Never Enough Page 8
The beneficiaries included the Arthritis & Rheumatism Council but the evening attracted the interest of both the local police and the National Front – obviously interested in any act with a provocative song called ‘Killing An Arab’ – neither of whom helped make the night any calmer. The police eventually brought the show to an abrupt and early end, while Smith and Tolhurst’s brothers and their crew introduced various National Front members to the car park’s asphalt.
The year 1977 had been a strange one for The Easy Cure. They’d found it relatively easy to secure shows in and around Crawley, having become semi-regulars at venues The Rocket and Laker’s at Redhill, and they’d also snagged a record deal. But Hansa’s intentions had left them feeling queasy, while Smith wasn’t so sure that the band’s small but devoted following were as keen on the nuances of ‘Killing An Arab’ or ‘Heroin Face’ (another early Easy Cure number, which would surface years later on the cassette-only add-on to their 1984 Concert album) as they were on Porl Thompson’s string work.
They agreed to end the year with a New Year’s Eve show at Orpington General Hospital, which had been arranged by Dempsey’s brother-in-law. He actually had plans to become The Easy Cure’s first manager, going so far as to print up 500 business cards emblazoned with the message: “Easy Cure For All Occasions”. Better still, the Orpington Hospital gig guaranteed the band £20. It wasn’t quite the £1,000 that Hansa had thrown their way, but given that almost 12 months ago to the day they’d been rocking the St Wilfrid’s School under the name Malice, £20 was hard to resist.
Smith was definitely up for it: the show was a chance to kick out the jams and forget about their ongoing hassles with Hansa. “Well, we thought, ‘We’ll play anywhere for £20,’” Smith recalled, “but when we arrived, we realised it was full of 40 – and 50-year-olds and trainee managers.” As the night wore on, Smith learned that it wasn’t just Hansa executives who were distressed by ‘Killing An Arab’; the crowd was in the mood for favourites, not sparse, austere deliberations of French existentialism.
Speaking in Ten Imaginary Years, Dempsey also realised quite early on that the Orpington General Hospital may not have been the perfect venue for a strong-willed band with a limited repertoire of golden oldies. “They wanted a dance band and we really had no grasp on anyone’s tunes but our own. We were also expected to play two sets but we knew right from the outset it was dangerous because we played our first set to a lot of booing and hissing. Luckily they weren’t sufficiently drunk at that stage to be anything more than vocal.”
Although Porl Thompson’s Fender-bending antics may have still seemed superfluous to The Easy Cure’s needs, he did come in handy at this year-ending show. In between sets, Thompson, who’d once been a guitarist-for-hire with local cabaret acts, mentioned that he knew his way around the 10-tissue weepy ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon’. So the band decided to use it to open their next set.
As Smith would relate, “We went back and started playing it and this roar of approval went up, but after bashing away at the chorus for six or seven minutes, this bloke threw a bottle and we ended up in the car park getting beaten up by several punters who wanted their money back.”
It’s hard to imagine that too many of the fans at the Orpington General Hospital could really summon up the strength to thump a group of hearty 18-year-olds. But the show was enough for Dempsey’s brother-in-law, who trashed his Easy Cure calling cards and terminated his services as the band’s manager-in-waiting, forthwith. In some ways, the gig was as much a turning point for the band as their battle with Hansa: they knew that they simply weren’t cut out to play the favourites. As Smith stated in 1988, “We didn’t want to learn loads of other people’s songs just so we could, because that way we would have become yet another pub band.”
During January, the band and Hansa agreed to undertake one more recording session, this time at London’s PSL Studio with producer Trevor Vallis at the desk, a man who would go on to work with such acts as Marillion, Bucks Fizz and Peter Cetera. (Hansa had previously tried to link the band with producer Gary Taylor, former bassist for GTO Records’ signing Fox.) The deal was very clear – Hansa had provided a relatively well-known producer, so the band should adhere to their label’s plan and cut some no-brainer hits. At least, that was the plan.
