Never Enough Page 6

  Again, given that Crawley was not exactly rock’n’roll ground zero, the band had to search for a venue to unleash the rock beast within. By this point, Smith was bored of their endless rehearsals. “We would jam,” he said, “but I hated it. Why play another blues? Why change chords? Why not just stay on E?” Smith, at least, was definitely ready for their first public appearance. This time they chose Worth Abbey on Turner’s Hill in Crawley, an institution that promoted itself as “an English Benedictine monastery in a changing world”, with “a community of Roman Catholic Benedictine monks seeking to follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ within a framework provided by their rule of life and their Abbot”. In hindsight, it seemed the perfect starting place for a band whose later albums would feature such titles as Pornography, Faith and Disintegration and who were often accused of inspiring an entire generation of God-less Goths.

  So Malice unleashed their musical assault on the world on December 18, 1976, at the Christmas party for Upjohns, the company now managed by Smith’s father Alex, who helped them secure the gig. But instead of plugging in and roaring their way through Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’ and Alex Harvey’s ‘Faith Healer’ – or possibly something by blue-jean rockers Status Quo, whom Smith had checked out in 1971 and found “fantastic” – the band was forced to play unplugged and to operate under an assumed name. The tag Malice was considered not quite right for the hallowed grounds of Worth Abbey (where Smith and Mary would marry some 12 years later). So they turned up with acoustic guitars, and a bongo, no less, and sat on the floor and played. “That was the firm’s dinner and dance,” Tolhurst recalled. “We sat in the sort of minstrel’s gallery in Worth Abbey with bongos and acoustic guitars and just played nonsense. Everybody politely clapped; it was the boss’s son, so they had to be pleasant.” The world of rock’n’roll remained unchanged, at least for the time being.

  Two days later, Smith, Tolhurst, Dempsey and Thompson would reunite, briefly, with guitar man Mark Ceccagno. Amulet, Ceccagno’s new, post-Malice combo, were booked to play a show at St Wilfrid’s, and Malice managed to talk their way onto the bill. Smith, of course, also had to talk his way around his nemesis, the St Wilfrid’s headmaster. Smith told him that Malice was a band that peddled jazz-fusion, which was perfectly acceptable, so they were given the green light to play. He did, however, neglect to mention that he was a member of the band.

  Porl Thompson designed the stoner-ish looking poster for the show, which announced the gig as “A Special Christmas Bumper Bundle Party”. “Jazz rock combo” Amulet were billed as “speshul gest [sic] stars”. Nothing is known of the mystery band Bootleg, who were also mentioned on the poster as part of the evening’s entertainment, although Michael Dempsey, for one, suspects that it may have been a ruse to inflate the entrance fee to 30p.

  Smith, a reluctant vocalist at best, was yet to step up to the mic, so the band coerced Martin, a journalist from the local Crawley Observer, to take care of frontman duties. Completely unrehearsed, he rocked up in a three-piece suit, Manchester United scarf and motorcycle helmet, which he clung to throughout the show in fear of it being nicked. According to Tolhurst, the scribe-cum-vocalist’s best feature was that he “did a good impersonation of David Cassidy”. “We had about 100 rehearsals and knew six songs, so we thought we’d do it in public,” said Smith. “The curtain opened and we were there, snarling. It was a disaster. I started with a different song and was one ahead all the way through without noticing until they started the last song and I’d already played it.”

  Their set, for what it was worth, included ‘Foxy Lady’ – later to be massacred by The Cure on their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys – ‘Wild Thing’, which Tolhurst attempted to sing, Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’, Thin Lizzy’s ‘Jailbreak’ and a Smith original, ‘A Night Like This’, which would eventually turn up on The Cure’s 1985 long-player, The Head On The Door.

  Having bluffed their way in using the “jazz-rock fusion” ruse, Smith and co then started playing what he would describe as “loud, fast music”. The racket was overwhelming – “a screaming wall of feedback,” according to Smith – and of the 300 people in the hall at the start of their set, most of them headed for the door. “There was another band on who were much more proficient than us,” recalled Lol Tolhurst, “but it set the stage for what we were to become. It was a trial by fire. The response was fairly muted; everybody was sitting around the side of the hall.”

