Never Enough Read online

  Over the course of three graveyard sessions, The Cure had cut a total of 26 songs. Their final night of recording was on October 25, after returning from an uninspiring show supporting the long-gone Young Bucks at the Windsor Castle in London’s Harrow Road. According to Tolhurst, “For all intents and purposes we could have been playing our first show at The Rocket in Crawley. It was 10 people looking in their beer.” But that show was another key moment in the Chris Parry/Cure relationship, because Parry pulled them aside before going on stage and suggested, strongly, that they needed to develop some kind of image. Smith, in particular, was now very uncertain as to whether his new label boss and surrogate manager shared the same mindset as The Cure. “That sowed some seeds of doubt,” said Smith. “I mean, Bill [Parry] could have waited until after the show to have his say.” Smith would eventually explain the band’s non-existent image this way: “As a group, we weren’t particularly affiliated with anything. There was no left wing, no right wing, no nothing.” Dempsey agreed, telling me that “we never said we liked anything, really.” The band that had been formed out of resistance to the 9-to-5 grind was still keeping their distance.

  At this point in their musical lives, The Cure didn’t so much have an image as an anti-image – they were still a long way removed from their wild-haired, lipstick-smeared, black clad, sexually indeterminate signature look of the Eighties and Nineties. Michael Dempsey favoured corduroys and Hush Puppies – Parry thought he “looked a dork” – Smith was fond of a shapeless, nondescript coat and Tolhurst, according to Parry, “used to turn up wearing any sort of trousers and shoes, a white shirt and a bit of a beard. I thought, ‘These guys are the dog’s breakfast – the music is great but they look like shit.’” The band’s concerns, however, were alleviated somewhat by the cash that Parry forked out to help them spruce up their wardrobe. Smith and Tolhurst would soon be seen sharing a leather jacket, which turned up in many of their early live and promo shots.

  Parry’s road-hardening plan for The Cure continued through October and November 1978, as the band supported The UK Subs and then Generation X. While it’s unlikely that he had the luxury of picking and choosing support slots, Chris Parry was demonstrating a knack for connecting them with acts of wildly different backgrounds, profiles and mindsets.

  The UK Subs, when The Cure opened for them at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, were in the strange position of being known as punk-rock survivors. Helmed by singer Charlie Harper, The UK Subs had been in action since November 1976, when Harper had heard The Damned and experienced a musical rebirth, quickly killing off his existing band, an R&B flavoured combo called The Marauders. The UK Subs (a shortened form of their original tag, The Subversives) outlined their plan of world domination from Harper’s place of business, a hairdressing salon in south London. Not surprisingly, Harper sported a flawless perm. They’d cut several John Peel Sessions on BBC Radio One in 1977 and 1978, eventually scoring a record deal with the GEM label. In 1979, they were even the subject of Julien Temple directed film documentary, entitled Punk Can Take It.

  Lol Tolhurst had previously met Harper at the Croydon Greyhound when Harper actually asked him to join the Subs. He politely declined the offer. Robert Smith’s take on their shared bill at the Moonlight Club was that it was “a fucking glorious night”, even though The UK Subs were members of one of punk’s most loathed clubs – ageing rockers. “I remember they said, ‘Hey, we gotta use your gear, man,’” said Smith, “and I said, ‘You can’t call me man. This is 1978.’” To Smith’s recollection, The Cure’s set that night was one of their most aggressive and best. The trio would be photographed outside Harper’s house in Clapham Common for a Melody Maker feature which ran on March 24, 1979, Smith and Tolhurst stunning in their Miss Selfridge’s jackets.