At the third and what proved to be final recording session for Hansa, The Easy Cure obliged their master and cut one cover, their second take on ‘Rebel Rebel’, along with originals ‘Plastic Passion’ (another track destined for Three Imaginary Boys), ‘I Just Need Myself’ and ‘Smashed Up’, a song which Robert Smith would state was “the worst thing we ever recorded”. By now, the band knew that the situation with Hansa was untenable: the label wanted safe versions of established hits, The Easy Cure wanted to find the middle ground between punk rock, Beatles songcraft and Albert Camus. And Hansa had no plans to get the band on the road, which was essential if they were to earn some kind of living. To make matters just that little bit worse, Lol Tolhurst was hit by a bus. As Robert Smith recalled, the band propped Tolhurst up in the pub, easing his pain with brandy. “He spent the rest of the day playing drums and bleeding. It was cack.”
Smith and the band realised that the Hansa deal was a dead end. There was no way either party was going to compromise. “On top of all this,” Smith added, “I had suddenly realised that I actually hated the songs we were doing and that even if Hansa liked them, we wouldn’t follow through.” (Of course this didn’t stop the band re-recording three of the songs from the Hansa sessions – ‘Meathook’, ‘Plastic Passion’ and ‘Killing An Arab’ – for their subsequent debut long-player.)
By February 19, a dejected Easy Cure was back at their regular Crawley haunt, The Rocket. This time around they were supported by a punk band called Lockjaw, whose numbers included bassist Simon Gallup. Born in Duxhurst, Surrey, on June 1, 1960, before moving to Horley as an infant, Gallup was the youngest of five children (he was one of four boys). Again, like both Tolhurst and Smith, there was a sizeable age gap between Gallup and his nearest sibling, Ric, who was almost seven years his senior. Gallup had attended Horley Infants and Junior schools, then Horley Balcombe Road Comprehensive School. By the time his path crossed with The Easy Cure, he was holding down a job at a local plastics factory. It was hardly the rock’n’roll dream that dedicated Kiss fan Gallup had been hoping to live out. However, his brother Ric worked in a Horley record store, situated at the rear of an electronics shop, so Simon had been exposed to the punk singles that were pouring out of London, which would have an immediate and very tangible impact on Lockjaw.
Gallup was aware of Lol Tolhurst, mainly through reputation. Tolhurst was dating a girl that Gallup knew from school; she would often boast how Tolhurst was a “hard man”. Tolhurst confirmed this. “Simon, when he saw me in the street, used to cross the road. As he got to know me he realised that was far from the truth.”
Lockjaw had also endured a tough introduction to the music industry. They’d sent a very rough demo tape to a label called Raw Records, who, in Gallup’s words, “thought we were this really good suburban band – but in fact we were shit.” On being signed, Raw Records introduced Lockjaw to the world with the single ‘Radio Call Sign’, backed with ‘The Young Ones’ on the B-side. It sank without trace.
“They were a raw punk band,” Tolhurst said of Lockjaw. “Their shows were very much the same: lots of stage invasions, people pogoing, stuff like that.”
Lockjaw had snared the support slot at The Rocket on the strength of their Raw Records single, but it turned out to be their only appearance at the venue, mainly because, as Smith recalled, “The place was torn apart.” Robert Smith took note of Gallup and his band; he, Tolhurst and Dempsey even started hanging out with Gallup at his brother’s record store.
During March, The Easy Cure – and Hansa – realised that they needed to come to some kind of conclusion about their unsteady alliance. The band was insistent that the stark ‘Killing An Arab’ should be their debu
t single, while Hansa were just as insistent that it was a career-killer. By March 29, when Hansa officially rejected the song as a single, band and label parted. And the split was permanent.
The Easy Cure, understandably, were devastated by their first not-so-successful foray into the music business. From then on they would display a certain wariness towards the fiscal side of the world in which they moved – eventually reaching the point where Smith turned down all offers for use of the band’s music in ads (at least until the early 21st century), thereby turning down millions of pounds in potential earnings. What he took away from the terminated Hansa deal was a sense of caution, plus the rights to all the originals they’d recorded during the three sessions.
According to Tolhurst, that was one of the smartest moves Smith ever made. “It all came to a sticky end but luckily Robert remembered to ask them to let us keep our advance and asked for the rights for our songs back. Robert’s always been like that; he’s always been aware it’s our stuff. [Otherwise] Hansa would still own the rights to some of our stuff.”
