The Cure became an international band in 1980 and 1981. Of the 250-plus gigs we played during that period, the vast majority of them were outside the United Kingdom.
The Cure appealed to so many different types of people around the world because we were never tied to a particular fashion. There have been attempts to pigeonhole us and make us into a kind of brand, but these attempts have failed miserably. I don’t think you can say that we represent one idea at all.
The beginning of the Seventeen Seconds tour in the UK took us to one of the coldest spots in the country: Cromer, West Runton Pavilion. Even the name conjures up old shipping forecasts and freezing seas. I vividly recall sitting in the ancient seaside hotel after our gig, seriously thinking about chopping up the furniture to make a fire. It was that cold. The kind of deep wet English chill that makes your bones creak.
When we got up to Newcastle, something seemed to be stirring in the ether, an undercurrent of violence that we just couldn’t quite shake. Halfway through our set it was obvious we would have to do something about the annoying guy in the audience who kept throwing things and upsetting everyone else.
I heard a clang as something hard hit Robert’s guitar neck and he spun round and gave me an exasperated look as he firmly put the guitar down. I knew that look from our early days. It meant we were going to have to engage again with some idiot. I really wanted to believe that all of that stuff was behind us now. Whenever trouble popped up, it just made us more determined to be heard. I got off the drum seat, and together with Robert and Simon and one or two of the crew, we chased the interloper out of the university hall.
With the English leg over, we were off to Europe again to consolidate our success there. We went to Rotterdam and had a fine old time in the appropriately named Heavy Club. The thing about touring is that most of the time is spent either traveling or hanging about waiting to travel. As a young band, we spent a great deal of time looking for diversions. Nowadays, I’m quite content to read a good book or some such, but back then the only reasonable (or maybe unreasonable) diversion was to drink in our hotel or go out to drink, which was why we had found ourselves at this nightclub. It was getting very heavy in there. The drinks were flowing even though it was very early in the morning. I think Horace Panter and a few other members of The Specials were there as well. We had become friendly with the band, having played a few festivals on the same bill. As we were veterans of the same wars, so to speak, we had a bond of sorts.
Once again, I was searching for a place to pee in a crowded club, and I was having trouble making out where the lavatories were located. I stumbled into a small room that looked like it might be the toilet. I looked for a light switch, but no luck. In the darkness I decided it felt right to pee even though I couldn’t see the urinal. It certainly smelled like one, so I decided to relieve myself.
At that precise point a warm glow infused the room from a small electric light above me and a woman’s voice said, “Hey, not here! This is not the toilets. You must leave now!”
All at once I realized my mistake. I couldn’t find the light switch, mainly because it was on the outside of the phone booth. My penis, or more precisely my bladder, had got me into trouble yet again.
My propensity for bladder trouble came to a head later on in the tour. Mac had arranged some screens at the back of the stage against which he would throw vast washes of lights. By this time we were playing longer sets and consuming more beer before and even during the gigs, which necessitated a short break so that I would be able to relieve myself.
One of our songs, “Grinding Halt,” had a long intro. If I gave Robert a signal he would spin it out even longer, thus enabling me to get off the drum riser to nip behind the screen, where the crew had thoughtfully stashed a large bucket to enable me to pee without leaving the stage.
The rest of the stage area was designed to be private and closed off, so it was in fact very discreet. Nobody was able to see me until I reappeared looking much relieved. This arrangement had worked very well throughout the tour, and nobody but the band and our crew had any idea that halfway through the gig I was in fact pissing while onstage.
That all changed in a very big way, and I say big because it was massive.
Lights were positioned to project colored washes of light up on the screens. My bucket was strategically placed between the screens. As I accessed the onstage “facilities,” Mac would extinguish the wash lights from the lighting desk out front, plunging the backstage area into darkness, with the exception of a single torch held by one of our crew that was guiding me to the correct spot and then back to the drums. Perfect.
One night Mac absentmindedly (at least I hope that was the case) pushed the faders up on the lighting channel directly by my bucket. The effect was immediate and dramatic. The audience waiting for the extra-long intro to “Grinding Halt” to finish were treated to a spectacularly outsized shadow of yours truly peeing into a bucket.
I suppose there are times when it’s hard to believe your eyes and equally hard to comprehend what has just occurred. Both arrived at the same time that night. I heard a gentle titter, then a full-throated guffaw from someone in the audience. It was joined by a few more and then even more. As anyone who has ever worked onstage for his or her livelihood will tell you, there is one incontrovertible truth: the show must go on. No matter what illness, injury, or tragedy may befall you, you have to get out there and get on with it. People have paid money and your reputation depends on it. Secondly, if something bad or strange happens onstage, incorporate it into your performance and the audience will be none the wiser.
