Malice
1976-12-20 Crawley - St. Wilfrids School Hall (England)

 

Robert Smith
Laurence Tolhurst
Michael Dempsey
Porl Thompson
Martin Creasy

Songs played: 5  (5)

Day of the week: Monday
Tour: -

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event:	Concert
hosted by:
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20th december 1976
Malice!!!
Robert's first public performance
St Wilfrids school hall in Crawley...
Porl and Lol and Michael were onstage too...... though, we played St Wilfrid's with Marc's new band, Amulet. I told the headmaster Malice were a pop group without telling him I was a member because he hated me! We got in this singer, Martin, a journalist with The Crawley Observer with whom we hadn't had a single rehearsal, and he turned up in a three piece suit, a Manchester United scarf and a motorbike helmet which he refused to part with because he was scared someone would steal it!
He turned out to be a cabaret singer ... did good impersonations of David Cassidy. We started playing; 'Jailbreak', 'Suffragette City', 'Foxy Lady' ... but no-one could distinguish anything! It was just a screaming wall of feedback!
Three hundred people came, 200 left, and the rest got up on stage! Lol started singing 'Wild Thing', Porl felt so humiliated he hit him and Martin fled with the words 'This is shit!' No-one's seen him since ... We immediately broke up the group!20 DECEMBER 1976
Malice support Marc Ceccagno's new band, Amulet, at St. Wilfred's Comprehensive School in Crawley. Vocals were handled by a local journalist named Martin, and the set included 'Wild Thing' (sung by Lol), 'Suffragette City', 'Foxy Lady' and Thin Lizzy's 'Jailbreak'. Another Song from this period, 'A Night Like This', is later revived by Robert for the 'Head On The Door' album.
"We pretended there was this jazz group and a choral quintet and sold about 150 tickets at 25p each. It turned into a riot."Personally, I consider the first gig we did as the band that became The Cure to be the one that we did on December 20, 1976, the Malice gig at our old secondary school, St. Wilfrid's. True, we had done a gig of sorts a couple of days earlier in the minstrels' gallery at Worth Abbey for Upjohn's Christmas party, and a rather strange 'performance' in 1973 as The Obelisk, but this was our first full-blown concert.
We had settled on a most unlikely character named Martin Creasy as a singer. He worked as a journalist for the local paper, so we thought he might be able to get us a review. I don't know if he ever did. I do remember he did a great David Cassidy impersonation.
I had persuaded my mother to purchase a full-length black studded catsuit for me to play in that night. I had seen pictures of drummers and that looked like what you wore. I was going to top off the look with Alice Cooper-style black mascara eye makeup. I loved Alice.
Sitting in the small dressing-room area at the school, I had on the black studded catsuit. I had a black mascara stick in my hand, but no matter how I tried I couldn't get the right effect; this rock-and-roll stuff was harder than it looked.
Robert's girlfriend Mary was there. I knew Mary well, as we were all in the same class in school, so I asked her to help me apply the black lines for the desired effect, which she did. I'm sure it looked wonderful and was exactly what I wanted, but I'm glad there are no photographs of that getup.
We started off the gig with our friends Steve Forrester and Peter Doherty (no, not that Peter Doherty) slowly opening the curtains and bringing up the stage lights. We opened with 'Jailbreak' by Thin Lizzy, and then Martin Creasy appeared at the side of the stage in a brown three-piece suit! Not very rock and roll. He didn't last as our singer for long. A nice guy, but not right for us.
It was a suitably awful concert for our first proper gig. We had a couple of 'triple songs.' At the time we liked to write songs as triptychs for some reason. I sang my party piece 'Wild Thing.' It was a disaster, really, and I thought, 'Well that's that, then!' But it wasn't.I actually worked with Porl Thompson when he worked at L&H Cloake Record shop, the chap who was in Pauls band when Easy Cure played at St Wilfrids school was Martin Creasy the monotone vocalist also an exCloakes employee who at the time was working for the local newspaper. You may also know that Amulet also had kevin Cohen on keyboards who was also a Cloake's employee so really everybody new everybody.
I also went to school with Robert , Laurence (LoL) and Michael Demspsey. And I let Paul borrow my Keyboards to use on the CULT HERO single!
I now also have my own band T-30 Control who released an album called "Blade of the sun" along with colleague Peter Smith another Cloakes's employee and played with Porl in Exotic Panda's. Monotone? How dare you!! Seriously, though, I was attempting to sing through a crash helmet and I'm sure we were all rather the worse for wear. I remember it being a rather humiliating experience as just about every musician I'd ever worked with in Crawley was in the audience that night. I woke up the next day thinking That's it, I'll have to leave town. I did, within a month. I moved to join a band in Hampshire, returning only to pick up my little 60 watt Traynor PA which Robert and the boys had completely blown out at the famous Crawley bandstand gig. Happy days!

41 years ago today we played our first gig as the band that would become the Cure. The reason I say that is because the one two days before was rather like "unplugged" no kit and acoustic guitars. The wilfrids gig had drums and amplified guitars. The Cure sound was started!

— Lol Tolhurst (@LolTolhurst) 20. Dezember 2017

Support     | Malice
Headliner | Amulet

St Wilfrid's Catholic Comprehensive School, Crawley
Oakwood Old Horsham Road
Crawley West Sussex
RH11 8PG

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• @ education.gov.uk

1. 1976-12-20 St. Wilfrids School Hall (@ Malice)