  Smith’s take on the show was more extreme. As he saw it, because the band was playing so aggressively they qualified as a punk band, which didn’t sit so well with the youth of Crawley. “Everyone hated us and walked out, but we didn’t care because we were doing what we wanted.”

  In the type of scene that would be played out again and again at various times and in various locations during The Cure’s early years, Malice’s brief set ended in chaos. When Tolhurst stepped up to sing ‘Wild Thing’, a humiliated Thompson punched him, gobsmacked that he dared to desecrate a Hendrix number. It wasn’t the last time a fist was raised in anger at a Cure show, although Tolhurst had some trouble recalling the ruckus when we spoke. “I don’t actually recall any fights with Porl – at least not then,” he said.

  As for the band’s first-time vocalist, he stormed off the stage with the farewell words, “This is shit”, returning to his post at the Crawley Observer without so much as a glance back over his shoulder. As 1976 drew to a close, and Queen’s ‘Somebody To Love’ and Abba’s ‘Money Money Money’ slugged it out at the top of the pop charts alongside Showaddywaddy and Johnny Mathis, the dream was over for Malice. So Robert Smith, not for the last time, reacted accordingly: he split up the band.

  Malice’s temporary hiatus, of course, didn’t quite rank with the subsequent splits in Camp Cure. There would be times when Smith – his judgement altered by drugs, paranoia, ennui, anger, Steve Severin (or a combination of each) – would swear on a stack of Melody Makers that it was all over for the band, usually to return to the grind within months. This time around, however, the rift lasted just beyond the Christmas holiday; by January 1977, the musical firm of Smith, Thompson, Tolhurst and Dempsey was back. While they continued the increasingly frustrating search for a vocalist, the Crawley four also had to consider their post-high school future.

  What the band needed, more immediately, was a new and improved name. Not only was Malice now forever linked to the St Wilfrid’s debacle of the previous December, but Smith felt that their moniker made them sound as if they were clones of camp rockers Queen, a band he truly despised. As far as Smith was concerned, the mincing Freddie Mercury had nothing on everyday hero Alex Harvey, so the name Malice had never been a comfortable fit for him. The idea for the tag Easy Cure came to them in the Smith family kitchen, during a January 1977 band meeting. And it wasn’t an inspired choice.

  “We decided we needed another name if we were going to start playing again,” Smith figured. “One of our songs was called ‘Easy Cure’, a song written by Lol, and eventually, in desperation, we settled on that.”

  Smith, in fact, hated the name. “I thought it was terrible. I sort of remember sitting around arguing about what we were going to be called and in the end I think we just got bored of it.”*

  After his run-in with authority at St Wilfrid’s which led to him being tagged “an undesirable influence”, Smith still managed to pass nine O-levels. Even though Smith had vague plans of enrolling at university, his brief expulsion proved to him that academia or any kind of further education clearly wasn’t for him. Smith knew where his immediate future lay: on the dole. Michael Georgeson told me that Smith’s parents were very concerned about their boy’s lack of interest in academia. “He was a great worry to his parents,” said Georgeson. “The school, I seem to remember, took most of the blame for that.”

  Smith registered for Social Security forthwith, financing his musical addiction with money raised by flogging his father’s home brew on the side. (“We’d steal five to six a week and sell them to old
blokes of the area, and with the money we’d buy records.”) According to Smith, his instructions to Social Security staff were very clear – not to put themselves out trying to find a job for this musician-in-the-making.

  “It came to the point where I’d rather kill myself than get a job,” said Smith. “I told Social Security to give the jobs to those who want them; I’d rather stay at home listening to music. But they’d tell me I had to work and I’d just ask, ‘Why?’”

  Smith had taken – and passed – the Oxford-Cambridge entrance exam, but more as a personal challenge than some gateway to the future. “I just wanted to see if I’d be able to get in,” he said. Typically, he rolled up for his entrance interview in a woman’s fur coat, and wasn’t accepted. He was, however, offered a place at Sussex University. “It was supposed to be the best university for drugs in the country.”