So in the tradition of music hall comedians around the globe, I zipped up my trousers and strode back to the drum riser, my face a mask of inscrutability as I sat on the throne as if nothing had happened. Like that old movie Gaslight, where the husband tries to drive his wife mad by suggesting the things she sees and hears are all figments of her imagination for his own nefarious ends, I dared the audience to think that they had only imagined what they had just seen by keeping a completely straight poker face.
You know what? It worked. Because after the gig nobody mentioned it. Had I fooled the audience or were they just too polite? Maybe they thought it was part of the act . . .
Anyway, as a result of my unruly bladder, we were shown the door at Club Heavy, and we decided to go down to the sea as the morning light was just coming up.
We jumped in the van and drove ourselves down to Rotterdam’s seafront at the village of Monster by the Hook of Holland, and thence down to the beach. The van was full with the band, Mac, and a few extra people we had met at the club. The dawn light was coming up as we parked and tumbled out onto the grassy edge of the sandy beach. A strong wind blew across the sand, reminding us we were not on the Mediterranean but on the edge of the North Sea. It was a fairly nice-looking place, but it was directly across from a huge international port for container ships that was full of large gray vessels and the massive cranes they used to load the goods onto those ships.
“Bit parky,” I said to nobody in particular, and started to wander off toward the sea. I noticed a small path veering off to the left and decided to go down it. It was the opposite direction from the beach where most of our crew was headed, but a young lady from the club followed and eventually caught up to me. We chatted as we strolled along the early-morning coast.
A good twenty minutes or so had passed, and as we were getting nearer the containers and colossal ships, I suggested we turn around and go back toward the van. I hadn’t really noticed how far we had walked. We were completely out of sight of the others and I couldn’t see or hear any sign of them at all. It took several minutes of fast walking before I could see the van again.
As we drew closer, I noticed there was another van parked in close proximity to ours. In fact, it seemed to be blocking our van. It was unfamiliar to me, but the letters on the side had a familiar ring: “Politie” looked a lot like “Police,” and my walking companion confirmed it.
“Shit! What’s happened?”
I could hear the raised voices of people remonstrating with the police. That didn’t sound good. As I got closer, I could see that everybody was inside the police van with bars on the windows, and a policeman was about to get in the van and drive them off to the station and put them in jail!
It seems that when we arrived at the beach we had failed to notice a small sign that said “No Swimming.” It’s no surprise that we missed it, because the sign was in Dutch. Nevertheless, things would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the little old lady who looked out the window of her beachside cottage at the normally deserted beach and spied several drunken Englishmen running full tilt along the beach, whirling the “No Swimming” sign above their heads before depositing it in the ocean. Then some of them decided to strip off and go for an early-morning skinny-dip. This apparently was too much even for the normally phlegmatic Dutch disposition to tolerate, and the old lady called the coppers on my friends. Hence their current residence in the back of the Rotterdam Police paddy wagon.
I approached the policeman as deferentially as I could muster, being two sheets to the wind myself, and asked what crime my compatriots had committed to land in such hot water?
“Ah well,” he said, tilting his hat back on his head in the manner of exasperated constables everywhere.
“You see that house up there on the top of the sand dune?” he asked.
I nodded that I did.
“Well a very important old lady lives there and she called us to report that drunks were running up and down the beach, smashing things, and one of them was naked.”
A cursory look into the van and I ascertained that this was the man from the Isle of Iona, none other than Mac, our lighting designer, shirtless still. At this point the occupants of the van were getting agitated and starting to shout things like, “Call the British embassy!” and “Fascists!”
“Will they be charged, then, officer?” I asked in my best undrunk voice, which wasn’t that convincing, I have to say.
“Well they might have to wait a day in jail before they see the judge.”
He looked around in both directions to see if anyone else was in earshot before taking out his notebook. I stole a look at everyone and, with a finger pressed to my lips, motioned to them to quiet down.
“But maybe we can forget the whole thing,” he said, hesitating slightly, “if you pay the fine right now in cash. I’ll be sure to tell the old lady you’re very sorry and that I gave you a stern warning.”
Even in my intoxicated state, I realized that I was being offered a chance to keep my criminal companions out of jail.
“How much is the fine, sir?”
The policeman flipped open his notebook again and wrote a figure on it and showed it to me surreptitiously. It said 450 guilders—about £350. I opened my wallet. I had about 250 guilders. I gave it to him.
“That’s all I have, sir.”
He looked at me then motioned to the van. I walked over and explained the situation. Robert, being totally pragmatic about the situation, gave me another couple of hundred, and we paid the fine. The policeman quickly put it in his back pocket.