  As for the brilliantly (and presciently) named Generation X, they were led by William Broad, one of the many punk scenesters who set up camp in Sex, the boutique operated by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. He may have been a Beatles-fancying child of the Sixties, born in Middlesex and raised, briefly, in Long Island, New York, but Broad embraced the punk life as though he was born to it. He dyed his hair blond, renamed himself Billy Idol and joined prototype punk act Chelsea. Two months later he’d joined forces with bassist-cum-punk provocateur Tony James and formed Generation X. They may have worn the gear and sneer of street punks, but Generation X knew their way around a catchy pop song, reeling off a string of UK hits in 1977, which included ‘Wild Youth’, ‘Ready Steady Go’ and the cleverly titled ‘Your Generation’. They even covered John Lennon’s ‘Gimme Some Truth’ on their self-titled 1978 long-player, giving away their classicist’s roots. Generation X were also the first punk act to star on Top Of The Pops, a moment that had almost the same gravitas as Bowie’s star turn in 1972.

  The Cure, however, probably weren’t that familiar with Generation X’s pedigree when they arrived at High Wycombe on November 24 for the first of a string of support dates. They were preoccupied with negotiating with Gen X’s sound and lighting man, who insisted that The Cure pay £25 for use of the house gear. The band responded by lugging in their own gear: the two Yamaha A40 bins they’d been using as a PA, an HH mixing console, set up on stage, which Smith operated on cues from fans in the audience, and a pair of lamps, which the band parked on either side of the stage. By the time of their next show, at Northampton Cricket Club, their display of moxie so impressed the headliner’s crew that they offered The Cure free use of Generation X’s equipment.

  Parry may have put The Cure on a token wage, but money was still tight: after each show with Generation X, they’d drive back to Parry’s house at Watford and crash on the floor. It was only on November 30, when they played at Tiffany’s in Halesowen – and were attacked by skinheads afterwards – that The Cure were actually granted the luxury of a hotel room. And even then it was mainly for show, because Parry knew some Polydor brass were coming to the gig.

  Robert Smith has always been a man fond of a tipple and he very graciously accepted the offer of free Southern Comfort from the Polydor staffers. So graciously, in fact, that he spent a good part of the night with his head down the toilet, throwing up his freebies. Tolhurst was imbibing with as much gusto as Smith, but restrained from vomiting until they reached their shared hotel room. Then he let loose in the room’s sink and all over the carpet. They checked out quickly the next day.

  Even in this early, relatively freewheeling chapter of The Cure’s career, Michael Dempsey was quickly learning that he wasn’t built for life on the road. Sure, he agreed that this new world was “fun”, but he had trouble adapting to his seemingly endless hangover and the indifferent reaction of most crowds. “He’s a funny character,” Tolhurst said in 2005. “As friends we still get on pretty well; we might even record some things in the future. But being on the road, especially at that lowly level, demanded a certain constitution. It’s like being in the army – you don’t get much sleep, you get up, go full pelt for a few hours and then head off somewhere else. He used to bring a lot of multi-vitamins and pills and remedies with him; he was always slightly under the weather. Whereas Robert and I had fairly robust constitutions; we could do it for month after month without suffering too much.”

  Dempsey was also troubled by the band’s many risky, late-night road trips. “Because of Parry’s ‘economy’,” he said in 2005, “we didn’t stay in hotels, so we’d be driving huge distances, almost falling asleep at the wheel. And we not only drove ourselves, but we lugged our own equipment. I did it reluctantly; I don’t think I particularly enjoyed it.”

  An innocent enough incident occurred after their October 3 gig at the Bristol Locarno which the band believe led to them being ejected from the Generation X tour. It began when Tolhurst wandered through the backstage area, in dire need of a toilet. Although warned not to enter, he pushed past a security guard and strolled into the gents, to discover that Billy Idol was “introducing himself” to a female fan. Undeterred, Tolhurst went ab
out his business, calmly spraying Idol’s foot with pee as a farewell gesture.

  “I found Billy in, shall I say, a rather compromising position with a young lady in the bathroom,” Tolhurst said. “I was desperate to relieve myself, he wouldn’t budge, so I did the best job I could. Unfortunately some of Billy was in my trajectory.” (Years later, Tolhurst met Idol again in New York. “He gave me the strangest look as he was trying to piece together where he remembered me from. I didn’t remind him.”)

  The Cure and Generation X would share one more bill, on December 5 at the California Ballroom in Dunstable, but even then, according to Smith, it was only because The Cure were the only act available at short notice. “The toilet incident obviously didn’t go down too well,” Smith explained, “but, as well as that, we were beginning to get too good a reaction and that made them nervous.”

