Most people don’t associate The Cure with punk, but Robert and I were the very first punks in Crawley.
Crawley is just twenty miles south of London but it might as well be another planet. It is a town with no center and no end, just endless rows of suburban bleakness that blurs into the dark, dank countryside. Crawley is a place where it’s always raining and a slate gray sky hangs over everything. It is where The Cure was born and always struggled to leave, the place we were never quite able to put behind us.
Crawley was one of the handful of “new towns” that popped up around London after the Second World War. A suburban swamp built around shops, schools, and factories: the Holy Trinity of English postwar “progress.” They were towns with no future and no hope. The late 1970s was a terrible time to grow up in England. It was a troubled era marked by a flagging economy, rampant inflation, political unrest, and no reason to think it was going to get better anytime soon. There were no jobs and everyone was on the dole. Even electricity was being rationed. While other places around the world were thriving, we were stuck in the shadow of austerity.
The boredom in our little town was palpable. It seemed like most of the people we knew were treading water and content to do so. As bad as things were, serious changes were rumbling through the wires. We could hear the call ringing out from London.
It was a time of protest and discontent that gave birth to punk music, punk fashion, punk rebellion. Robert and I swapped precious details about the latest punk songs we’d heard on John Peel’s radio show, or seen in the record shop in Horley where we hung out on Saturday afternoons. We didn’t have to go to London to see punk gigs. Punk came to us.
Robert and I were both students at Crawley College of Technology, whose dull, unimaginative campus could have been dreamed up by Joseph Stalin. It was a place where you could study English literature or learn how to mend cars. A mix of the high and the low. A vocational school putting on airs. I was learning to be a chemist: a blend of personal and professional interests. Robert studied literature, of course.
Many big London bands came to Crawley and played in the strangely named “leisure center” or at our little school. In the years 1977–1978 that meant bands like The Clash, The Jam, and The Stranglers. Robert and I went to every gig and we paid very close attention not only to the way these bands sounded, but to the way they looked as well. We were drawn to the spectacle—a lot of people were—but what made the biggest impression on us was their attitude, and we were quick to copy it.
It didn’t take much to stand out in Crawley in those days. Conformity was the rule. To be different was to declare oneself as exceptional, and that was an affront to English manners. To the Neanderthal-like kids in Sussex, anything they couldn’t understand was a perversion of normality. To them we were “poofs.”
We didn’t care. We didn’t believe in stereotypes. When I was told that an earring in my right ear was the equivalent of declaring to the world that I was gay, which I wasn’t, I promptly had it pierced twice. The time for being polite was over. We were confrontational because we had to be.
On February 3, 1977, I went out to celebrate my eighteenth birthday with my three best friends—Robert, Michael Dempsey, and Porl Thompson, all fledgling musicians. We had started to morph from Malice, the band we’d formed in secondary school, to Easy Cure, a name that I came up with and was quite proud of, to simply The Cure. We were still finding our way musically, figuring out what we liked and throwing out the rest.
For my birthday, I went all-out in putting together my outfit for the evening. I wore a hand-dyed orange jacket with “NO CHANGE” stenciled on the back. I’d made buttons from photos cut out of porno magazines—just the performers’ ecstatic heads, mind you, none of the offending body parts. Very subversive. I had on a pair of straight-leg trousers and winkle-picker shoes from Brighton. For good measure, I stuck safety pins here and there to complete the outfit.
Robert’s getup was more subdued. He wore brothel creepers and the dark full-length raincoat that he wore everywhere in those days. The only time he took it off was to put on the leather jacket that each member of our band took turns wearing.
Our destination that night was the Rocket, the hangout for Crawley’s disaffected locals. These consisted of three groups: hippie burnouts stuck in the 1960s, working-class skinheads, and us. We were like a secret society, neither with one faction nor another. We had our own passwords, our own lore. We were our own cult and our bond was a deep-seated longing for something, anything, other than this.
Although Robert and I were close to the same age, we had been drinking in the Rocket for a year, which wasn’t unusual in 1970s England. Back then most people over sixteen could get served alcohol in the pubs, a government ploy to sedate the natives in that cold, gray, miserable climate. Easier to control if they’re all drunk, you see.
