Mick Tarrant was sat in his office at the Midnight Express nightclub in Bournemouth one afternoon in July 1983, dealing with beer deliveries and other mundane admin chores, when he received a surprising call.
“I picked up the phone and a voice announced himself to be Chris Parry, manager of The Cure,”1 he remembers1. “I naturally thought it was a wind-up, but he confirmed that he genuinely was Chris Parry and had heard good reports about Midnight Express from others in the music business.” Parry, also head of Fiction Records, asked if Tarrant would be interested in holding a “secret gig” by The Cure2 – a warm up for their headline appearance at the popular Elephant Fayre festival at the end of July.
Bournemouth might have seen an odd choice for the Fiction boss to ease his band back into performing in front of audiences again, but in the early 1980s, the Dorset coastal town had a flourishing music scene. While Bournemouth had become synonymous with retirement villages and provincial boredom, Coaster magazine (launched in the Spring of 1981) kept track of the gigs, the bands, the fanzines and the artists that had emerged in the town since the punk revolution.
Mick Tarrant ran the eclectic Armadillo Records store in Westbourne and launched the Midnight Express club in the early 80s with Louis O’Mara, the owner of Comix bookshop, also in the town. Set in St Swithuns Road, not far from Bournemouth train station and located at the top of a steep staircase above a chip shop (punningly called De Plaice), the Midnight promised “No Disco Dross” on its flyers, and quickly came to be a stopping off point for bands that were looking to get themselves exposure outside London. By the summer of 1982, the club played host to synth duo Blancmange, just prior to their huge Top 10 hit, “Living On The Ceiling”.
As 1983 arrived, the Midnight put on shows by indie stars such as Pigbag, Amazulu, The Go-Betweens and Factory Records hopefuls 52nd Street. July of that year opened with a showcase for The Smiths, just off the back of their debut single, “Hand In Glove”.
The date for The Cure’s Midnight Express show was set for Wednesday 27th July 1983 – three days before the band were due to headline the Elephant Fayre. “I paid them a reasonable amount,” says Tarrant. “I pretty much set ticket prices to cover the fee only, so it was ‘affordable’ to everyone. Even though there was very little publicity surrounding the gig, I could have sold it out four times over.” The show was a strictly ticket-only date, limited to members of the club.
In fact, Tarrant barely got to meet the band on the night, although he did notice that some members were not so sure of the set in soundcheck. He recalls: “Robert actually took the band off stage to the dressing room to run through a couple of oldies and fan favourites that some of the band were unfamiliar with.”
Bournemouth was enjoying one of its hottest ever summers3, and so it was on a sweltering Wednesday evening that Tarrant took on DJ duties for the night: “It was mighty crowded and there were countless people outside trying to get in. The bar was flat out, so there was much to do for all the staff, me included. The stage was only about two or three feet high so the band were almost at audience level.”
For Lol Tolhurst, it was his first Cure show behindthe keyboards rather than the drums. The new line-up had barely had four days’ worth of rehearsal before the show, so Tolhurst had given new drummer Andy Anderson a crash course in the band’s back catalogue. “Andy had enough skill to do anything I had played,” says Tolhurst, “But he graciously said I helped him learn the songs!”4
The drummer had already performed The Cure’s opening number – “The Figurehead”, from the previous year’s Pornography album – during the band’s appearance on The Oxford Road Show that March, so the set got off to a steady start… albeit a very dark one.
For a band that was currently in the charts with an electro-pop classic, “The Walk”, the Bournemouth setlist concentrated more on The Cure’s bleaker material: “In Your House” and “M” hailed from the hollow sound-world of 1980’s Seventeen Seconds, and was followed by Smith’s tribute to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy of books, “The Drowning Man”.
Following two slabs of self-loathing from Pornography (“Cold” and “Siamese Twins”), the set turned to the nearest thing it had got to a hit so far: the single “Primary”, which garnered some appreciation from the audience. “I don’t know what you were expecting tonight, but we’re very under-rehearsed, so don’t throw anything,” said Smith as way of an introduction. Despite the heat in the club, the frontman wore the now-regulation rock star leather trousers… alongside a long-sleeved blue t-shirt from Ms Selfridge.5
The crowd at the Midnight Express were responsive and rather rowdy, as the surviving tape of the show proves, and the appetite among the fans was for The Cure’s earlier, punkier material6. “We remember Carshalton!” yelled one audience member at one point, recalling the band’s show in the Surrey town in June 1979. Following shouts for the band’s almost-hit “Boys Don’t Cry”, Smith noted that they couldn’t play The Cure’s evergreen single because he didn’t have an acoustic guitar7.