  Tolhurst confirmed this when I spoke with him. “As I recall, it [the bathroom encounter] was the excuse they needed to eject us from the tour. We had been going down too well, I think.”

  The day before their Dunstable finale, The Cure recorded their first of many sessions with the hugely influential BBC Radio One DJ John Peel. Peel was a veteran of pirate radio station ‘Wonderful’ Radio London (the “Big L”) who had joined the BBC in 1967. Alongside everyone from Captain Beefheart to T. Rex, The Undertones to The Sex Pistols, Joy Division and The Buzzcocks, The Cure was one of the many independently minded acts that Peel would not only champion at the apprenticeship stage of their careers, but throughout their musical lives. Their debut Peel session featured four band originals: ‘10.15 Saturday Night’, ‘Fire In Cairo’, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and ‘Killing An Arab’. It was just the seal of credibility that the band needed.*

  The Cure endured another indifferent gathering on December 8, at The Corn Dolly in Oxford, when drunken yobs repeatedly yelled for “that drip drip drip one”. The band responded by playing ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ over and over again. Yet in spite of narrow-minded yobbos, Tolhurst’s piss-stained encounter with Billy Idol, and Dempsey’s wariness about life in the back of a van, The Cure’s luck and their profile were slowly improving. On December 16 they received their first national coverage from the British music press, courtesy of Adrian Thrills, the scribe hand-picked by Parry three months earlier to check out the band at Redhill.

  Under the headline, ‘Ain’t No Blues For The Summertime Cure’, Thrills documented the band’s brief history. He noted Smith’s fondness for his Woolworth’s Top 20 guitar and laid out the evolution of the band, analysed their head-butting with Hansa and their eventual signing by Parry and Fiction. It may have been Smith’s first formal sit-down with the music press, but he was already developing the type of spiky one-liners and catty put-downs that would become his trademark. When asked about Hansa’s plans, Smith delivered his witty kiss-off about how “it got to the stage where we would have become the Barron Knights of punk”, while dismissing the tunes offered to them by the German indie as “really banal old rock’n’roll songs”. Smith also defended ‘Killing An Arab’ for the first but by no means the final time. Thrills described the song as appearing “at first glance, irresponsibly racist”, before detailing its erudite roots. Smith handled this potentially prickly subject with the steady hand of a press veteran. After making his jibe about the song being dedicated to all the wealthy Arabs seen hanging about Crawley discos, Smith tried to downplay the song’s meaning, once and for all. “It’s not really racist,” he said, “it’s not a call to kill Arabs.”

  Even though Thrills’ depiction of The Cure as “an abrasive light-metal trio” was way off the money, the writer was clearly impressed by the brooding young men from Crawley. “The Cure are like a breath of fresh air on the capital’s smog-ridden pub and club circuit,” he wrote. “I suggest you catch The Cure immediately.”

  Thrills’ favourable feature had a very immediate and tangible effect – not surprising, given the follow-my-leader nature of the UK press (and the punters who devoured the music weeklies). When The Cure walked on stage at the Hope & Anchor in Islington, a week later, the place was packed. Even though Smith was running a temperature of 102 and was self-medicating with Night Nurse and Disprins, the band was a hit. Rick Joseph of Melody Maker was in the crowd and fancied what he saw, despite Smith’s physical shortcomings.

  “This was a cruel date on The Cure’s calendar,” he began, worryingly, going on to outline Smith’s illness, Tolhurst’s unstable drum kit and the low-rent venue, which, he wrote, “displayed the charm of a cross-Channel lorry deck”. But just like Thrills before him, Joseph could spot the band’s rising star. He praised their “crisp set”, stating that in spite of their setbacks, “The Cure … salvaged this unluxurious event from oblivion through their own embryonic music talent and their ability to inject a dose of enjoy-serum into the Mivvied corpuscles of punters present.” In short, The Cure rocked, returning for a pair of encores.

