Never Enough Page 14
Still, The Cure and Parry were uncertain about their next move. Smith, whose songwriting confidence was growing in sync with his hair, was tuning into Captain Beefheart and German minimalists Can, as was Tolhurst. They realised that there could be a lot more to The Cure than lyrics read verbatim from food decorating sets or the stripped-back garage rock of ‘Grinding Halt’. Yet that was exactly the track that was chosen as the next single from Three Imaginary Boys, although the decision was a half-hearted one, at best. Only 1,500 promo copies of the single (backed with ‘Meathook’) were pressed and dispatched to UK clubs and radio stations. It was more a teaser for the album than a genuine second seven-inch.
Again, the NME spewed venom. This time the writer was Ian Penman who, when he was in the mood, could be even more verbose – and incomprehensible – than Morley. “The Cure’s particular hypothesis,” he wrote in mid-May, “concerns a situation of non-forward moving national community activity. Got that? This is the sort of thing we in the Brill Building call a ‘hype’.” End of review. It was also the end of Fiction’s plan to go forward with ‘Grinding Halt’ as a second single from Three Imaginary Boys. They dropped the idea as swiftly as Penman dropped his arch barbs. (The Tolhurst-penned track eventually found a life on the soundtrack to the 1980 punk flick Times Square, alongside tracks from David Johansen, The Patti Smith Group and Roxy Music.)
What The Cure could do was tour, which is how they spent the rest of May (and much of 1979, in fact: they played over 100 shows that year). There was no venue too small, or suburb too obscure, for The Cure, as they rolled through Northwich, Newport (twice), Halifax, Stafford, Birmingham, Sheffield, Yeovil, Portsmouth and Norwich, during the month of their album’s release, with all the relentless forward motion of one of Rommel’s tanks. Yet NME remained unconvinced, despite the band’s improving profile. They unleashed another spray when reviewing their May 29 show at the Limit Club in Sheffield, going so far as to label them “mutton dressed as lamb”. Robert Smith’s lack of trust towards the music media was developing, along with the trio’s growing skills as a live outfit.
On June 1, The Cure van docked at Carshalton Park for yet another show. While they were hopelessly mismatched with Mod revivalists Secret Affair and The Merton Parkas, the Quadrophenia vibe of the night – the film based on The Who’s album had just been released – would help inspire a future Cure single, ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’, a bitter put-down of bandwagon jumpers and assorted wannabes. The Record Mirror’s Philip Hall was at the show, but walked away underwhelmed. “Lots of ideas but little identity,” he declared. As Smith scowled and continued scribbling new lyrics in his notebook, The Cure kept on touring, swinging through Liverpool, Cheltenham, Milton Keynes, Swansea – basically anywhere that would have them. By June 17, they returned to London for their first headliner since March’s month-long Marquee residency. But again, the band drew the wrong kind of press notices, this time from Mike Nicholls at Record Mirror. It seemed as though NME’s thumbs-down had marked the band as targets for every other music paper.
“Did you know they were the Pink Floyd of the new wave?” Nicholls asked with more than a little snippiness. “Well, Robert Smith carries off an admirably Syd Barrett drone and their general art school and smoke bombs approach has definite hippy appeal. The Cure can consider themselves prime contenders for the Most Frustrating Band of the Year award.”
In the Fiction bunker, Chris Parry shrugged and released ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, backed with ‘Plastic Passion’, as the next Cure single, on June 26. While Melody Maker’s Ian Birch acknowledged that ‘Boys’ was a live highlight, he found the single version “ordinary”. NME’s Paul Morley, however, had changed his tune, embracing The Cure like a long-lost sibling. “‘Boys Don’t Cry’ is a light trippy riff, with an eloquent one-string motif, chatty, ambiguous, yearning vocals and a series of understated, unexpected twists,” he declared. “It is classic new pop. I still find the Three Imaginary Boys LP as empty as a yawn … [but] this is magnificent.”
Clearly there was some back-pedalling at work in Morley’s gushing review, but the song was far and away the finest three minutes of The Cure’s life to date. Even Smith knew that, admitting that, in a righteous world, the track should have reached the top of the charts. As a prime example of old-before-its-time pop classicism, the song still rates highly several decades after its release. It proved that The Cure could be a much more adroit, tuneful outfit than Three Imaginary Boys suggested.
