Never Enough Page 7
Even if The Easy Cure had any music-business savvy – and who has at this apprenticeship stage of their career? – they would have been hard pressed to find a less compatible label than the German-based Ariola/ Hansa. Founded in 1964 by brothers Peter and Thomas Meisel, who also ran a publishing company called Meiselverlage, the Hansa label’s first signings were European “schlager” artists (popular/folk musicians); these releases were distributed through Ariola, which signed such artists as David Hasselhof, Roger Whittaker, Snap and Eros Ramazotti. By the time they placed their “search for a star” ad in Melody Maker, Hansa had grown into a seriously successful label. Their roster featured such acts as Boney M and Donna Summer (and later Milli Vanilli, No Mercy and Lou Bega). If The Easy Cure had read the ad’s not-so-fine print closely and considered the contents, they would have figured that Boney M and Donna Summer came from a different galaxy altogether to the Crawley hopefuls. Unlike Fiction, the label that would eventually be formed to provide a recording home for The Cure, creative development wasn’t exactly high on the list of Ariola/Hansa priorities. They wanted to shift some units – their roster proved that.
But the real warning sign for The Easy Cure should have come in 1976, when Ariola/Hansa attempted to turn four blow-waved Brits, going by the name of Child, into the type of pre-fab pop outfit that would relegate The Bay City Rollers to pop’s second division. It didn’t work. The airbrushed quartet didn’t score until September 1978, when their ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ reached the UK Top 20 – but by then The Cure had learned all they needed to know about Ariola/Hansa.* Regardless, the business aspects of making music were a long way from the minds of Smith, Thompson, Tolhurst, Dempsey and O’Toole when they joined forces around a tape recorder in the front room of the Smith household in April. This first recording of The Easy Cure was sent to the London address of Hansa, preceded by a band photo. The Easy Cure prayed to the rock’n’roll gods and then got back to rehearsing. It was the only time they would enter a talent comp – and for good reason, as it transpired.
While their application – or, more accurately, their photo – was doing the rounds of the Hansa office, another performance opportunity arose on May 6, this time at The Rocket, a Crawley local (now known as The Railway). The gig only came about through a choice piece of opportunism by Tolhurst. It was Sunday lunchtime and Tolhurst discovered that Marc Ceccagno’s band, Amulet, who’d been witnesses to the Worth Abbey debacle, wouldn’t be able to make their scheduled set at The Rocket that night. So The Easy Cure drummer made the call and offered their services. The publican shrugged and figured, “Why not?”
“We realised we needed to play in front of a real audience at some point,” Smith figured, reasonably enough, “so we rehearsed all afternoon and went down and played. We went down quite well.”
Well, not quite, according to Lol Tolhurst. “The first show there was absolutely abysmal. There were about 15 people there looking in their beer, trying to ignore what was going on on stage.”
Although the band’s songs-in-development were unlike anything else being heard in Crawley at the time – hardly an Olympian achievement, given the limited competition – any attention The Easy Cure received was based on the flashy axework of Porl Thompson. Yet by this time, the band was experimenting with such minimalist mood-pieces as ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ and ‘Killing An Arab’ – songs that balanced both silence and sound in their arrangements. Thompson’s chops seemed to be a tad superfluous.
While fledgling songwriter Smith clearly saw Thompson’s tricky playing as excessive to The Easy Cure’s needs, he also insisted that Thompson wasn’t overly excited by the band’s direction. “He didn’t actually like what we were doing,” Smith commented in 1989. “We didn’t really like what he was doing either.”
Michael Dempsey, however, could spot Smith’s future intentions for the band’s sound, even at this nascent stage. “We didn’t have to be virtuosos. He stripped away everything that we didn’t like – in fact, we never said we liked anything, really.”
