Never Enough Page 4

  By the time he was 14, in 1973, Smith was talking up his (non) ambitions: he intended never to be a slave to a regular job; his life goal was to “sit on top of a mountain and just die”. He did, however, have at least one job outside of The Cure. “He was a postman one Christmas; they’d always hire extra,” Lol Tolhurst said to me. “That lasted about a week or two until he ditched his mailsack in a river somewhere and told them he wasn’t coming back and that was it. I don’t remember him having any other full-time job.” The Cure’s first bassist, Michael Dempsey, does recall that Smith also held down a gardening job – but only for a few weeks.

  So The Cure was born out of indolence, apparently, not burning ambition. When The Cure had become one of planet pop’s most unlikely superstars in the late Eighties, Smith still insisted that he didn’t form The Cure for either sex or drugs. Instead, it was “just the best way to avoid getting up in the morning”.

  In his own way, Lol Tolhurst agreed with Smith. “We didn’t have a master plan; we didn’t really have one until the mid-Eighties,” he replied when I asked him about the evolution of The Cure. “We were pretty young; we didn’t have any idea of what was going to happen. In some ways that was our saving grace. Some bands today do it as a career move; to us it was just something we felt like doing.

  “Some of the early shows were just an excuse to have a party; we’d book a local church hall, charge a small amount to come in, we’d buy some beer and have a party. It was more for the sake of something to do than anything else.”

  “None of us had a really strong vision of being superstars,” figured Michael Dempsey.

  Both Smith and Tolhurst had older brothers – schoolmates, as it turned out – who’d taken the everyday route of school, higher education and a “normal” life of wife and children and a house in the suburbs. Smith and Tolhurst weren’t so thrilled by what they saw. “Both of our brothers had taken that path, but we thought, ‘Here’s what life could be, comfortable but ultimately tedious, or we could do something different,’” said Tolhurst. “That’s what drove us.”

  Much later in his life, Smith would agree that his rebellious outlook was pretty standard teenage moodiness, even if it meant life and death to him at the time. In 2003, he came clean. “It’s normal, as a teenager, to love this idea of being a victim – the whole world is against me, no one understands me.”

  Yet Smith would build much of The Cure’s early career on this cult of the outsider. His morbid fascination with both death and the French existentialists, notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, seemed a natural progression from his typically dour, normal-life-sucks teenage hang-ups.

  But Smith’s education was not all doom, gloom and heated playground debate about that “poofter” David Bowie. Between 1970 and 1972 he attended Notre Dame Middle School, which was experimenting with open-plan classrooms and in the process actually encouraging freethinking in its pupils.* So liberal was Notre Dame, Smith would insist, that he turned up for classes in 1970, at the age of 11, wearing a modified black velvet dress. “I really don’t know why,” he pondered. “I thought I looked good. My teachers were so liberal they tried hard not to notice.” Smith survived the day at school, but as he walked home he was jumped and beaten up by a pack of four not-so-open-minded fellow Notre Damians.

  Lol Tolhurst was there, looking on. “Robert went to a jumble sale and got a black velvet dress, really long and tight fitting,” he told me. “His mother cut it down the middle and made it into a pair of trousers. Which was fine until you saw him on the playground with his legs together, so it looked like he was wearing a dress.” As Tolhurst read it, this was simply an attempt on Smith’s part to see how flexible the school’s few rules really were. “Our thing was to operate just within the letter of the law. Some of the teachers knew what we were up to and tried to pin something on us.”

  Smith agreed, saying that he wore the dress “for a dare”, as a way of testing how far he could push his teachers’ casual approach to authority. “I’d worn it all day because the teachers just thought, ‘Oh, it’s a phase he’s going through, he’s got some kind of personality crisis, let’s help him through it.’”

  On another occasion, Smith decided to experiment with his sister’s cosmetics before attending school. “I locked myself in the bathroom and went to school wearing make-up.” This time around, however, Smith’s teachers weren’t as tolerant. “I got sent back home immediately,” he said. And the response of Smith’s parents? “They were quite patient with me,” Smith said. “They hoped I would simply stop it one day.”

