Never Enough Read online

  Over those few jars of rotgut, Parry spelled out his grand plan for The Cure – but it wasn’t quite what the three had expected to hear. While they had anticipated a fairly rudimentary offer from Polydor –“we figured Polydor, great, big label, lots of money,” Tolhurst said – Parry admitted that he was becoming increasingly frustrated with the slow-motion grind of the corporate machinery. He knew how important it was to get a new band such as The Cure into the studio quickly and capture their freshness and raw energy on tape, before they either broke up or broke down.

  Parry wanted to form his own label, and he wanted The Cure to be his first signing. Polydor would still be involved in the deal, however, because Parry realised two things: their distribution and marketing muscle couldn’t be denied, and there was no point in burning any bridges. Polydor could definitely help Parry, and The Cure, make that “awful lot of money” he’d roared about on the dance floor at Laker’s.

  Smith, Tolhurst and Dempsey were, in Smith’s words, “obviously a bit disappointed” that he wasn’t asking them to sign directly to Polydor. “But as he explained his ideas for the label, we started to like what we were hearing and decided to give it a go.” Tolhurst agreed, if somewhat reluctantly. “We thought, ‘Hmmmm, OK.’”

  They agreed to sign with Parry, but only when he settled on a halfway decent name for his new label. Smith couldn’t stomach Parry’s original idea, Night Nurse, so Parry countered with 18 Age, which Smith found equally useless. A bemused singer asked his new boss a key question: “What happens when we get to 20?” Eventually, all parties agreed on 18 Age/Fiction (the “18 Age” part of the title was eventually discarded in 1982). On September 13, 1978, they signed a six-month deal.

  Parry had other acts in mind for Fiction, namely Billy MacKenzie, later of The Associates, who was signed within days of The Cure. With his new signings and a grand plan for his label, Parry now had enough confidence to chuck in his A&R Manager position at Polydor. Fiction was his future.

  By September 17, he also had enough confidence in his new charges to try to stir up some media excitement. After all, what was a new band without a buzz? (“He made things happen quickly,” said Dempsey.) The Cure had another gig booked at Redhill, so Parry – now christened “Bill” by the band, a tag that would stick – brought along Adrian Thrills, of the NME, to check out their show. Never a man to miss an opportunity, Parry force-fed Thrills Billy MacKenzie’s album Mental Torture during the drive. While Thrills held off in his judgement of The Cure, he felt that Mackenzie’s album had lived up to its name. As Parry recalled, “He said it was mental torture.” Thrills would become the first music scribe to write a Cure feature, but that was still a few months in the future.

  Now that Parry had a new band and a new label, he needed some music. He booked the trio into Morgan Studios on September 20 – the same studio where The Cure had endured some of their futile sessions with Hansa, which had generated little more than tension. But plenty had changed in the six months since The Cure had parted ways with the Germans: they’d shed a guitarist, gained a new boss and label, and developed something that resembled a future plan. Even the rejection letters from EMI, Island, Virgin and all the other labels didn’t seem to hurt the trio as much as they once did, now that Fiction Records was handling them. Parry might have seemed just a little odd, but he was ambitious. And the Fiction office – the empire currently comprised Parry and another ex-Polydor staffer, Ita Martin – was also located in the Morgan complex, which was convenient, especially if they needed some beer money.

  With Parry working the desk, The Cure recorded some familiar tunes (‘10.15 Saturday Night’, ‘Killing An Arab’, ‘Fire In Cairo’) along with ‘Plastic Passion’ and ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ during the September 20 session at Morgan. In order to keep costs down, the recording was conducted during the graveyard shift. The band finished at 5.30 on the morning of the 21st, forcing Tolhurst to call in sick to his employer, claiming he had boils on his backside.

  While Parry was happy enough with the results, he knew that The Cure also needed to be road-hardened. All their gigs at this stage had been in the safe surrounds of their home turf, at either The Rocket or Laker’s. It was unlikely that NME would make them cover stars if they hadn’t played anywhere apart from a few gigs in Crawley’s High Street. Parry booked them a pair of shows with Wire, at the University of Kent, Canterbury on October 5 and the following night at the London Polytechnic.