Subsequently, two Cure songs would emerge from the Hansa debacle. The first, a straight-up dismissal of the label entitled ‘Do The Hansa’, would emerge as an extra B-side on the 1986 re-release of ‘Boys Don’t Cry’; it also appeared on the Join The Dots collection. The other Cure song influenced by their tug-of-art with Hansa was, intriguingly, the 1987 single ‘Catch’. At the time of its release, Smith revealed that the Hansa’s execs would listen to their material and then advise them: “You write good songs, but there’s never a catch.”
During April, the now label-less Easy Cure once again hooked up with Simon Gallup and Lockjaw, this time at a show at Laker’s. A bond was starting to develop between Gallup and Smith, despite the former’s love of Kiss, the hideously successful cartoon rock outfit that The Cure considered “horrendous” (Lol Tolhurst’s words). Post gig, they spent the rest of the evening drinking together, not stopping until two in the morning. “We became good friends,” said Smith. Smith and Gallup would also learn that they shared a gently twisted sense of humour: their idea of fun was to ask the DJ at their shared gigs to play such funky pop cheese as The Bee Gees’ ‘Night Fever’, “so we could disco dance while all the punks pogoed about”, according to Smith. While he may have quickly warmed to the attitude of punk, Smith found it hard to fully conform: he’d only just dropped his flares in favour of straight-leg jeans, while he definitely wore his hair on the wrong side of his shoulders.
The Smith/Gallup alliance would ultimately have a major effect on the band’s future. They would hang out at the Red Deer club in Croydon, where they’d check out such seminal punk acts as The Vibrators, The Buzzcocks and The Clash. Throughout much of The Cure’s life, Smith had a tendency towards forming alliances – with Lol Tolhurst, Simon Gallup, Fiction label head Chris Parry and with video director Tim Pope – that would have a very tangible impact on the success (or otherwise) of the band.
But in early 1978 the shifts starting to take place in The Easy Cure camp were slight, as the Gallup/Smith bond started to form and the band’s sound slowly expanded. During April, Smith bought a Bon Tempi organ and a WEM amp, to go along with his much-loved Woolworth’s Top 20 guitar. Smith had heard Elvis Costello’s benchmark record, My Aim Is True, and made a sonic discovery. “They were the sounds I wanted,” he decided.
One sound the band didn’t desire, however, was the wail of Porl Thompson’s guitar. By May, the situation had become quite complicated: not only did Thompson refuse to play the guitar chords Smith suggested, but he’d also started dating Smith’s sister Janet. “We’d be rehearsing in the house when my mum and dad were out,” Smith said, “and he’d be somewhere else with my sister.” Rather than confront the problem head-on, Smith, Tolhurst and Dempsey decided to abandon rehearsals for a couple of weeks and then simply fail to tell Thompson when they resumed.
“We were becoming more and more stripped down,” Smith would relate afterwards, “and leaving him just short gaps [to play]. Eventually it became absurd – we’d be playing something like ‘10.15’ and there’d be like a 16-bar section where he could play lead guitar. So we came to an agreement and he left.”
Thompson formally left the band on May 3. Given their reluctance to deal with the Thompson problem directly, it seemed that their Easy Cure tag was becoming worryingly apt. The band staged a mock wake for their dear departed guitarist, at a Rocket show entitled ‘Mourning The Departed’. To the backing of some solemn organ music recorded by Smith, they conducted an on-stage seance and Smith, resplendent in priest’s robes, played the entire set with a crucifix-shaped piece of wood nailed across his guitar.
Thompson was relatively at ease with the decision, accepting that punk was rendering his “fast” playing anachronistic. He was even in the crowd at his own musical wake, as Robert Smith would attest. “Porl arrived in a hat and an old mac, and we didn’t know he was in the audience until – just as we finished playing – he walked up and poured a pint of beer over Lol’s head. Suddenly we were friends again.”