“It was insanely crowded,” remembers Tolhurst. “So much so that Robert was put off by somebody in the front row singing all the songs – so he had to close his eyes to sing.” The former Cure drummer acquitted himself respectably for his first night on keyboard duties, adding colour to the songs “Primary” and “At Night” and an ominous Solina string synth drone to “Cold”. On the song “Three Imaginary Boys”, however, the keyboard solo consisted mainly of an electronic squeal. “It was nerve-wracking,” he says of these early attempts. “Because it wasn’t my first instrument. But I was curious about the sounds you could make with the new electronica.”
After a nervous start, the band hit their stride with “One Hundred Years” and “Play For Today”, two songs that benefitted from Andy Anderson’s powerful drumming, while Phil Thornalley’s solid bass slotted in seamlessly where the absent Simon Gallup had once been. The Cure decided not to showcase their current hit “The Walk”, although they did deliver a reasonable version at Bath’s Moles club the following night8 – the second warm-up date for Elephant Fayre festival.
The set at Bournemouth climaxed with the two sides of their first single, “10.15 Saturday Night” and “Killing An Arab” – which got the biggest cheers of the night. Despite the latter being barely five years old, Smith admonished the crowd as the final guitar chord died away: “You shouldn’t clap nostalgia!”
After the main set closed with the hit “A Forest” and the title track of the Pornography album, a brief encore consisted of the 1979 mod-bashing single, “Jumping Someone Else’s Train” and The Cure’s improvised piece “Forever”.
“I must’ve lost about five pounds that night, just by sweating,” remembered Anderson9.
“Chris Parry phoned to thank me for our co-operation and professionalism,” remembers Mick Tarrant. “He said he and the band thoroughly enjoyed the event and thanked me for limiting the numbers to what was comfortable. He appreciated me sticking to my word and said most promoters would have simply packed the place from floor to ceiling.”
THE CURE – MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, BOURNEMOUTH 27 JULY 1983
The Figurehead
In Your House
M
The Drowning Man
Cold
Siamese Twins
Primary
Three Imaginary Boys
At Night
One Hundred Years
Play For Today
10.15 Saturday Night
Killing An Arab
A Forest
Pornography
Encore:
Jumping Someone Else’s Train
Forever
Thanks to Andy Davis and Mark Paytress. Much of the background to Midnight Express comes from Gavin Underhill’s excellent site about the Bournemouth music scene – read more here.
- Mick Tarrant interview with the author, 27 September 2018. ↩︎
- No 1 notes that Smith claims there will be some “secret” gigs, “but it’s hard to imagine when he’ll have the time.” None of the other mainstream music press reported on the two warm up shows. (“No Rest Cure”, No 1, 9 July 1983) ↩︎
- Temperatures reached 31 degrees on 23 July 1983: “The Top 7 Hottest Summers Dorset Has Seen Since The 70s”, Bournemouth Echo, 25 July 2014. ↩︎
- Lol Tolhurst, interview with the author for Radio X, 9 July 2018 ↩︎
- “I used to get all my clothes from there at that stage. Unfortunately I don’t fit into a girls’ size 12 any more.” “Robert Smith, This Is Your Life”, Smash Hits, 7 May 1986. ↩︎
- Someone shouts for the disco-parody “Do The Hansa” from the 1979 era, but Robert just groans. ↩︎
- Which is a bit on an excuse as it was previously always played on electric guitar. Smith ditched the band’s finest pop moment from the set in 1982 – it wasn’t until The Cure were firmly crowned as pop stars in 1984 that the song made a re-appearance in the setlist. It clearly didn’t fit in with the gloomy onslaught of the Pornography material. The song had a resurgence of interest in 1983 when Polydor released an American compilation of The Cure’s early material called Boys Don’t Cry, marking the first time the song had been officially available in the UK since 1979. ↩︎
- With Tolhurst still easing his way into the keyboardist role, Smith played “The Walk”‘s nagging synth riff on guitar. They also played another song from the new EP, “La Ment” at Bath. ↩︎
- Andy Anderson, interview with the author for Radio X, 2 December 2018. ↩︎
Crying For Yesterday 