  To Michael Dempsey, London shows such as this were the highlight of his tenure with The Cure. “They were landmark moments,” said Dempsey. “But there were diminishing returns from then on. It was like drinking – the first one was great, but it’s downhill from there.”

  As for Chris Parry, his decision to jump the good ship Polydor appeared to be justified. His new signing had the songs, the leather jacket, the support of the famously fickle music press – now all The Cure needed was some music in the marketplace. In December, the band’s debut single, ‘Killing An Arab’, backed by ‘10.15 Saturday Night’, was released. In an effort to capitalise on the good press and get something in the stores before Christmas, Parry was forced to release their single on Small Wonder Records, at least for the initial pressing of 15,000 copies. Small Wonder was a grass-roots indie label operating out of a record store in Walthamstow, east London, which had scored some small-scale success with the bands Punishment Of Luxury and The Leyton Buzzards. The deal was this – by effectively sub-letting The Cure for these 15,000 singles, Fiction could undertake some free market research, gauging the public’s response to the band’s improving profile. And if the first pressing sold out, Fiction would be sufficiently cashed-up to press another 15,000.

  But despite Parry’s best efforts, the band’s debut didn’t reach the stores in time for Christmas, so The Cure missed out on the chance to go head-to-head with The Bee Gees, whose ‘Too Much Heaven’ was the single of the season (alongside the desperate plea that was Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’). Even Robert Smith might have noted the irony that The Barron Knights’ ‘A Taste Of Aggro’ was also riding high in the Yuletide charts.

  What Parry did manage to do, however, was place ‘Killing An Arab’ on the Polydor punk compilation, 20 Of Another Kind, which emerged in March 1979. The Cure found themselves back in the company of shaghound Billy Idol and Generation X, along with Parry signings The Jam and Sham 69 (who both contributed two songs, not surprisingly, given that the Fiction label boss compiled the album).

  Although Robert Smith disliked the sleeve design for ‘Killing An Arab’, it was certainly striking. A stark, piercing pair of eyes – the reversed-out image of an old man’s face – glared from the cover, while the flipside, in an almost laughably literal interpretation of the song, featured the image of a small dripping tap (you know, as in “drip drip drip”). It was the first of several disagreements between Parry and Smith on the look of the band and their music, even though Parry admitted he “wasn’t terribly concerned” when Smith screwed up his nose at the cover art. Parry didn’t want his rising star to get involved in such subjective discussions – he just wanted him to keep writing quality songs. Which was something Parry was sure The Cure had produced with ‘Killing An Arab’.

  “I knew the punters would like it,” Parry declared. “It was something you could pogo to, so it was a winner for punks and … those were the people I really wanted to get at – the people who read music papers, the active ones.”

  Despite its delayed release, the music weeklies’ resp
onse to ‘Killing An Arab’ was favourable and immediate. And before the end of the year, Small Wonder had 2,000 orders for the single. The upswing in the band’s fortunes came as a shock. “One minute we were nothing,” Smith said, “and the next we were the New Existentialists.”

  Music writers were engaged in some healthy one-upmanship in an effort to claim first reviewing bragging rights for The Cure’s debut single. Sounds’ Dave McCullough edged out his rivals, reviewing ‘Arab’ on January 13. Amidst the usual overly clever waffle, McCullough did manage to cut to the chase: “The A-side is … nice and fresh and crisp and funny. Quaint. You immediately love it.” He did the band a sizeable favour by also reviewing the flipside, ‘10.15’, noting that “it hits upon the sparseness in rock’n’roll like no other record has in, oh, as far back as I can think. There’s scarcely any playing in the song at all. Everything is left to your imagination.” McCullough had justified Robert Smith’s decision to move away from Porl Thompson’s guitar heroics in just a couple of sentences.

  Melody Maker, who’d covered the band’s January 8 show at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, were next in line to talk up ‘Arab’. Ian Birch likened the song to Siouxsie & The Banshees’ recent excellent single. “As ‘Hong Kong Garden’ used a simple oriental-styled riff to striking effect,” Birch figured, justifiably, “so ‘Arab’ conjures up edginess through a Moorish-flavoured guitar pattern.”