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Their label, HMV, were adamant that a cover of Martha & The Vandellas’ ‘Honey Chile’ would be a sure-fire hit. The band wanted to go with an original, ‘Come With Me’. Eventually they backed down, put their tune on the B-side of the single, and looked on with a knowing, satisfied grin as DJs opted for the original over the safe-as-houses cover. ‘Come With Me’ became a major domestic hit. No wonder Chris Parry experienced a strange sense of déjà vu when he eventually met up with The Cure: he’d endured exactly the same kind of muddle-headed record company logic as them.

  The UK, however, didn’t exactly embrace Fourmyula. The band watched more shows than they played, while they managed to secure only one session at Abbey Road, where they covered a track called ‘Lady Scorpio’ which became another hit at home but was met with a deafening silence in the UK. After a four-month stay they returned for a homecoming gig with the intention of showing the locals exactly what was happening overseas. They launched into Led Zep’s ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ and then powered their way through a set of covers that they’d experienced first-hand in the UK. Their fans stared in slack-jawed, gobsmacked disbelief. Fourmyula, reluctantly, went back to the winning formula.

  Fourmyula made one more assault on Europe, in 1970, establishing a reasonable fanbase in Scandinavia (they even changed their name to Pipp, a Danish word meaning “mad”). But like so many antipodean hopefuls before them, it all fell apart and they disbanded later in the same year.

  Chris Parry had seen enough of the UK to realise that there were a hell of a lot more music biz opportunities there than in the Land of the Long White Cloud. While his fellow Pipp-sters hightailed it home, he stayed in London, marrying in 1971. He then spent two years studying marketing before securing a job in the International department at Phonogram Records. Then in 1974, via a connection who happened to be friends with Wayne Bickerton, Polydor’s head of A&R, Parry was offered an A&R role. (In the same year, he became a parent for the first time.) His first signing, the Chanter Sisters, had a modest hit in 1975. Parry had come a long way in a short time from thumping the tubs for Fourmyula. He’d also learned some handy lessons about the machinations of the music industry, which he was about to put to practical use.

  By 1976, Parry could sense the cultural change occurring in rock. He made a point of checking out all the key punk bands that were making a serious noise: the Pistols, Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Clash. Bearded and draped in a heavy coat, Parry was hard to miss at these shows – he looked more like a lumberjack than a talent-spotter. Parry was moving in the same circles as Caroline Coon, a high-profile stringer for Melody Maker who’d also helped found Release, an organisation dedicated to offering legal advice to under-agers facing drug charges. Release had the help of such A-listers as The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, which had helped to up the profile of both Coon and her organisation.

  Her memories of this flashpoint in punk history are as strong and evocative now as they were when she was a star reporter for Melody Maker. “I loved what was going on,” she told me. “I wanted to break this story [of punk]. I thought I could tell it better than anyone else on Earth.” Coon, naturally, had some fairly sizeable obstructions to overcome: at the time, Melody Maker was manned, as she sneered, by “hippies and pub-rock fanatics – neither paper [Sounds or Melody Maker] took this breaking story seriously. Melody Maker refused to take my advice that this was one of the most significant events in rock’n’roll – partly because I was a girl.” Finally Coon had a win: her seminal report on punk in the July 28, 1976 issue of the mag was arguably the first article to document the new movement, hitting the streets just ahead of her rival-cum-fellow-true-believer, Sounds’ reporter John Ingham.*

  Today, Coon has no strong memory of Parry, but does recall that “some record company execs were vile, some were lovely. We might have gone to the same gigs.”

  Chris Parry, meanwhile, was dealing with the same kind of trouble as Caroline Coon: he simply couldn’t convince his senior colleagues at Polydor that punk was more than just a blip on the rock’n’roll radar. Most of his signing suggestions were rejected by the label.

  In fact, despite Parry’s rapid climb up the corporate ladder, by the time he first heard The Cure he was in fear of being known as much for the bands he missed out on as those he signed. Parry had witnessed a typically anarchic Sex Pistols show at Barbarella’s in Birmingham in 1976 and raced back to London, imploring his Polydor bosses to sign the punk rock banner-wavers. Likewise The Clash. He’d later tell Lol Tolhurst about the experience. “He told me about seeing The Clash with people from Polydor and there was some kind of mini riot. This bottle exploded behind their heads and his colleague said, ‘That’s it, we’re not signing them.’ That was the attitude. I think he was the only guy among all the A&R people in London who could see what was going on.”

