One afternoon when we were in The Playground Studios’ Siouxsie walked into the control room. She had come to see Robert Smith and Mike Hedges who were mixing ‘From Under The hill’ with us so they got up and spoke with her and Steven Severin, who was with her, leaving us in stunned silence not knowing where to look.
After a while Robert and Mike came back to the desk and continued working on… I think it was ‘Midnight Garden, Severin came over to look at a fretless Ibanez bass guitar Graham had inexplicably bought and brought along with him, and Siouxsie stood, leaning against the panelled wall looking… marvellous and mildly bored.
This was the post punk, pre Gothic era so her appearance wasn’t dramatic in that sense but her charisma was completely disarming. I wanted to say something but my mind froze. None of us said a word and eventually she wandered out of the room and was gone. I had never been so in awe of someone like that before and I don’t think I have been since.
Robert certainly had a strong charisma, but he wasn’t exactly famous when we first met him and my understanding of the phenomenon is that although fame alone doesn’t create charisma it does at least feed or heighten it.
In fact, it was around this time that he was starting to get a lot of media attention and I remember him almost apologetically taking out the latest edition of what was the most popular UK pop magazine of the time ’Smash Hits’ with his face on the cover. He looked at me and said “yeah - I’m everywhere at the moment… do you think its getting a bit too much”?. I said I thought it was OK - I mean… if you’d asked any singer in any band at that time if they would have been OK about being on the cover of Smash Hits there weren’t many… or any, who would have declined.
I didn’t have many conversations with Robert, very few actually - he connected more with Justin as I think he saw something of his younger self in him. They had fun working on Justin’s guitar sound - particularly ’So this is Silence’ where they created a reverse feedback sound they named ‘The Minatour’.
When we’d finished mixing all six songs he played us their new single. So the first time we heard ’Charlotte Sometimes’ it was loud, though the giant mix down speakers right there in the place where The Cure had recorded it. When it ended he said “not as good as any of your stuff of course…” which was absurdly generous but it sort of summed up his attitude towards us at the time.
He, in fact all of The Cure, treated us as much like equals as they possibly could have, which considering they had already had records in the charts, had been on Top Of The Pops and were now everywhere in the music press, was pretty remarkable. It meant the atmosphere was always relaxed and good humoured and we didn’t feel like star struck kids. I didn’t take any photographs on these occasions which in retrospect is a bit of a shame but I just didn’t feel like it - nor did any of the others.
I’d been taking photographs all day, every day at the Cadbury studios for the past few years; I liked it, but didn’t want to spend the rest of my life there so when Nick and Justin finished school Graham and I decided to quit our jobs and ‘go professional with the band’. It sounded serious and glamorous and it was indeed a life changing moment… although what I remember most when I think back to that period is - never having any money, the hours spent on the phone trying to contact gig promoters, and sitting in The Dairy, our rehearsal room, covered in sweat after playing headers and volleys in the yard for a couple of hours.
However, our first delivery of ‘From Under The Hill’ had arrived. On the cover was a photograph of an unfinished sculpture our older brother Mark had discarded and on the actual cassettes there were ‘BPM RECORDS’ stickers which made them look official, so we focussed on trying to reach our sales targets.
The sales went well enough too. We travelled around to record shops where most of them, even Virgin records in Birmingham, agreed to stock them on a sale or return basis and of course we tried to sell them when we played live.
We put every ounce of our energy and passion into our live performances which no doubt made them too extreme on plenty of occasions. Mike Davies, a seasoned music journalist from Birmingham, told me some years later that our performance at The Junction in Harborne was the most intense gig he’d ever witnessed. But every night, every performance and every crowd is different, and that is a big part of the beauty of it all.
At a pub in Stoke called The Vine we invited a band that had formed in our village to support us. They were called ‘Guilt For Dreaming’ and were formed by a friend called Steven Burrows who played bass and sang. There was a really good crowd there that night and we got an encore which was rare and made us feel very good.
Then there was Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham who booked us into a thousand capacity hall where our home made PA was embarrassingly under powered and the sparse, bemused audience looked on as if they had never seen or heard anything like it. Better was to come. Worse too… in fact what I would rate as my worst ever gig experience was literally, just around the corner.
Written by SHJ