While both The Easy Cure and Thompson returned to neutral corners to consider the future, a telegram arrived from one Kathy Pritchard, addressed to a Robert J. Smith of Crawley, Sussex. Its message was simple. It read: “Please call Hansa Records urgently.” Easy Cure’s rough-and-ready demo tape (and, crucially, their cheap mug shot) had done the trick. Smith called the number and an audition was arranged at Morgan Studios in London on May 13, 1977.* Justifiably excited, the band caught the train to London, set up in the studio and ran through a couple of songs while the Hansa staff videoed the band. With the benefit of hindsight, Tolhurst admitted that the presence of a video camera should have tipped them off to Hansa’s intentions: they were searching for the next Child, not some post-punk upstarts.
“They videotaped us, which should have been the first clue, but we failed to get the significance of it all. We realised after: they’d had a hit with Child, all pretty boys, and that’s why they videotaped us. We were all young boys so they’d do the same with us.”
Of all the members of The Easy Cure, only Smith seemed unsure about Hansa’s intentions. Dempsey recalled that after the first try-out, “Robert was very circumspect – the others not so. But we were just so green.”
Hansa had seen enough. By May 18, only five days after the band’s Morgan Studios audition, they sent a contract to The Easy Cure, offering them a five-year deal. The band convened for an emergency meeting at the Smith household. If nothing else, they were realists – given that they hadn’t been besieged by A&R sharks waving lucrative contracts, the band decided to sign up. “Well, it wasn’t like we could choose who we were going to sign to,” Smith explained much later. “There wasn’t a queue down the road.”
Tolhurst, for one, was shocked. “We were amazed. How did that happen out of all those people that applied?”
The band’s following did build with further gigs at The Rocket – as many as 300 locals turned out for these shows. But again, it seemed to be Thompson’s playing that was drawing the crowds, not Smith’s swiftly developing and oddly curious takes on punk rock. It also helped that Tolhurst and Smith’s older brothers encouraged all their mates to attend these shows. Such rough-and-ready cuts from the time as ‘Heroin Face’, recorded at The Rocket in 1977, would end up on the 2005 reissue of Three Imaginary Boys.
“Whenever we played,” Smith said, “we thought it was awful – there was loads of feedback and you could never hear anything except Porl’s guitar.” Smith had set up a bare-bones sound-mixing unit, which he operated while the band played, but it didn’t seem to help. Smith was convinced that their regular gigs at The Rocket came about purely because of Thompson’s “guitar hero” status. “That’s the only reason we kept getting re-booked.”
The increasingly sceptical Smith also suspected that The Easy Cure was merely providing a background soundtrack for Crawley locals on a big night out. After all, The Rocket was hardly The Marquee. “We had a really drunken following,” he said, “and we were really just a focal point, an excuse for people to go out, get drunk and smash the place up.”
While the bar staff at The Rocket swept up the broken glass and fag butts from another Easy Cure show, the band had to deal with a more immediate challenge – and it had nothing to do with Porl Thompson’s axegrinding or the choice of songs for their upcoming Hansa demo. Their vocalist with the movie-star moniker, Peter O’Toole, returned from a kibbutz in Israel and informed his bandmates that rock’n’roll was not the life for him. He quit the band on September 12. Smith made a key decision: he figured that he might as well become their singer, if for no other reason than there was no one else he knew who could do the job. It was a decision he’d been edging towards for some time.
“We went through about five different singers,” Smith said. “They were fucking useless, basically. I always ended up thinking, ‘I could do better than this.’ So gradually I started singing a song, and then it was two songs. I thought I couldn’t be any worse [than his
predecessors] so I decided to be the singer.”
It was no smooth or immediate transition from “drunk rhythm guitarist” to accidental frontman for Robert Smith. The band subsequently went through a brief “instrumentals only” phase, while he slowly developed the nerve to open his mouth and sing. And Smith’s public debut as vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the now four-piece Easy Cure wasn’t the highest point of the band’s early career. “I was paralysed with fear before we went out,” Smith said. “I drank about six pints of beer, which … was enough to knock me over.” While the lager helped lubricate Smith’s vocal cords and ease his stage fright, it didn’t do a lot for his memory.
“I was singing the wrong song,” he remembered. “Of the first three songs, I started on the second song. They carried on playing. No one even noticed. So I thought, ‘If I can get away with that, I can be the singer.’”