  Parry was annoyed by Polydor’s wariness, admitting he was “pretty pissed off” by their refusal. Despite his keen antennae for punk, Parry lived in fear of being tagged a three-time loser – the kiss of death for any A&R man worth their damaged liver. Then he was given a tip from future Pogue, Shane McGowan, to check out Woking-class zeroes The Jam, who were playing The Marquee on January 22, 1977. Playing oddly angular takes on classic Britpop, and led by the fierce Paul Weller, The Jam were convincingly real. Parry walked away convinced that this was the band that could not get away. “I was determined I wasn’t going to miss out again,” he said.

  Though they didn’t necessarily fit in with the punk acts that were cheerfully blowing major label budgets all over London at the time – the Jam’s heroes were Modfathers The Who and the Noël Cowards of pop, The Kinks – Parry spotted The Jam’s star potential. He signed them on February 15, barely three weeks after the Marquee gig, and went on to score co-production credits for their first two albums, In The City and This Is The Modem World, both of which emerged in 1977.

  By May 1978, at the same time that The Cure headed into the tiny Chestnut Studios in Sussex to cut their first demos as a trio, Parry had added Siouxsie & The Banshees, Sham 69 and sister act Doreen & Irene Chanter to his impressive roster of signings. He’d also signed Otway and Barrett, a punk-era duo, whose singer, John Otway, had tracks produced by The Who’s Pete Townshend. While with Polydor, they produced an unlikely one-off hit, 1977’s ‘Cor Baby That’s Really Free’. Parry’s star – unlike that of The Cure – was clearly in the ascendancy. He even turned up in Julien Temple’s iconic feature film The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, which charted The Sex Pistols’ rapid rise and deadly freefall. It was pure method acting: Parry played one of a team of pissed-off A&R men in the film.

  The Cure, meanwhile, had recorded a new batch of demos on May 27, with cash borrowed from Ric Gallup. The band had started to spend more and more time at Gallup’s Horley record store, where he turned them on to singles from such mysterious labels (at least to the Crawley three) as London’s Rough Trade. They’d also moan to him about their disastrous Hansa deal. After several months of this, as Tolhurst told me, Gallup was fed up. “He’d commiserate with us but then he said, ‘OK, I’m tired of seeing you sitting round feeling sorry for yourselves; why don’t you make another demo and send it around to the other labels?’ He ended up paying for the recording sessions.”

  This collection of songs (three of which would make the cut for their debut album) proved just how lean and skeletal their sound had become since shedding Porl Thompson. ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ opened with the sparest of all possible interplay between Tolhurst’s drums, Dempsey’s bass and Smith’s guitar, before the band locked into a mean garage groove. Smith, meanwhile, pulled off a fair impersonation of a leaking tap as he documented the despair of the loneliest time of the loneliest night of the week. Sad, lonely and blue, Smith variously waits for the phone to ring, sobs, and finds himself spellbound by the damned relentless dripping of his tap. Smith then unleashes a sparse guitar solo which helps sustain the overwhelming sense of gloom, if only from a teenage miserablist’s point of view. The song was an early
favourite of Smith’s, who’d planned to team ‘10.15’ with ‘Killing An Arab’ as the band’s debut release (a double A-side), because ‘10.15’ was “more representative of what we were trying to do [at the time].” Smith had written both ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ and ‘Killing An Arab’ in 1975, when he was 16.

  “‘10.15 Saturday Night’ was written at the table in our kitchen,” Smith revealed in the liner notes for the 2005 reissue of Three Imaginary Boys, “watching the tap dripping, feeling utterly morose, drinking my dad’s home-made beer. My evening had fallen apart and I was back at home feeling very sorry for myself.”

  Elsewhere, ‘Fire In Cairo’ was another spare, tense strum, propelled by a chorus that, while understated, had all the singalong potential of any Buzzcock punk-pop anthem. It’s a mouthful – “F I R E I N C A I R O” – but Smith’s mantra-like chant (reinforced by some savvy multi-tracking in its finished version) gave the song exactly the kind of impetus he was seeking.

