1:15 SATURDAY NIGHT

Greatly enjoyed reading that interview with Cure mainstay Robert Smith in your December issue [Take 271]. It took me back four decades to the late ’70s, when I was in the sixth form in Surrey, about six miles up the road from the Horley/ Crawley area where The Cure (or “Robbie’s Robots”, as they were hilariously nicknamed locally) were beginning to make a stir. In particular I remember going to a gig in Crawley in December 1979 – at the technical college Smith had attended a year or two earlier.

On the train down there we chatted with Simon Gallup, who we knew a bit from another local band, the Magazine Spies, and who had now replaced Mick Dempsey in The Cure. He was still quite new in the band and seemed pretty nervy and hyped up, gobbling handfuls of Smarties from a box as he told us how the band had played a poly in Bradford a couple of weeks earlier. It seems some students from a Middle Eastern background had let it be known they were pretty upset about the recent Cure B-side “Killing An Arab”, so the band had changed the chorus to “Killing an Englishman” to avoid trouble. Anyway, it was a great gig in Crawley, with another newcomer, local hairdresser Matthieu Hartley, filling out the sound with one-finger keyboards – and again Smith altered the lyrics to that controversial (Camus-inspired) song. Afterwards, having failed to secure a seat in one of the cars heading back up to Reigate, I found myself trudging the 10 miles home on foot. At around 1am, somewhere around Three Bridges, I spotted Lol Tolhurst on the other side of the road, plodding along, fag in hand. ‘No room in the car for you either, eh?’ I remember thinking…

Steve Sales, via email