  Every bit the storyteller, more than once Smith has said that his first experiment with make-up coincided with his first attempt at cross-dressing. Either way, he was beaten up on the way home from school, which he didn’t consider “a very fair reward” for his efforts. Not that it put him off, of course.

  As for Notre Dame, its so-called “middle school” experiment had been introduced into some British schools in the early Seventies; it was designed to “bridge the gap” and soften the transition between junior and senior school. “It was supposed to be very liberal,” Smith stated in 1989. “You had ‘open class’; if you had a class you didn’t like, you could move to another. You’d address the teachers by their Christian names – that sort of set-up.”

  Lol Tolhurst, one of Smith’s Notre Dame classmates and future Cure co-founder, was equally surprised by Notre Dame’s freewheeling approach to education. “Looking back, it was strange. I now send my [teenage] son [Gray] to a similar school,” Tolhurst said to me. “But that was the Seventies. At one point I remember we didn’t have any set lessons; we were given projects to do and asked to report back at the end of the week to tell what we had done with them. We weren’t really supervised.”

  Speaking in Ten Imaginary Years, the band’s first official biography, published in 1988, Smith admitted to embracing the “revolutionary” teaching methods. He also discovered that it was an easy system to abuse. “If you were crafty enough,” he said, “you could convince the teachers you were special: I did nothing for virtually three years. But it was at heart a Catholic school, so there was still a certain amount of religious education.”

  Smith sleepwalked through his studies, only putting in the effort required to achieve a pass mark. English was the one subject that managed to maintain his interest and enthusiasm. When asked, Smith recalled that his school reports stated: “Something in the order of, I was doing less than I could. That was pretty accurate because at the time I was consciously trying to do as little as possible.”

  Another positive aspect of Smith’s “middle school years” – especially for a youth whose goal was to avoid the nine-to-five grind that he witnessed every day of the working week in Crawley – was that he met Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst and Michael Dempsey.

  Born and raised in Horley, Surrey, on February 3, 1959, Tolhurst, like Smith, had siblings with vast age differences. One of six children, his oldest sibling, his brother Roger, had been born in 1942 (followed by Nigel in 1946, who died two months later; John, who was born in 1947 and Jane, who was born in 1951). And again like Smith, Tolhurst had a sister, Barbara, who was born in 1960. Tolhurst’s father William had served in the Navy for 15 years; 10 years in China prior to World War II and then another five in Europe and the Middle East during the war. Both Smith and Tolhurst had attended St Francis Primary and Junior Schools; Smith recalled meeting Tolhurst on the school bus on his first day of primary school.

  “He lived in the next street and we went to school on the same coach,” Smith said. “But he made no impression on me whatsoever. He remembers me, though not very favourably.”

  The Tolhursts were a strongly musical family: Lol’s father William played the piano, while his younger sister Barbara would eventually opt for a career as a music teacher. And his mother Daphne was incredibly supportive when one of her sons showed a certain musical aptitude. “My mother was always very interested in music and arts,” Tolhurst said, when we spok
e in early 2005. “She gave me my love of all those things. It’s only in hindsight that I realise that not a lot of parents do that. She was always encouraging me in those areas. When we started the band, she was very supportive. I went from having a secure job to this very unsecure [sic] thing and about half the money I formerly had. I was still living at home and she didn’t bat an eyelid.”

  Michael Dempsey, the future Cure bassist, was born on November 29, 1958, in what was then known as Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). One of four Dempsey children, Michael and his family had shifted to Salfords in Surrey in 1961. Before enrolling at Notre Dame in 1970, which Dempsey now remembers as requiring a “horrible train commute” from Salfords, Dempsey had attended Salfords County School. Dempsey insists that his family were “emphatically not musical”, although his mother Nancy played piano and sang in the local Catholic church choir. Just like Smith (and Tolhurst), Dempsey acquired a handy musical education from a sibling, his sister Anne, who was five years his senior. “Anne had the record collection,” Dempsey told me in early 2005. “It was a weird assortment: the soundtrack to Lawrence Of Arabia, [prog rockers] Gong, early T. Rex, when they were Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was an eclectic mix.” And just like Smith, Dempsey was inspired by Bowie’s star turn on Top Of The Pops. “It was rare to see anything extreme,” he said. “And it was also cool to like the thing that shocked your parents most.”