Later in the year, Parry would add ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ to his second 20 Of A Kind Compilation, but only as something of a consolation prize for his band. Every bit as sure as Smith as to the commercial potential of ‘Boys’, Parry felt that his former label Polydor had stitched up the band, failing to give the single the push it deserved. “‘Boys Don’t Cry’ was my pick for the Top 10,” insisted Parry. Of course it didn’t get anywhere near the money end of the charts.
In between July shows, including another London gig at the Lyceum, alongside The Ruts, a clearly disappointed Robert Smith undertook the first of many non-Cure projects. Simon Gallup’s brother Ric had graduated from working in Crawley’s one reasonable record store to setting up his own label, christened Dance Fools Dance. Smith was the label’s other co-founder. A Smith “discovery”, 11-year-old drummer/guitarist Robin Banks and 12-year-old shouter Nick Loot (aka The Obtainers), were the label’s first release, albeit in a massive pressing of 100 copies, which were flogged to friends and family for 50p apiece. They’d dropped a cassette in the letter box of Smith’s parents’ house and he was smitten. “The songs were brilliant,” he said. With Smith producing, The Obtainers cut ‘Yeh Yeh Yeh’ and ‘Pussy Wussy’ at Morgan. The pair of songs made the single’s A-side.
“They were two strange kids from our town … they probably hung around the record store that Ric Gallup worked in,” Tolhurst told me. “One was fairly ‘normal’, in a strange way. The other was quite a character, like a teenage John Lydon, complete with sneer. Basically one banged pots and pans and the other sang in a voice not dissimilar to Mark E. Smith of The Fall. I think their main objectives were to live up to their name and obtain as much as they could all the time, which they did pretty well!”
But more significantly, Smith’s pal Simon Gallup was now in a band called The Magazine Spies. With their name shortened to Magspies, their track ‘Lifeblood And Bombs’ was used as the single’s B-side. Gallup’s future wife Carol Thompson – no relation to Porl – sang backing vocals on the track. Just like The Obtainers, Gallup had slipped Smith some music via the family letter box, leaving him a copy of Shane Fenton & The Fentones’ ‘I’m A Moody Guy’. The message wasn’t lost on Smith. “He thought I was a moody bastard.”
It may have been a throwaway track, cut simply for laughs (and for the king’s ransom of £50), but the Gallup/Smith alliance was clearly growing stronger. Smith’s relationship with Lol Tolhurst had deep roots, despite his cutting remarks about Tolhurst’s limited musical repertoire. But that wasn’t the case with Cure bassist Michael Dempsey. He and Smith had never really connected and that was only heightened by their endless hours squeezed into the back of the Cure Maxi van (which was actually a retired Upjohns’ vehicle – prior to that, the band got about in a van that Dempsey bought from a pig farmer). With The Cure, as with so many bands, the need to relate to each other was just as strong off stage as it was on. And this just wasn’t happening with Dempsey and Smith. “I never really knew Michael,” Smith admitted. “We never had that much in common. If it weren’t for the group, I wouldn’t have socialised with him at all because I don’t think we particularly enjoyed each other’s company.” Lol Tolhurst was now drummer and go-between. “It was always that I was Robert’s friend and he knew Michael and Michael was my friend and he knew Robert. I was always in the middle.”
Dempsey wasn’t coping especially well with the touring life, either, regularly falling ill, despite guzzling vitamins by the handful.
Smith and Gallup, m
eanwhile, were getting tighter with each beer. Every Saturday, Smith met up with Gallup and his mates at their local in Horley. “I thought it would be great if Simon was in the group,” said Smith. “It would be much more fun.” Both Smith and Gallup were diligent curry eaters, too, which made their connection even stronger.
Heartened by The Magspies’ experience and their boozy Saturdays, Smith was now very serious about finding a place in The Cure for Gallup. But there was still the matter of Michael Dempsey to deal with. For the time being, however, Smith and Gallup decided to collaborate on another project. If The Obtainers seemed like the dodgiest case of child exploitation this side of the Industrial Revolution, what became known as the Cult Hero was weirder still. The idea came out of another beery night at Gallup’s local in Horley.