  Smith made a compromise with his father – he told him that he’d go to university if he was granted a year off to see where music led him. “But once I started the group and they realised I was serious about it, I wasn’t just using it as an excuse to go around and get drunk all the time and pull women, they dropped all sort of ideas of me furthering my education.”

  As Lol Tolhurst saw it, this was a turning point in their lives. “We’d reached a point where we had to do one thing or another: take the safe path, go to university and so on. But we got to the doors of it and decided to do otherwise.”

  Smith, in fact, was convinced that the period that he spent on the dole, post-education, were possibly the best eight months of his life. It didn’t hurt that Mary Poole, who actually had a job, would buy Smith’s drinks at the many Crawley watering holes that they’d frequent in the mid-to-late Seventies. Robert Smith was in an enviable position: he had a band in waiting, a loyal girlfriend, home brew on tap, and a burning desire to do as little as possible. Lol Tolhurst was also enjoying this golden age. “We’d listen to his brother’s really groovy records and drink home brew.”

  “I can’t understand people wanting to work,” Smith would declare in an early interview with Shake magazine. “I think the ‘dignity of labour’ is another myth propagated by employers. It’s all just money. I mean, if you’ve got enough money to do what you want, then that’s it really. I can’t understand people needing to work to prove that they’re worthwhile.”

  Interestingly, Smith would consider his lack of true faith one of the reasons for his raging apathy. Smith would talk about laying “myself open to visions of God, but I never had any. I come from a religious family and there have been moments when I’ve felt the oneness of things, but they never last. And I never think that I’m ever going to wake up and know that I was wrong. If God didn’t exist and the search for meaning was futile, what was the point of having a job?

  “When you have no belief in anything but yourself,” he continued, “you tend towards apathy; you see no reason for doing anything and nobody can find a reason for you. I used to value nobody else’s opinions.”

  While Smith’s slack attitude to employment and God might sound like the usual mix of youthful arrogance and standard teenage rebellion, it wasn’t as though he had that much to rebel against. The Sex Pistols might have sneered at the monarchy – John Lydon’s tough London-Irish upbringing provided plenty of source material for his venom – while The Clash railed against racism and apathy, an outlook formed as much by education as angst. But The Cure came from comfortable, middle-class Crawley. If the band failed, there were jobs to be found in local firms, possibly with a little encouragement from supportive parents. Alex and Rita Smith may not have been overwhelmed by their son’s (non) career choice, but they didn’t throw their offspring into the street. Smith had the type of freedom of choice that many of his post-punk peers were denied, which goes a long way to explaining The Cure’s decidedly apolitical outlook. Although they would go on to play many benefits and fund-raisers, the only thing they had to rebel against was the mundane, comfortable existence of the English middle class. ‘Anarchy In The UK’ it was not.

  Yet when he was asked if he considered himself middle class, Smith bridled at the thought. “I hate the idea of classes,” he said in 1984. “I think that’s a stupid concept. I’ve never come across the concept of middle class. Middle class is a thing that the media likes to propagate – class divisions. I really hate it, it’s stupid. I’m not working class, because I don’t work, but then a lot of other people don’t [work] either.”

  Lol Tolhurst, meanwhile, had undergone the obligatory careers vocation interrogation prior to leaving St Wilfrid’s. “He said to me, ‘OK, you’re pretty good at chemistry and science, maybe you should be a chemist – and there’s an opening at this firm.’ They got cheap labour, really.” When not working for Hellerman Deutsch, he attended Crawley Technical College. (Smith also enrolled there, principally to hang out with his bandmate.)

  Dempsey had a similarly enervating chat with his careers advisor. “I had no idea,” he told me. “I alighted on the word ‘journalist’ and he replied, ‘Journalism – very competitive.’” Dempsey also left St Wilfrid’s and decided against further education: Tolhurst had landed him a job at Hellerman Deutsch, testing cables and relays for Exocet missiles procured by the French military. (“I had no science knowledge at all,” he laughs, looking back.) He then attended business school in Crawley, but had no real plans for a career in that world. “It was convenient, really,” he replied when I asked him about this. He also found a job as a porter at Netherne Hospital, the local asylum, which he recalled as being “built on the Edwardian model – it was an extraordinary place, almost like a country house”. A country house, that is, populated by mentally unstable inmates drugged to their eyeballs.