  It was a bold, probably foolish move on Parry’s part to partner his Crawley neophytes with critics’ favourites Wire. Though they may have emerged from the heart of the punk and post-punk movement, which had also inspired Smith and Tolhurst, Wire was rapidly outgrowing the stylistic limitations of the form. They would prove this at these shows.

  Wire had joined forces at Watford Art College in 1976, when guitarists Colin Newman and George Gill formed Overload with AV technician (and third guitarist) Bruce Gilbert. With the recruitment of bassist Graham Lewis and drummer Robert Gotobed (aka Robert Grey), the first Wire line-up was established.

  After some fumbling early dates in London, Gill was ousted and the reborn Wire opted for a pared down, experimental sound. A chance meeting with EMI’s Mike Thorne, who was recording groups for a live punk album, resulted in two Wire tracks appearing on his compilation The Roxy, London WC2. By the time they’d signed to EMI in September 1977, they were itching to record, quickly, before they lost interest in the material, abandoned it and moved on. If there was one constant in a career based on action and reaction, it was their creative restlessness.

  By October 1978, when The Cure opened for them at the University of Kent, Wire had just returned from their first US dates, on the strength of their previous two well-received albums. Produced by Thorne, 1977’s furiously paced Pink Flag comprised 21 highly original tracks (each clocking in at barely 90 seconds). “On a formal level,” wrote Rolling Stone, “it’s an astonishing achievement, pulling punk away from the rock revivalism of The Sex Pistols and Clash without sacrificing its energy or gut-level impact.” But within a year they’d delivered the remarkable about-turn that was Chairs Missing, which, with the introduction of keyboards, was even tagged “early Pink Floyd” by some tough critics. The near-perfect tune ‘Outdoor Miner’ might have become a hit, if it wasn’t for some disruption at EMI. Robert Smith was no fool – he could see that Wire were streets ahead of The Cure in terms of music, ideas, appearance, the works.

  After their first support slot, the gulf between The Cure and Wire was obvious. Smith admitted that he was “horrified”. Tolhurst, however, reacted differently. “Wire were the first band we played with that definitely had ‘it’,” he says. “I think we realised after playing with them that we were going to be able to do our music and be able to find an audience for it, too.”

  Smith, Tolhurst and Dempsey were so startled by the Wire experience, in fact, that they almost crashed their van on the way home from the show – money being so short at this stage, they were required to drive home after most shows, a risky endeavour that would shorten Dempsey’s term in The Cure. The next night they went one worse – they didn’t even show up for the gig. But the cause of their no-show was out of their hands. They were relying on a Horley local, a man with a van named Phil, to get them to the show at the London Polytechnic. But his motor broke down on the trip north and by the time they reached the venue, Wire was already on stage. The Cure’s offer to play after the headliner was firmly, politely refused.

  Backstage, Chris Parry was fuming at the trio’s amateurish approach. If the band was that casual in the future, he shouted, “You’ll never get another booking again.” Having vented his anger, Parry and the band adjourned to a pub, where Smith, Tolhurst and Dempsey – showing more than a little spunk, given the night’s calamity and their label head’s mood – floated the idea of “turning professional”. Despite Tolhurst’s vague plans of becoming a research chemist, it wasn’t as if the trio was beholden to potentially rewarding positions outs
ide of the band. But Parry, who was drunk by this stage, acquiesced, agreeing to a minimum wage of “£25 a week or something”. The money offered may have been barely enough on which to survive, but Parry’s decision gave the band a true sense of purpose.

  For Lol Tolhurst, turning pro was a revelation. “That was a strange feeling for me because I remember walking around town and feeling like I was on vacation. ‘OK, this is all going to stop in a few weeks.’ After a few years it dawned on me that this is my real job.”

  Within the week, on October 12, Parry had the band back in their second home, Morgan Studios. Their plan was to record enough songs for a debut album.

  A glance at the charts in late 1978 would suggest that punk’s planned global takeover had never happened: maybe it was still a dream lodged somewhere in the mind of Malcolm McLaren. Grease was very much the word in the UK, as the rubbery-hipped John Travolta and squeaky-clean Olivia Newton-John let the world know how hopelessly devoted they were to each other; the Fifties retro musical also spawned the hits ‘Summer Nights’ and ‘Sandy’, which were lodged in the business end of the UK Top 10. Only Irish vagabonds The Boomtown Rats, with ‘Rat Trap’, reminded listeners that there was supposed to be some kind of revolution happening in the world of music. But they were a lone voice in the wilderness, surrounded by such pop fluff as Leo Sayer’s ‘I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You’, The Jacksons’ ‘Blame It On The Boogie’ and The Commodores’ ‘Three Times A Lady’. And – maybe just to remind The Cure of their Hansa nightmare – Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ was also in the Top 10.

