’re a little off course, sir. This is Cape Cod.”
In our somnambulant state, we had taken a wrong turn on the highway and ended up on the little peninsula that is Cape Cod. Now we would have to race down to New York to catch our plane back to the UK in time to play on TOTP. It wasn’t the last time we would take a wrong turn in the life of The Cure. It was April 21, 1980, and Robert’s twenty-first birthday.
We arrived at the BBC Television Centre jet-lagged and hung-over. We had traveled back on the plane with our old festival buddies The Specials, who had just been in New York themselves, which of course meant a few drinks here and there.
Any band that has ever played TOTP will tell you how mind-numbingly boring the day of the actual show is. Endless rehearsals for lights and cameras start at a very ungodly hour, and you spend most of your day confined to a small, bare, utilitarian dressing room somewhere in the bowels of the Television Centre. It’s no wonder that at 5 p.m. when the bar opens upstairs, everybody makes a beeline for it.
I think TOTP was one of those venerable old institutions by this point. Like the Queen, largely irrelevant to the average citizen but still acknowledged for old times’ sake and a certain “Britishness.” You simply had to do it despite the fact it was so old-fashioned and not part of what you really wanted to express with your music. As Robert pointed out to me, “If we don’t do it some other rubbish band will, so I suppose we should.”
Quite right.
I think for our first performance we came off quite well. It was always mimed. I think only The Who and The Clash managed to persuade the BBC to let them play live. I have the stone-faced look of indifference I was using at the time behind the kit, and Simon looks suitably hunky and young. There was a large bandage on Robert’s left thumb from the accident with the car hubcap in Boston. If you look closely you can see it in the footage, incongruously sliding up and down the fretboard. After he had been to the doctor to get it seen to, Robert told me the doctor had had to drill a hole through the nail to let the pressure out. It looked painful, so it was a good thing that we didn’t actually have to play.
This was our first time at TOTP. We would be back for quite a few more performances. One particular encounter there sends shivers down my spine even now. We were there to perform “The Walk,” and Porl, Andy Anderson, and myself were standing around the edges of the studio when somebody crept up behind us.
“Oh, sons of Dracula! You are looking ten thousand percent!” Eyeing us up and down was none other than the alleged old sex offender himself, Jimmy Savile.