  But of the four demos recorded at Chestnut Studios, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ was the most immediate and accessible. If there was one song from the band’s early songwriting efforts that precisely captured the minimalist, post-punk, post-Porl Thompson direction in which Smith was steering the band, it was ‘Boys’. Again, Smith’s aching heart drove the song’s central lyric: despite his protestations to the contrary – boys don’t cry, apparently – you got the distinct impression that he’d shed a few tears during its writing.

  When asked about what would become a signature tune for the band, Smith said that it was his attempt to write a classic pop song, with a definite Sixties influence. “In a perfect world,” he announced in 1985, “that would have been number one.”*

  Despite Smith’s dreams of chart glory, at the time, Dempsey was still holding down his porter’s job in the psychiatric hospital, while Tolhurst continued working at Hellerman Deutsch. Because he was still officially unemployed, Smith took on the role of correspondent, as he mailed out their new demos to virtually anyone who might be willing to listen. With the exception of Hansa, of course.

  The letter that accompanied their demo tape couldn’t have been any more precise. Along with some basic information (Lol 19 Drums / Mick 19 Bass / Robert 19 Gtr/Vocals), it spelled out their mission statement:

  “Hello,” it read, “we are The Cure. We have no commitments. We would like a recording contract. Listen to the tape. If you are interested please contact us at the above. Please return the tape in the enclosed S.A.E.” The letter was signed, “Thankyou, Robert THE CURE.”

  While this introduction to The Cure was doing the rounds of London’s record labels, the band played their ‘Mourning The Departed’ show for Thompson at The Rocket on July 9, then five days later drove down to Brighton for another double-header with Gallup’s band Lockjaw.

  Gradually the replies trickled in – and none were positive. In late June 1978, Phonogram and then Island said thanks but no thanks. The trio had also sent an entry to the BBC’s ‘Band of Hope and Glory’ competition, which was part of the David “Kid” Jensen Show. The BBC’s response, dated June 29, was typical of the feedback they were receiving. “Unfortunately, we cannot use your group,” wrote Tony Hale, Radio One Producer, “but that isn’t to say that your tape is without interest or that the group is not good enough. It’s just that the particular combination of qualities we are looking for isn’t quite there.” In a final note, which would prove to be deeply ironic given the success of The Cure over the next few decades, Hale signed off with the following: “I hope this reply isn’t too much of a bring-down: always remember that music is a subjective area, so that when you sell your first million albums, you will know we were wrong.”

  While the BBC’s response would provide some smug satisfaction for the band further down the road, it didn’t help solve their immediate predicament, which only worsened when Virgin and then EMI also gave them the knock-back. The band did, however, receive expressions of interest from United Artists and Stiff. Of the two, the second was definitely the label of choice for The Cure, mainly because it was the home of Elvis Costello. But the label execs failed to show at an early Cure gig, as planned, and the proposed deal fell apart. “We were so upset when Mr Stiff didn’t turn up,” Smith said. “We thought he was going to be different, but he was just like all the others.”

  Over at Polydor, Chris Parry settled down to his usual weekend ritual of test-driving the seemingly endless supply of demo tapes that poured into their offices each week. He’d grab a pile every Friday night, just as he was heading home for the weekend. Parry was flicking through the Sunday sports pages when he dropped The Cure’s cassette into his tape player. ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ was the track that grabbed him – on hearing Smith’s “drip, drip, drip” refrain, he found himself playing the tape again. ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ also caught his ear.

  Having had such stellar success with suburban three-piece The Jam, Parry’s A&R radar started twitching like mad when he checked the return address and the line-up of The Cure. Maybe chart lightning did strike twice in the same (suburban) place. Tolhurst was, and still is, convinced that Parry imagined The Cure to be another Jam in the making. “He thought, ‘They’re kind of young, they’re sharp with some stuff and they’re outside of London – and nobody knows about them except for me.’” Michael Dempsey agreed. “Yes, I see the logic in that.”