While it may not have arisen out of any grand design, what Smith the vocalist wisely chose to do was to stay true to his speaking voice: just like his guitar playing, his singing stuck safely within his limitations. “I think the weirdest thing about the way I sing,” he would comment, “is that most of the time it’s how I talk.” It provided the band with one of their more distinctive early musical traits: it wasn’t as if Smith was singing a tune, it was more like he was talking directly to you, which increased the all-round creepiness of a song such as ‘Killing An Arab’. So what if his pitch was flatter than Loftus Road, the home ground of his beloved football team, QPR?
The Easy Cure appeared at a free show on October 9 in Queen’s Square, Crawley. The positively named Peace Jam – with poster art, once again, from the pen of Porl Thompson – was arranged by James and Consuelo Duggan, who’d organised approximately 100 similar shows in Ireland. Three hundred punters turned up for the event, which was talked up by the Duggans as a chance for people “to listen to the music and think about peace, not just for Northern Ireland but everywhere”. Smith’s father Alex, meanwhile, stood stage front with his trusty Super 8 camera, documenting the largest show of The Easy Cure’s career to date. (This footage would turn up on the video companion to their first best-of collection, entitled Staring At The Sea – The Images.)
The local rag, the Crawley Observer, was sufficiently impressed to provide the band with their first press coverage. The paper was especially excited when they learned that the local lads had signed with Hansa for the lofty figure of £1,000.
Beneath a headline that read: ‘Rockin’ To The Top’, the article documented The Easy Cure’s seemingly rapid rise. “The band, all aged between 18 and 19, was one of 1,400 bands to answer an advertisement in the Melody Maker,” they reported. “Only 60 bands were selected for an audition in London from which eight groups [Japan being one of the other winners] were offered a contract by Hansa, a leading German recording firm. The group’s first single will come out on the Antlantic [sic] record label.” In his first documented public comment, Robert Smith – who was soon to develop a notoriously hot and cold relationship with the media – was still in shock. “It all happened so fast,” Smith said of the Hansa deal, “but now we are really looking forward to making our first record.”
The Easy Cure had no trouble spending Hansa’s £1,000 advance on new equipment. They would, however, have problems appeasing Hansa’s commercial expectations when they got comfortable in London’s SAV Studios for the first of two recording sessions for the label (the second was at Chestnut Studios). They laid down five originals during that first session. The song list featured ‘Meathook’, which would reappear on their debut album in 1979, and ‘See The Children’, whose questionable lyrics painted Smith as a dirty old man in teenager’s clothing. There was certainly an uneasy air of queasiness about lyrics which talked of passing sweets through a fence and wanting to join in the children’s games. Other tracks recorded were ‘I Just Need Myself’, ‘I Want To Be Old’ and ‘Pillbox Tales’, which would resurface as the B-side of 1978’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and then, again, some 27 years later on Join The Dots: B-Sides And Rarities.
But Hansa wasn’t interested in Cure originals. They’d sent the band tapes of songs they deemed suitable for their new signing, including ‘I Fought The Law’ – later brilliantly covered by The Clash – and ‘The Great Airplane Disaster’. At Hansa’s request, they also covered The Beatles’ shouter, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, along with originals ‘Little Girl’, ‘I’m Cold’ (another track to resurface on 2004’s Join The Dots) and, most crucially, ‘Killing An Arab’, but in a much slower version than the track which would become their official debut single in 1978. The band managed to cut their own tunes only via an impressive act of stealth, as Tolhurst would recall. “When somebody had gone out for a cup of tea we’d persuade the engineer to record some of our songs.”
If any indicator was needed of the wilfully non-Hansa direction that Robert Smith’s slowly developing songwriting talent was taking, it was evident in ‘Killing An Arab’, a sparse, skeletal meditation on murder and nothingness. The track – which over its life would stir up plenty of attention from such groups as the National Front and America’s Anti-Arab League – was directly inspired by an incident in the book étranger (The Stranger), written by renowned French existentialist Albert Camus, which had been part of Smith and Dempsey’s St Wilfrid’s reading list. As heroes go, Camus was as peculiar a choice for Smith as everyman hero, Alex Harvey. (An early Cure press release would zero in on the Camus connection, declaring that the band was inspired by “punk and the Penguin Modern Classics”.)
Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria on November 7, 1913, to a French Algerian (pied noir) settler family. His mother was of Spanish extraction. His father, Lucien, died during World War I’s Battle of Marne in 1914. Camus endured a tough, poor childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. He eventually became an author and philosopher, one of the principal luminaries of existentialism, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, another hero of the young Robert Smith. Camus – who died in a car crash in 1960 – was best known for The Outsider, which was based on his theory of the absurd. In the first half of the novel the protagonist Meursault is a cold fish, virtually a walking corpse. It is Meursault’s inability to reflect on the nature of his existence that leads him to murder. Only by being tried and sentenced to death is Meursault forced to acknowledge his own mortality and the responsibility he has for his own life.
If there was one passage in Robert Smith’s dog-eared copy of The Stranger that left the deepest impression, it was the following, which occurred immediately after the murder by shooting that formed the narrative and moral heart of the book:
I took a few steps towards the spring. The Arab didn’t move. Even now he was some distance away. Perhaps because of the shadows on his face, he seemed to be laughing.
While its roots lay in a deeply profound, if worryingly emotionless study of alienation, Smith would regularly play down the song’s intentions. “‘Arab’ was a great rabble rouser when we played it live,” Smith would say, “but it was almost a novelty song.” Smith would defend the song with a touch more levity in a 1978 interview with NME. “The song’s dedicated to all the rich Arabs who go to Crawley college discos to pick up the girls,” he joked, before adding that ‘Arab’ was “not really racist, if you know what the song is about. It’s not a call to kill Arabs. It just happened that the main character in the book had actually killed an Arab, but it could have been a Scandinavian or an English bloke. The fact that he killed an Arab had nothing to do with it really.”
Hansa, however, had trouble identifying with (or even locating) the “novelty” aspects of a track going by the name of ‘Killing An Arab’. In fact, they had trouble identifying with any of the songs recorded by The Easy Cure during the two 1977 sessions. Hansa countered by offering The Easy Cure tunes that they had earmarked for teen-sceners Child. The band politely demurred.
“They wanted us to be another Child,” Smith said with some disdain in 1978. “We we
re even offered a song that Child would eventually put out as a single. [And] they were giving us these really old songs to cover. We couldn’t believe it,” Smith said. “This was summer 1977 and we thought we’d be able to do all these outrageous songs we’d written and all they wanted from us were versions of really banal old rock’n’roll songs.” Smith also slagged off the label’s choice of “unsympathetic” producers whom Hansa had attempted to team with The Easy Cure.
Almost 30 years later, Lol Tolhurst still laughs at some of the meetings held between band and label. “We’d go and see them and they’d say, ‘We don’t like your songs. Not even people in prison would like this.’ I have no idea why they said this. [But] we thought that was the way the music business worked.” On one occasion, the band met with Steve Rowland, Hansa’s A&R rep, in a London office that the label had hired by the hour. “All the time we were talking to him, we felt that he didn’t hear a thing we said. He just had this plan about how he was going to make us big stars.”
While The Easy Cure reconsidered the merits of signing with Germany’s biggest independent label, they were headed towards another clash. But this time their adversaries were the law – and the National Front. On October 16, in between the two Hansa studio sessions, they were booked to play Felbridge Village Hall. The show’s poster, with type by Smith and design by Thompson, featured a drawing of a gormless looking character (many believe it is the band’s first public piss-take of Tolhurst). The Easy Cure were to be supported by the not-so-legendary Mr Wrongs rock disco, which turned out to be a Crawley school friend who came equipped with a turntable and his private stash of Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd vinyl albums. Admission was 30p, but, as the band would soon regret, the crowd was encouraged to bring their own booze.