SUBURBAN HYMNS

“A FEW years ago I went back to The Rocket, the pub in Crawley where The Cure started playing. Our first bassist, Michael Dempsey, met me at the airport and asked, “Do you want a trip down memory lane?” The biggest thing that ever happened to The Rocket was The Cure – but there’s nothing on the walls, nothing to commemorate us at all! There were just three very dour-looking people sitting in there on a Sunday night. It was super-depressing, but I suppose it was fitting in a way. Then I walked past another pub we used to go to – and saw the same type of angry, pissed-off-looking people sitting outside.

Not much had changed in darkest Crawley. It’s still the same place. Being there reminded me why we needed to get out 40 years ago! We were on our own, we felt very isolated. In some ways that worked well, though – it was us against the rest of the world. In May 1979, we released our first album, Three Imaginary Boys. Based on our age, the time and what we were trying to achieve, I’m pretty proud of it. I think one of the reasons Robert’s not that keen on the album is because the production was taken out of our hands. Back then, we didn’t really have that much of a clue about what we were doing!

All the same, it was our introduction to the horrible music business – and, at the time, we were pretty excited. We were friends and we’d started making music because we wanted to do something just so we didn’t have to go down the pub. We recorded all the songs we’d been playing for two or three years, since the band