  Parry was no fool. He did admit to the appeal of signing another pop/rock trio when he was interviewed for Ten Imaginary Years. “The idea of a three-piece excited me and that this little cassette had come from the backwoods and no one else had touched it. My reaction was it had mood, it was atmospheric and I liked it.” So much so that he wrote to the band on July 21. His missive cut to the chase, reading: “Dear Robert, I would like to meet the Group [sic] and suggest that you telephone my secretary, Alison Korsner, who will arrange a meeting.” Smith did exactly that and a get-together was arranged for August 10.

  While speaking on the phone, Parry had asked if the band would play in London, but Smith refused: the trio wasn’t so sure that playing before an away crowd (if anyone showed) would inspire a record company’s support. And the band had already been burned in a similar manner by Stiff. Instead they agreed on a sit-down meeting at Polydor’s office in Stratford Place.

  Although the trio arrived on time, they were made to wait for Parry, who, as Dempsey would recall, turned up looking slightly sheepish, “as though he’d committed some criminal act”. With his airbrushed hair and what Dempsey would describe as “craggy jowls”, the band decided that Parry was a dead ringer for Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. As first impressions go, it was hardly a winner. (Smith would confess to being a “bit disappointed at first”.) After an introductory chat in his office, Parry decided that a midday tipple was in order, so he took the trio to a nearby pub. Smith remembered it as being “a pleasant afternoon, really”, as did Dempsey when we spoke. The close link between The Cure, music and alcohol was forged over several jars of Directors bitter with their manager/label boss/publisher/booking agent-in-waiting. “I liked him,” Dempsey said. “He was quite direct – he wasn’t a bullshitter.”

  To Smith, Parry seemed unlike anyone he’d previously met in the music industry – he was certainly nothing like the suits at Hansa. And unlike the Stiff staff, he’d actually turned up, albeit late. For starters, Parry had bird shit on his shoulder, which he didn’t seem to notice, while he kept spilling beer on his shoes as he spoke with the band and boldly mapped out their future. “[He was] the first person we’d met involved in the business who didn’t take himself seriously,” Smith said. “He seemed to be doing it because he liked it.”

  As for Parry, he quickly discerned the three very different characters of The Cure. “I liked Dempsey’s understated sense of humour,” he said. “Lol was flapping around here and there, but it was obvious that Robert was the leader and had views on things. [He was] checking me out more than the others.” Parry was also aware that the band had the intelligence t
o cut through the usual music biz hype. “They [had] a certain type of fatalism and sharp humour attached with all this nonsense. No one takes things too seriously.”

  With neither party too scarred by their first meeting, Smith suggested that Parry check out the band playing on home soil. For Smith, it was partly a challenge to see if Parry would turn up at the show, which was held at Redhill Laker’s Hotel, Redhill, on August 27. That would be a real test of his commitment to the band.

  The Cure was booked to support The Hotpoints, who – being a jazz/funk fusion outfit – were hardly a band in sync with these post-punkers. But not only did Parry go to see The Cure, he also arrived with a friend, Dave Alcock, whom an excited Tolhurst mistook for Bee Gees’ manager and all-round entertainment Svengali, Robert Stigwood.

  While their set still included such Smith faves as Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’, it was gradually loading up with Cure originals, including such cuts as ‘10.15 Saturday Night’ and ‘Killing An Arab’. Parry, standing on the floor where the band was playing (only the headliner actually got to use the stage), was suitably impressed. He turned to his friend Alcock and shouted: “This band are gonna make me an awful lot of money.”

  “It’s not that I’m very money orientated,” Parry would correct later on, “it just came out that way.” What Parry saw in the band was a certain “universal appeal”, which he couldn’t help but translate into monetary terms. Truth be told, Parry was hungry for success. As Lol Tolhurst would tell me, Parry was irritated by the human interaction side of the music biz. “I can always remember him saying that he wished he could invent a machine that could write hit songs for him and that way he wouldn’t have to deal with us monkeys.”

  After their set, Parry invited the trio for a post-gig drink at a nearby pub, the Home Cottage. As far as Tolhurst was concerned, it was over those few drinks that their future with Parry was sealed. “We liked him immediately for lots of reasons. Although he was sharp and businesslike, after the show at Laker’s, we went to this pub that sold this really strong bitter. He drank loads of it and made quite a fool of himself. We immediately liked him for that reason; he wasn’t afraid to be an idiot.”