“Your friends are now free to go. Be good boys, now.”
He opened the back door of the van and they tumbled out, cursing slightly under their breath, but now the fight had gone out of them. We all got into our van, and Matty said he would drive. The driver of the police van left first and drove out down the beach road.
Matty drunkenly steered the van into town. That’s when the absurdity of the situation really struck home. The officer had let us off with a bribe to drive the van home drunk.
A few days later, we played our first gig in Berlin. Keep in mind that in the early 1980s Berlin was a city divided, as the Berlin Wall was still in existence, and it was a little difficult to enter the small enclave that was West Berlin, even for Western Europeans.
Back then, there were two main ways to enter the city: by car or by train. If you came in by car, it was along the heavily policed Berlin corridor to make sure you didn’t pick up people from the eastern part of Germany. If you made a wrong turn and drove off a motorway ramp, within a few hundred feet you would be greeted by a gated guard-post with heavily armed police inside who would quickly turn you around.
The border between West and East Germany was marked by two border posts with a no-man’s-land in between that was full of barbed wire and looked heavily mined. Your passport was stamped with a time to ensure that you kept to the speed limit, as it would be matched with the time at the other end of the corridor. If you went too fast you would get a speeding ticket; too slow and the car would be dismantled as they searched for stowaways or contraband.
The bus stopped at the border post and a heavily armed and greatcoated East German border guard got on the bus and asked for our passports. As soon as he realized we were a band, the following conversation ensued.
“You are a musical group, yes?”
After we answered in the affirmative (and why wouldn’t we, as any other explanation would seem very suspicious?), the conversation continued:
“You have T-shirts, yes?”
This question was usually asked after the guard had everybody’s passports in hand. Road-tested tour managers usually kept a small box full of such goodies close by at border stops to facilitate the next exchange.
We produced two or three T-shirts and gave them to the guard, who furtively stashed them under his greatcoat with a nervous look. Then he handed back our passports with a flourish and waved us through the border post.
In the space of a couple of days we had paid two bribes to officials. Whatever it takes. The show must go on.
Berlin in the early 1980s was a very different place than it is today, with the constant anxiety of living in a totally walled-in city (albeit one of 2 million people), combined with the presence of the Red Army on one side and the Second World War Allies on the other, creating an air of constant paranoia. It was a place that was on edge all the time.
Our first gig was at SO36, a club in the heart of Kreuzberg, which was the alternative subculture district, because it was in the poorest area of the city and home to the largest Turkish population outside of Turkey. Truly a place where East meets West, which made it very exotic to us.
We had been playing in front of people for a while now, and usually the reactions were positive. If on rare occasions the results were not quite as good, we at least understood why we were being ignored or even misunderstood. The reception we got at SO36 was very odd: I felt like we were being studied under a microscope. The club was long and narrow, with the stage at one end. The place was absolutely packed with people, but no one talked. The silence in the room was complete. All six hundred or so people just stared straight at the stage with tremendous intensity.
We started with “Seventeen Seconds”—not the liveliest opening song, but it suited this very intellectual and introspective audience. From there we went straight into “Play for Today,” and I couldn’t detect so much as a tapping foot among the stone-faced crowd.
I shouldn’t have worried, because by the time we got to the end of the set, with “A Forest,” the joint was, as they say, jumping. I think Robert won them over by changing the lyrics to “Killing an Arab” to “Killing Kevin Keegan,” an English footballer of some repute.
The last gig of the year was in London, and in a way it was a swan song for our innocent youth. Those years were now over and we were a serious rock band—whatever that meant—that was completely professional and road-tested in every way. We had played over 250 gigs in two years and the strain was beginning to show, so we decided to have a Christmas party!
The occasion illustrates the two sides of Robert: on one side he is a creative artist with a very sincere and singular message to give the world, but on the other side he absolutely loves Christmas.
We looked around for a suitable place for a combined gig and party on the last Thursday before Christmas. We found it in the Notre Dame Hall in Leicester Square, which coincidentally was connected with our old schoolmaster Dr. Anthony Weaver. He was running a cultural exchange center there for French students. We decided to invite our friends to play with us: The Associates, The Scars, and various members of the Banshees. The evening was a huge success, as the audience was made up of our friends and colleagues. It couldn’t be a party any other way.
It was really loud, and it seemed as if somebody was screaming all the time, which was a little disconcerting, but I took it as a sign that everyone was having a good time. There was much drinking from 7 p.m. until 1 a.m., and the year ended on a high. We had weathered the storms of the road and emerged reasonably unscathed. We were twenty-one years old and we were now adults. The playfulness and lightness of our youth was being washed away bit by bit by the harsh realities of the artistic life we had chosen.