Like most English pubs back then, the Rocket was an unappealing mix of browns and beiges with a multicolored carpet designed to hide the cigarette burns and vomit stains. Fred, the Rocket’s usually taciturn landlord, took note of the large number of drinks being ordered and wanted to know why we were celebrating.
“My birthday,” I told him. Fred wisely didn’t ask which birthday that might be. See no evil, hear no evil. Less than a year later, Fred would offer us our first real gig as a band that would eventually take us away from Crawley and on to bigger and better stages. But we couldn’t see so far into the future. On this particular evening we were content to drink and enjoy one another’s company. We were young, exuberant, and didn’t give a toss what others thought about us.
That attitude, as well as our flamboyant dress, attracted the attention of the skinheads in the bar. They were sullen, working-class kids who aped the diatribes they heard at home from their uneducated parents. They made their intolerance known by joining extreme right-wing groups like the National Front. Where we could hear the revolution coming, these yobs tried to drown out the sound with bigotry, prejudice, and hate. Just as we could feel the anarchistic pull of punk, they tried to hold on to their old fears masquerading as values. We all got very, very drunk.
The pub called last orders at 10:30 p.m. It was thirty years after the war and pubs in England were still obliged to close early, a practice that had been devised to ensure that its citizens would not be too drunk to make it to the factory the next day, manufacturing guns and bombs for the war effort. In the car park at the back of the pub, Robert suggested we go to his house and continue to celebrate with some of his father’s lethal home brew. It was a Thursday night and I didn’t have any lectures the next day. I told Robert I was game and we decided to catch a train to his house. As we crossed the old, wooden footbridge to the station, I heard the words behind us:
“Bloody poofs!”
Turning slightly, we caught sight of three large skinheads in National Front T-shirts just thirty yards behind us and closing fast.
This was nothing new. For as long as I’ve known Robert people have been out to get him. On stage, in the pubs, or on the street, he’s always been a target. I’ve never seen Robert instigate a fight, yet there’s something about him that provokes people.
On one hand, Robert is the dark, brooding, creative and melancholic sort. It’s obvious from the way he carries himself that his head is somewhere in the clouds. It’s always been part of his persona: the tortured artist, the all-seeing poet, the messenger with news from the other side. He’s also quite normal, someone who enjoys sitting down with a pint and watching football. People sense this dichotomy about him and it doesn’t add up. He’s part of the world but also not part of it. Here and not here. Matter and anti-matter. People don’t like that. They want you to be one thing or another. If you don’t fit into a neat little box, they get upset. Pretty soon they’re demanding to know, “Who do you bloody well think you are?” and the fists start flying. If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a hundred times.
There was a time when I had a reputation as a hard man. I had to be because Robert was always getting into fights. I can’t tell you how many times a pint glass would come flying out of the audience and hit one of us. We’d set down our instruments and leap into the crowd to settle the matter.
This probably clashes with the ideas that many people have about The Cure, but that’s how it was. We had to fight to be heard, fight for our place on the stage, fight to be taken seriously. We weren’t loud rock or fast punk. We were something else, something new, and people didn’t know what to make of us. If we hadn’t stood up for ourselves in those early days, we wouldn’t have been able to weather the storms to come. Robert was in the eye of most of them.
On this particular night, however, it isn’t fair to blame Robert. The way I was dressed with my bright orange jacket was like a neon sign that read “Beat me,” and those National Front thugs with their shaved heads and Dr. Martens boots were all too happy to oblige.
I stole a glance at Robert to see what he wanted to do, but he’d already stopped and turned to face the skinheads. That’s when I noticed the glass in his hand. A thick, proper English pint pot with real heft and weight. He’d seen this coming. In a flash, he hurled it across the bridge. I could see its arc flashing past me in the cloudy moonlight before the glass smashed against the ironwork and exploded into a million shattered stars at the skinheads’ feet. They were as stunned by this turn of events as I was, but their shock and surprise quickly turned to anger.
“You wankers!” they shouted. “We’ll fackin’ kill you!”
Discretion being the better part of valor, we legged it across the bridge and down the street, past the station doors, and continued to our old primary school where we’d been classmates, eerily lit up on this cold February night. There would be no train for us. We were on our own. Once we put those fat, fascist fuckers behind us, we collapsed on the grass at the edge of a park, laughing uncontrollably.
I was eighteen years old. We were making our own rules. It felt like my life was about to begin.