  While Notre Dame’s more laissez faire approach to learning had been too tempting for Smith not to abuse, it did imbue him with a certain “anything goes” attitude. This would be the perfect manifesto for a band such as The Obelisk (as The Cure were first known), and the many other hopefuls who emerged in the post-punk period. But Smith, Tolhurst and Dempsey first had some chops to learn.

  Unlike another of his childhood favourites, Pinocchio, Smith admits that he had no problem with attending school – “I actually enjoyed it while I was there” – but that his questioning outlook towards religion led to him being deemed “unsuitable”. He was eventually suspended from St Wilfrid’s Comprehensive School, which he attended between 1972 and 1977. “I was suspended from school,” he recalled, “when I was supposed to be doing exams because my attitude towards religion was considered wrong. I thought that was incredible.”

  Describing itself as a “thriving and caring Catholic comprehensive school”, St Wilfrid’s was established in 1953. Their mission statement – “we pride ourselves on being committed to the whole person and the whole community; we are conscious each child has been created in the ‘image and likeness of God’ and pursue not only academic excellence but also spiritual growth based on Gospel values” – was inevitably going to cause some unrest for those pupils acclimatised to Notre Dame’s more easy-going approach. But Smith wasn’t alone; Lol Tolhurst was also feeling the pain, especially at the hands of one particular teacher.

  “He was a wizened old man, a chain-smoker,” Tolhurst told me, “who’d written all these books. He lectured us on all kinds of things. On the first day he grabbed me and said, ‘Tolhurst, I know your brother: what are you going to be – a first-class student or a bee in my bonnet?’ It was a lot different to Notre Dame.”

  Smith described St Wilfrid’s as “the most fascist school I’d ever been to. You couldn’t do anything. They’d re-introduced school uniforms, the whole thing – it was an entire process of clamping down. And that bred a lot of resentment amongst people of my age. We felt like we were used as guinea pigs.”

  Tolhurst was also shocked by the difference between Notre Dame and St Wilfrid’s. It took him all of one day to discover the difference in approach. “I remember feeling very anxious about going there, because I had long hair,” Tolhurst admitted. “I wondered what they were going to say about that. There was one teacher who was feared by all, a Mrs Slater, who grabbed me on my first day there and picked on me about something. Many years later I was sitting in a club in Sydney [Australia] and this voice said, ‘Mrs Slater wants to see you in her office, boy.’ It was her son. It was very strange. It still put the fear of God in me.”

  Michael Dempsey, however, actually preferred St Wilfrid’s to Notre Dame, although he wasn’t thrilled by either school. “I’ve seen Robert say that Notre Dame was radical,” he said to me, “but I don’t think it was that alternative. It was just a mix of the religious and more secular schooling. But they were outside the mainstream.”

  What St Wilfrid’s did instil in Robert Smith, and Lol Tolhurst, was a realisation that their daydream about not having a regular job should be pursued with extreme prejudice. Which led them, inevitably, to music.

  Smith and Tolhurst had been tinkering with musical instruments when they were students at Notre Dame; their bond had strengthened when they discovered that they were both members of the British league of the Jimi Hendrix fan club. (Smith’s relationship with Dempsey began when they realised that they both owned electric guitars.) But even earlier, Smith had been taking piano lessons, in part to keep up with the musical progress of his piano-playing sister, Janet, whom Smith would insist was the family’s “musical genius”. But frustrated by his lack of progress (and prowess) and determined to find an instrument that Janet couldn’t master, Smith started playing guitar, “because her hands were too small to get around the guitar neck and I thought, ‘She can’t beat me at this.’” Smith figured he was “six or seven” when he first fondled a six-string, “[but] I wasn’t very good.” Smith remembered his one and only guitar teacher as “the gayest bloke I ever met … He was horrified by my playing.”