  The charts weren’t that much healthier on the other side of the Atlantic – the US Top 10 was dominated by either the cast of Grease, remakes of creaky old standards (Donna Summer’s ‘MacArthur Park’), blue-collar rockers such as Bob Seger (‘Hollywood Nights’) and Australians impersonating West Coast soft rockers (Little River Band’s ‘Reminiscing’).

  Those who weren’t helping Grease to the top of the pop charts and the box office were coughing up the cash to help The Rolling Stones become the US summer’s top-grossing act. They netted a handy $6 million. Elsewhere, the four members of Gallup faves Kiss unleashed their own solo albums, piano man Billy Joel scooped the pool at the Grammys, and CBS Records hiked up album prices to a hefty $8.98. It was as though punk rock had never happened.

  Back in Morgan Studios, Chris Parry was starting to wield his influence over The Cure, steering their songs in a direction he felt was right for his new signing. They were still studio novices, so they had no way of articulating what they felt these songs needed. All Smith knew was that he was hoping to find some kind of unholy alliance between the two “Bs”: The Banshees and The Buzzcocks. “I really liked The Buzzcocks’ melodies,” he said, “while the great thing about the Banshees was that they had this great wall of noise which I’d never heard before. My ambition was to try to marry the two.” He’d fail, at least with these early sessions.

  Of all the bands that moved in and out of The Cure radar during their career, there was none – certainly in their formative years – that played a bigger role than Siouxsie & The Banshees. They formed a kinship, of sorts, with The Cure: not only would Smith become a Banshee for an extended period of time, playing guitar with them both in the studio and on stage (at a time when he was uncertain about the future of The Cure), he and Banshee bassist Steve Severin would form a bond based on chemical over-indulgence. Smith would also take some fashion leads from Siouxsie – in fact, he was convinced that The Cure’s sizeable Goth following was a direct consequence of his time as a Banshee.

  Just like Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner of Joy Division, Chris Parry and numerous other music industry players from the Seventies, the Banshees began as a direct result of a close encounter with The Sex Pistols. Both Siouxsie Sioux (the former Susan Dallion) and future Banshees bassist Steve Severin were part of a notorious group of Sex Pistols hangers-on called the Bromley Contingent. The Banshees formed in September 1976, with original drummer John Simon Ritchie soon to reinvent himself as the doomed Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols. They played their debut at the legendary Punk Festival at London’s 100 Club – their setlist comprised exactly one song: a near-Satanic desecration of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. Vicious soon departed for life as a Sex Pistol and was replaced by Kenny Morris, while original guitarist Marco Perroni moved on to Adam & The Ants. His spot was taken by John McKay.

  Siouxsie was not the most articulate or eloquent of vocalists, but there was a raw power behind her delivery that made her an irresistible force. “A vital connection between punk and psychedelia,” in the words of Rolling Stone, the Banshees’ 1978 debut LP The Scream was a key album in post-Sex Pistols Britain. The Banshees weren’t just drawing on such revered UK acts as Roxy Music and David Bowie, they were also pointing the way forward for everyone from The Cure to The Mission, Sisters Of Mercy, All About Eve and numerous other bands who would form, either directly or otherwise, because of the Banshees. They even scored an unlikely hit with the very atypical, richly melodic ‘Hong Kong Garden’, which raced into the UK Top 10 in September 1978, not long before The Cure had returned to Morgan with Parry.

  As for The Cure, their hassles continued in the studio. Because Parry was funding the sessions, Smith felt that their label boss and producer “had us over a barrel”. Band and producer’s method of dealing with their frustration manifested itself in very different forms – Smith would sink into a sulky funk, slumping in a corner of the studio, Parry would unleash his temper with extreme prejudice.