  Undaunted by this, The Easy Cure, with Dempsey’s help, would attend many of the parties held by the staff on the hospital’s grounds. As for Porl Thompson, he continued with his fledgling design career – which would continue in tandem with his musical life – by enrolling at the West Sussex College of Design, although this wouldn’t take place until 1979.

  By early 1977, The Easy Cure had settled into a new rehearsal routine, this time in an annexe attached to the Smith household. Smith’s parents had added a room to their Crawley home, and the group had virtually moved in, commandeering the space for rehearsals. “Our regular routine was three nights a week at the Smiths’,” Tolhurst told me. “They remodelled their home for a family room but the band moved in for three years.”

  Gradually, more original songs came to life. Porl Thompson’s tenure with The Easy Cure, inadvertently, also led to Smith developing his creative skills: as the band’s rhythm guitarist, Smith was the first to master the basics of songwriting. As Smith saw it, songwriting was born out of necessity, not some insatiable creative desire that was eating him up inside. “The group was a way of doing something,” he said, “but I found a lot of our songs better than those I was listening to.”

  Lol Tolhurst agreed with this. “I was talking with Michael Dempsey about this – a lot of people start bands thinking of people they liked and admired, but we started from the other direction. We decided what we didn’t like and who we didn’t want to sound like and what was left was what we played.”

  Smith was, however, drawing his nascent songwriting influences from a variety of reliable sources. One of those was veteran BBC Radio One disc-jockey John Peel. Smith tuned in to his nightly programme with all the intensity of an acolyte. But even a cocky kid like Smith had no inkling that his favourite DJ, the much-lauded Peel – a lone voice of credibility and taste in a sea of commerciality and musical fluff – would soon be championing the Crawley combo.

  From the age of about 15, Smith had been a Peel convert, tuning in to his show every night. “That was the best part of the day. I heard [The Clash’s] ‘White Riot’ and cut off all my hair [which was years away from growing into his trademark bird’s-nest, admittedly]. The Buzzcocks, The Stranglers – I used to dream of making a record that John Peel would play.” />
  What the newly named Easy Cure still needed, however, was a vocalist. Their Crawley Observer ring-in from the December show hadn’t been seen since storming off the stage screaming, “This is shit”, so the Crawley four knew they had to start looking elsewhere. The enigmatically named Gary X came and went during March 1977, followed by a man with an equally arresting name, Peter O’Toole (no relation to the blue-eyed boozer of the big screen), who made his public debut at a show to mark (belatedly) Robert Smith’s 18th birthday, on April 22, at the local St Edward’s Hall.

  O’Toole’s debut left absolutely no impact on Smith, who attempted to recall the gig in 1988. “I remember nothing at all so it must have been good.”

  But Robert Smith was coming to the realisation that no one else seemed to share the same musical mindset as the established members of The Easy Cure, even though Smith didn’t fancy himself as a potential vocalist. “When we started, I wasn’t the singer, I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.”

  Peter O’Toole, however, was still part of The Easy Cure when they spent another night around the Smith kitchen table, flicking through the pages of the music press, “trying to glean what was going on”, according to Tolhurst. They spotted an ad in Melody Maker, searching for new talent. It was hard to miss, given that the ad’s artwork was a very classy piece of prime Seventies sexploitation. To wit, two women were draped over a motorcycle in a particularly come-hither sort of way. The darker woman of the pair pointed her hard-to-miss hotpants-clad booty in the direction of the camera. “Wanna be a recording star?” the ad screamed in blazing red type. “Get your ass up,” continued the text, which was strategically positioned next to the hotpants-wearing beauty. “Take your chance.” It was followed by a phone number for German label Ariola/Hansa, along with the following details:

  Hansa, Germany’s leading pop label that brought you Boney M, Donna Summer, is auditioning in Britain. Top recording studios with video equipment. Only experienced groups, singer songwriters, age approx 15–30 should apply. For further details, phone numbers above and send tape, photo to Hansa Records PO Box 1 DT London W1A 1DT.