Tolhurst - Cured

Copyright 2016 by Laurence A. Tolhurst

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Theres a difference between memoir and autobiography.

They might seem the same but theyre very different beasts.

You may have heard that some of the events described here happened otherwise or went down a different way. Well, this is my versionhow I remember things, my truth.

The conversations are as close to verbatim as I could manage and honestly presented. A name or two has been changed to protect the innocent.

Mostly this is a record of the things that have kept me awake at 4 a.m., the precious flowers of the past blooming in the dark corners of memory. I have tried my best to capture whatever that light shone on. I hope it illuminates events for you as much as it has for me.

Love, Lol

Los Angeles, California

February 2016

Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I

am everything, and between the two my life moves.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Most people dont associate The Cure with punk, but Robert and I were the very first punks in Crawley.

Crawley is just twenty miles south of London but it might as well be another planet. It is a town with no center and no end, just endless rows of suburban bleakness that blurs into the dark, dank countryside. Crawley is a place where its always raining and a slate gray sky hangs over everything. It is where The Cure was born and always struggled to leave, the place we were never quite able to put behind us.

Crawley was one of the handful of new towns that popped up around London after the Second World War. A suburban swamp built around shops, schools, and factories: the Holy Trinity of English postwar progress. They were towns with no future and no hope. The late 1970s was a terrible time to grow up in England. It was a troubled era marked by a flagging economy, rampant inflation, political unrest, and no reason to think it was going to get better anytime soon. There were no jobs and everyone was on the dole. Even electricity was being rationed. While other places around the world were thriving, we were stuck in the shadow of austerity.

The boredom in our little town was palpable. It seemed like most of the people we knew were treading water and content to do so. As bad as things were, serious changes were rumbling through the wires. We could hear the call ringing out from London.

It was a time of protest and discontent that gave birth to punk music, punk fashion, punk rebellion. Robert and I swapped precious details about the latest punk songs wed heard on John Peels radio show, or seen in the record shop in Horley where we hung out on Saturday afternoons. We didnt have to go to London to see punk gigs. Punk came to us.

Robert and I were both students at Crawley College of Technology, whose dull, unimaginative campus could have been dreamed up by Joseph Stalin. It was a place where you could study English literature or learn how to mend cars. A mix of the high and the low. A vocational school putting on airs. I was learning to be a chemist: a blend of personal and professional interests. Robert studied literature, of course.

Many big London bands came to Crawley and played in the strangely named leisure center or at our little school. In the years 19771978 that meant bands like The Clash, The Jam, and The Stranglers. Robert and I went to every gig and we paid very close attention not only to the way these bands sounded, but to the way they looked as well. We were drawn to the spectaclea lot of people werebut what made the biggest impression on us was their attitude, and we were quick to copy it.

It didnt take much to stand out in Crawley in those days. Conformity was the rule. To be different was to declare oneself as exceptional, and that was an affront to English manners. To the Neanderthal-like kids in Sussex, anything they couldnt understand was a perversion of normality. To them we were poofs.

We didnt care. We didnt believe in stereotypes. When I was told that an earring in my right ear was the equivalent of declaring to the world that I was gay, which I wasnt, I promptly had it pierced twice. The time for being polite was over. We were confrontational because we had to be.

On February 3, 1977, I went out to celebrate my eighteenth birthday with my three best friendsRobert, Michael Dempsey, and Porl Thompson, all fledgling musicians. We had started to morph from Malice, the band wed formed in secondary school, to Easy Cure, a name that I came up with and was quite proud of, to simply The Cure. We were still finding our way musically, figuring out what we liked and throwing out the rest.

For my birthday, I went all-out in putting together my outfit for the evening. I wore a hand-dyed orange jacket with NO CHANGE stenciled on the back. Id made buttons from photos cut out of porno magazinesjust the performers ecstatic heads, mind you, none of the offending body parts. Very subversive. I had on a pair of straight-leg trousers and winkle-picker shoes from Brighton. For good measure, I stuck safety pins here and there to complete the outfit.

Roberts getup was more subdued. He wore brothel creepers and the dark full-length raincoat that he wore everywhere in those days. The only time he took it off was to put on the leather jacket that each member of our band took turns wearing.

Our destination that night was the Rocket, the hangout for Crawleys disaffected locals. These consisted of three groups: hippie burnouts stuck in the 1960s, working-class skinheads, and us. We were like a secret society, neither with one faction nor another. We had our own passwords, our own lore. We were our own cult and our bond was a deep-seated longing for something, anything, other than this.

Although Robert and I were close to the same age, we had been drinking in the Rocket for a year, which wasnt unusual in 1970s England. Back then most people over sixteen could get served alcohol in the pubs, a government ploy to sedate the natives in that cold, gray, miserable climate. Easier to control if theyre all drunk, you see.

Like most English pubs back then, the Rocket was an unappealing mix of browns and beiges with a multicolored carpet designed to hide the cigarette burns and vomit stains. Fred, the Rockets usually taciturn landlord, took note of the large number of drinks being ordered and wanted to know why we were celebrating.