Full-figured postman Frank Bell was one of Horley’s stranger legends: when not stuffing letter boxes he was often spotted hanging out with the local wrecking crew, decked out in a T-shirt that proclaimed: “I’m a Cult Hero.” Robert Smith had met him and was taken by his bold personality. Smith was convinced that the mailman had all the makings of stardom. When Bell’s name was mentioned in the pub one night, Smith had a brainwave: “I thought, ‘Get him in the studio and write a disco song.’” And that’s exactly what Smith did. He invited Gallup, Tolhurst, Porl Thompson and his teenage contenders The Obtainers to help out, along with a gaggle of Horley locals. Smith also invited his two sisters not only to attend, but play at the sessions: Janet plucked a bass and Margaret sang backing vocals. The song was cut at Morgan with Mike Hedges, although Chris Parry was given the producer’s credit.
When it was eventually released in December 1979, the single ‘I’m A Cult Hero’ (backed with ‘I Dig You’) was hardly the type of pop cheese to stop a nation in their tracks or change the course of popular music. Only 2,000 copies were pressed. As NME would report, ‘Cult Hero’ was “a bit of discofied nonsense concocted by the group and a drinking buddy that should never have seen the light of day”. But it achieved several things – firstly, Frank Bell’s dream of stardom was realised (especially when the song became a novelty hit in Canada the next year, selling upwards of 35,000 copies). And Robert Smith, still smarting from the Three Imaginary Boys cover fiasco, grabbed the chance to design the artwork, which was based on a Howlin’ Wolf LP. And, most crucially, it strengthened the bond between Gallup and Smith.
Michael Dempsey was on holiday when the session was planned. By the time he returned, Gallup had already mastered the bassline. Dempsey was relegated to adding some synth lines. As good-natured as the Cult Hero indulgence obviously was, Dempsey knew that his time as Cure bassist was as good as over. “Robert was tiring of me,” Dempsey said. “He’d clearly mapped out in his mind what was happening next. Simon was very easy-going, as was Lol, who would always find a way to make things work, but that was less a characteristic of mine.” Dempsey could also see that Gallup’s pared-back style of playing was much more suitable to the future Cure sound. “Robert stripped away a lot; he took out an awful lot [from the band’s sound]. He wanted to go down a very dark and uncompromising road and Simon was perfect for that.”
But Dempsey’s time wasn’t quite over yet. By July, there was sufficient interest in the band for them to make their first overseas trip, albeit a simple hop across the Channel to Holland. They played at an open-air festival on July 29 at Sterrebos. It was hardly a keynote gig in the early life of The Cure – Tolhurst recalled that “it was pissing with rain” and the band played in constant fear of electrocution – but it did show that Parry’s goals for The Cure stretched beyond the borders of Old Blighty. He had the band earmarked for world domination, which wasn’t surprising, given that it was his money being thrown in their direction.
Back in London in early August, Parry made an introduction that would have a radical, almost terminal impact on The Cure. Smith was at a Throbbing Gristle show on August 3 at the YMCA off Tottenham Court Road. He was standing at the front when the stench from what he thought could have been car fumes forced him to retire to the bar. There he bumped into Parry, who then introduced Smith to Banshee bassist Steve Severin. It seemed an innocent enough incident: label boss introduces one rising star, Smith, to another, Severin. But if Parry had any idea of how dangerous this liaison would become for The Cure, he would have grabbed Smith and braved the car fumes. Within a few months, Smith would be suffering an advanced case of divided loyalties.
Smith was quite a sight – he was decked out in sunglasses and a green Charlie Cairoli suit. Severin laughed when he laid eyes on him. “I was there in a bright-green check suit,” Smith recalled, “and Severin came over to me and said, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re wearing?’ I loved that.” A bond, of sorts, was immediately formed. Although Severin had been a fan of ‘Killing An Arab’ (Parry had slipped him a copy), he seemed more bemused than impressed by Smith. His first move – once he got past Smith’s suit – was to ask him how on earth he could be in a band and still live in Crawley. He just couldn’t comprehend how anyone could live somewhere other than London, the centre of Severin’s universe. Smith shrugged and replied that Crawley was more peaceful. “We just chatted over a few drinks,” Smith said, “which set the scene for the next five or six years, really.”*
At this point, Smith had yet to witness a live Banshees performance; he’d only heard ‘Hong Kong Garden’ when it was spun by indie guru John Peel. But during his early trips to London, in late 1978 and early 1979, Smith couldn’t help but notice graffiti splattered about the capital that screamed: ‘Sign the Banshees’. “It seemed to be everywhere,” said Smith, “and it gave them a mythic quality in my mind before they’d even released a record.”