Soon after his rock’n’roll wake, Thompson signed on at art college, while also playing with a couple of bands more suited to his flashy stringwork, A Lifetime Of Trials and The Exotic Pandas. But as with most people and players who would become Cure insiders, it wasn’t as though Thompson was cast adrift forever. He would eventually return to the band, as well as becoming heavily involved with their record artwork via his company Parched Art.
The Easy Cure now had to make a few big decisions about their immediate future. For the first time in their short lives they were playing as a trio, which suited Smith’s plans to strip back their sound. Smith had also decided to strip back their name: he figured that the tag Easy Cure sounded too American, “too hippyish”, and opted to shorten it to a very simple The Cure. Not for the first time did Smith piss off bandmate Tolhurst, who’d inadvertently created the band’s name with his ‘Easy Cure’ song. Smith, however, was adamant. “I hated it,” he said, “which put Lol’s back up. The Easy Cure sounded stupid so we just changed it. I thought The Cure sounded much more it.” The Cure was almost starting to look more and more like a serious rock’n’roll band. While Dempsey may have possessed the more traditional good looks (he actually resembled a Seventies version of Lemonhead Evan Dando), both the curly-haired Tolhurst and Smith, with his floppy fringe and predilection for leather jackets, brooded in a way all serious young things should.
The rechristened trio also decided to have one last shot at recording some of their own songs. If this failed, Tolhurst, Dempsey and Smith knew that a life of drudgery in Crawley was probably all they had to look forward to. And that was more like a sentence. “We see so many of the people we went to school with doing absolutely nothing,” Smith said at the time. This simply wasn’t part of their master plan.
* The name Easy Cure would later be adopted by an Italian Cure cover act.
* Slick, sleek pop moodists Japan also signed with Ariola/Hansa on the strength of the 1977 “talent wanted” ad, recording three albums for the label. Not surprisingly, frontman David Sylvian denied that their method of recruitment was simply part of some tacky “talent contest”. “No, it wasn’t like that,” he told an interviewer. “They saw pictures of us and became interested. We had nothing to do with the talent contest.” OK, if you say so.
* The studio, later known as Battery, has since closed down.
Chapter Three
“I hope this reply isn’t too much of a bring-down: when you sell your first million albums, you will know we were wrong.”
– BBC rejection letter, 1978
CRAWLEY, Sussex, might have felt like the suburb that time forgot, but it was a bustling metropolis in comparison to Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Located just north of the capital Wellington, the area had been colonised by Colonel William Wakefield in 1839, who acquired 110,000 acres of flat and fertile land from the local Maori. Not much has changed over the subsequent 170 or so years – like much of New Zea
land, Lower Hutt is a green and pleasant land, possibly even sleepier than Crawley.*
Lower Hutt was the birthplace of John Christopher Parry, who would come to play a key role in transforming Crawley hopefuls The Cure into budding stars (and beyond). Parry’s background had more than a few similarities to the men of The Cure: he came from a place that didn’t rank too highly on the barometer of cool, and he was raised in a very large family. But whereas Robert Smith was one of four children, and Lol Tolhurst and Simon Gallup were both one of six, Parry topped them all – he had no less than 10 brothers and sisters.
Parry’s musical life began in 1964 when he was recruited to drum – playing without a drummer’s stool, as it turns out – for a New Zealand outfit calling themselves Sine Waves. By 1966, the band, now renamed The Insect, had developed a reputation playing at high school dances, youth clubs, socials and – to prove that no gig was too weird – Bible classes. The New Zealand music industry was hardly a world-beater in the Sixties, but it was competitive. The Insect, now called Fourmyula, entered and won a National Battle of the Sounds competition in January 1968. Their prize was a journey to the UK aboard the Sitmar.
For any antipodean band of The Beatles’ generation, the UK was the rock’n’roll mecca. Not only were the Empire ties still relatively strong, but it also seemed as though all the great sounds of the time – the Merseyside acts, The Rolling Stones, The Animals – emerged from the Old Dart. Such Australian stars as The Easybeats and The Master’s Apprentices had done hard time in the UK, trying to replicate their domestic glory; Fourmyula were set to do likewise.* But before Fourmyula set sail, in February 1969, the band lived through a record company spat that would strangely echo that of The Easy Cure and Hansa.