  So instead, Smith’s brother Richard talked him through a few basic chords, while he also learned by ear, mimicking the playing he heard in his brother’s top-shelf record collection.

  It was Christmas 1972 when Smith received his first “proper” guitar, a present from his parents. The guitar was a Woolworth’s cheapie, christened the “Top 20”. As basic as it was, it would remain Smith’s number one axe for some time, much to the horror of his bandmates, record producers and Fiction Records boss Chris Parry.* In 1973, Smith formed his first band with Janet, his “hippie” brother Richard and some friends. They named themselves, for reasons that remain unclear to this day, The Crawley Goat Band.

  Next was a group named The Group, mainly because it was the only school band in existence, “so we didn’t need a name”.

  Lol Tolhurst, just like Smith, had his older brother to thank for his nascent musical career. When Lol was 13, Roger Tolhurst told his family that he was relocating to Tasmania, Australia. Before departing to the other side of the planet, he asked his much younger brother if he’d like some kind of farewell gift: Tolhurst asked for some drumsticks and a “how-to” book on drumming. He was on his way.

  Smith’s initial musical education had taken place at home in Crawley, where he learned the good book according to Jagger & Richards and Lennon & McCartney, and then saw the light when Bowie shocked the Top Of The Pops audience. But his more practical education began in the music room at Notre Dame Middle School. While skipping lessons, Smith, Tolhurst, Dempsey and several others started tinkering with whatever instruments they could lay their hands on. A new sound was born.

  “We’d go to the music room and pull out their instruments and bash out songs on them,” Tolhurst told me. “I remember some of the first songs we played: we got some sheet music from the local music store and played ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ – which is very strange because it’s a keyboard song and all we had was guitar and drums – ‘Heart Of Gold’ by Neil Young, and some Paul Simon song. It was a question of us trying to learn something. They were very strange choices but that was the only sheet music they had from the last century in the store.”

  Tolhurst was also a dab hand with the wheels of steel; he’d spent most of his time at Notre Dame spinning discs at lunchtime discos. “I was the DJ. I remember playing all these Black Sabbath records and the nuns would be nodding away.”

  Dempsey, every bit the pragmatist, was drawn to the music room for othe
r reasons. “It was warm,” he told me.

  Soon after, in April 1973, Smith, Dempsey and Tolhurst were ready to make their public debut. According to Smith, they played a piece to the class, featuring Smith on piano, Tolhurst on drums, Dempsey and Marc Ceccagno playing guitars and Alan Hill on bass. “We called ourselves The Obelisk and the whole thing was horrible! But still much better than studying.” Given Smith’s response to their one-off performance, it’s possibly a good thing that no one can quite recall what song they massacred. Lol Tolhurst still has no idea. “It was a complete nightmare but quite interesting,” he recalled in 2005.

  Dempsey still has strong memories of Ceccagno, the only black pupil at St Wilfrid’s. “He was quite mysterious, very sharp, very funny. He was also quite influential – he was possibly the first nihilist amongst us.” His nihilistic outlook clearly rubbed off on both Smith and Dempsey, if not the more easy-going Tolhurst, particularly when combined with their sixth-form reading list: Albert Camus’ The Outsider, Shakespeare’s Othello, Milton’s Paradise Lost. “We were good readers – and it helped reinforce your sense of isolation,” Dempsey figured, reasonably enough. Another book he and Smith both savoured was Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful Of Dust – they’d even thought about calling the band Brat’s Club, as a nod to the book.

  It was around the same time as Obelisk’s indifferent debut that Smith would lose his virginity with Mary Poole, “the nicest girl in school”, whom he’d first encountered in Drama Class at St Wilfrid’s. “I went out with her because everyone else wanted to,” Smith admitted. Typically, their first sexual encounter wasn’t quite Mills & Boon-worthy. “We were at someone’s party, a fancy dress party,” he recalled. “I went as a surgeon. I remember because I poured all this tomato ketchup down me. At the time I thought it was a really good idea, but after an hour it really began to stink. Every time I moved I was completely overpowered by the sweet sickly smell of tomato ketchup.”