  But Parry also truly believed that he had a “production concept” for the band. Rather than flesh out the trio’s sound, as he did to some success with The Jam, he wanted to strip it “right down to the bones”. He was enamoured of Smith’s voice and words, but felt that after the amped-up onslaught of punk, listeners would be searching for something more elusive, more “mysterious”.

  Parry felt that he had a clear idea of what was good for The Cure, whereas Smith only knew what he didn’t want for the band. “We had many arguments,” Parry would report. “I’d think, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve got enough problems trying to sort out the label without this.’ Why can’t they see I’ve got their best interests at heart?”

  Lol Tolhurst’s memories of those first sessions for Fiction are much less complicated than Smith’s. “We went in and recorded our songs. Chris and Mike [Hedges] were at the desk, we sat at the back and when we got bored we went home.” Dempsey agreed. “We went in and simply recorded our entire live set.”

  But in engineer Hedges, the band found an unexpected ally, who would come to play a key role in both the sound and success of The Cure Mk I. When Hedges was hired by Parry and first encountered The Cure, during October 1978, his CV was underwhelming. He was a tape operator and engineer, who’d assisted on such recordings as Central Heating’s 1977 album, Heatwave, the 1978 London cast recording of Evita, and Paraphernalia, an album by jazz saxophonist Barbara Thompson. So far, it was hardly a career of note. However, within a year of recording with The Cure, Hedges would work with Robert Smith’s teenage hero, Alex Harvey, engineering ‘The Mafia Stole My Guitar’, the title track of Harvey’s only solo album. He would also engineer Candidate, the album from Cockney Rebel Steve Harley. Much later he would work with Dido, U2 and Travis.

  Lol Tolhurst was a big admirer of Hedges; he was convinced that he was the right man at the right time. “He was still fairly young and he’d grown up in that studio system where he had a lot of good recording knowledge. You had to go through a whole apprenticeship to become a recording engineer and he’d done that. What he didn’t have necessarily in terms of a creative vision he could make up technically. He was very good for us.

  “He was, and is, a great person, very intelligent, a truly great Englishman in the best sense.”

  The Cure’s situation was hardly unique: a trio of novices walks into the studio with vague plans and have trouble adapting to this strange new environment (relatively new in the case of The Cure). It’
s a common occurrence throughout the history of rock’n’roll. When American punk/funk upstarts The Red Hot Chili Peppers were making their long-playing debut, the tension in the studio was so bad that their producer, Andy Gill, developed cancer, their engineer left the studio screaming, never to return, and Gill eventually took the master-tapes hostage until he was paid. The situation in Morgan Studios wasn’t quite that extreme.

  “The band didn’t really know what was going on,” according to Mike Hedges. “Everything was new for everyone except Chris. Robert knew what he wanted but he didn’t know how to express it. We used very little technology. He [Smith] just wanted to use his old [Woolworth’s] Top 20 guitar and a cheap HH amp, which was the worst in the world for distortion.”

  Smith’s insistence on using the HH amp led to another late-night argument with Parry. Although their producer felt the amp was suitable for some songs, it literally fell apart after the recording of their debut album’s title track ‘Three Imaginary Boys’. Smith was clinging to this cheap amp and his bargain-priced guitar like some kind of security blanket. Parry was livid.

  “I thought, ‘Jesus, here I am investing money in an album for some git who refuses to listen to reason.’ So I said, ‘Fine, if you wanna be a punk band, all dirgey and stupid, which you will be if you continue to use the equipment you’ve got, you can. But you’ll be thrown off the label.’”

  If there was one positive aspect of the sessions that would spawn Three Imaginary Boys, it was the presence of The Cure’s neighbours, The Jam. The Woking three-piece, whom Parry had signed the year before, were cutting their second LP, This Is The Modern World, in the studio next door. Parry was juggling production of both records. Because The Cure were working on the cheap, at night, they would sneak into the studio when Paul Weller, Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler had finished for the day, and “borrow” their gear. Tolhurst recalls using Buckler’s drums for almost all of the Three Imaginary Boys sessions, mainly because he “had a pretty ropey old drum kit”. Smith obviously wasn’t such a punk purist that he couldn’t resist the temptation to use The Jam’s more cutting-edge, Polydor-financed equipment. Maybe some of their melodicism (and good fortune) might rub off.