Smith and Severin seemed more an odd couple than like-minded reactionaries – Severin, alongside Siouxsie, had been part of the infamous punk crew the Bromley Contingent, while Smith had watched punk from the sidelines in Crawley. Severin was also four years older than Smith. But the pair shared a freethinking musical spirit, while Smith – although he wouldn’t admit it – must have envied the credibility that Severin and the Banshees had established with both press and punters.
Even before they signed to Polydor, the Banshees were receiving all the right kinds of notices. Their now legendary desecration of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, at their debut show on October 2, 1976, was described with the kind of gushing prose reserved nowadays for royal nuptials or Tinseltown premieres: “The prayer begins. It’s a wild improvisation, a bizarre stage fantasy acted out for real.” Paul Morley, the NME scribe who would carve up Three Imaginary Boys like some crazed wood-chopper, delivered this typically ambiguous Banshees bulletin in January 1978: “They could be the last ‘rock’ group. The only ‘rock’ group. They are not a ‘rock’ group. They are 20th century performers.” Even in the midst of Julie Burchill’s brazen pillorying of their debut long-player, The Scream, she did list those things she loved about Siouxsie: “‘Hong Kong Garden’, the way she treats her audience like muck … I even kind of liked the way she danced on Top Of The Pops.” Surely Robert Smith would have jumped if he’d been offered this kind of press in exchange for Morley’s windy assault on The Cure’s debut LP.
A few weeks after Smith and Severin’s first exchange, on August 29, Severin helped The Cure score the support slot for the Banshees. An unholy alliance was under way.
In early September, the band was briefly back in Morgan Studios to cut their third single, ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’, the tune inspired by the Mod revival Smith had witnessed several months earlier. Smith would characterise the opening guitar chord as “sub Pete Townshend”, another nod in a Mod direction. Although it hardly made an impression on the charts when it appeared in November, ‘Jumping’ was an impressive kiss-off from Smith, proof positive of the improvement in his songwriting and the growing sense of assuredness in his lyrics, which were actually penned in the bar at Morgan. But the session was just as significant for the single’s B-side, ‘I’m Cold’, which turned out
to be Dempsey’s final recording with The Cure. Smith had been writing a lot of the material that would make their next album, Seventeen Seconds, and Dempsey’s dislike of the material showed. “We’d had a couple of rehearsals,” Smith said, “and he didn’t like the new stuff.” At the same time, Fiction labelmates The Associates had been trying to poach Dempsey from The Cure and this wasn’t something that Dempsey was totally averse to. He said as much to Smith. “I said, ‘I think they’re great – I think they’re better than us.’”
Just to demonstrate how strong the ties now were between the Banshees and The Cure, Siouxsie added a backing wail to ‘I’m Cold’. Smith had encouraged her to sing on the track, as he spelled out in the liner notes to Join The Dots, where ‘I’m Cold’ was given a second life, some 25 years after its recording. “I wanted Siouxsie to sing on a Cure song because I admired what the Banshees were doing and I wanted them to be part of The Cure story,” Smith said. The track was a regular from the band’s early gigs at The Rocket in Crawley, but was slowed down to a neo-psychedelic drone for the single. Smith was impressed by the playback of the song, at full volume, late at night at Morgan, but wasn’t totally convinced he’d achieved his aim of displaying the “darker, heavier side of the band”. But that would come, and soon.
The Cure/Banshees double-header continued on September 5 at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. As a precursor to the drama that was about to go down, The Cure arrived on time, but their gear didn’t; eventually they played after the Banshees, using borrowed equipment. But that was a minor glitch compared to what happened the next day in Aberdeen.
Maybe the Banshees should have seen the signs: British PM Thatcher was in town and the city was crawling with security.* While Maggie spoke, the Banshees had an in-store signing of their album Join Hands. The store had ordered 200 copies, but Polydor had only delivered 50, which virtually walked out the door. The Banshees’ manager, Nils Stevenson, sold his stash of albums to the store’s owner to cover the demand, but Banshee drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay chose to start handing out the albums for free. When the store-owner advised them of their poor grasp of economics, the pair retaliated by refusing to sign any more autographs. A band huddle ensued and McKay and Morris stormed out of the store and the band. By the time the other Banshees returned to their digs, the vexed duo were on a train back to London, their tour passes safety-pinned to their hotel room pillows, which had been shaped to resemble human bodies.