Easy Cure
1977-05-06 Crawley - The Rocket (England)

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Peter O'Toole
Robert Smith
Laurence Tolhurst
Michael Dempsey
Porl Thompson

the Band was called 'Easy Cure'

Day of the week: Friday
Tour: -

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from the book 'Ten Imaginary Years'

On 6 May, Easy Cure played their first proper gig at The Rocket, a local Crawley pub.
Robert: "It was Sunday lunchtime and we realised Amulet were supposed to be playing that night and that they couldn't make it for some reason so we just phoned the pub and asked if we could play instead. We realised we needed to play in front of a real audience at some point so we rehearsed all afternoon and went and played. We went down quite well and they asked us back and, within two or three months, we were pulling about 300 people because there was no-one in Crawley who'd ever done anything like what we were doing. We had a really drunken following, and we were really just a focal point, an excuse for people to go out, get really drunk and smash the place up!"
"Whenever we played, we all thought it was awful - there was loads of feedback and you could never hear anything except Porl's guitar. That's the only reason we kept getting rebooked, because he became the local guitar hero!"

from the book 'Cured - The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys' (Lol Tolhurst)

We finally got a gig at the Rocket in May 1977.
We were now all eighteen, so Fred, the Rocket's landlord, wouldn't fall afoul of the child work laws or something. Clever old Fred. He actually didn't ask us outright anyway. Rather, our friend's band Amulet, fronted by ex-Malice guitarist Marc Ceccagno, couldn't do the gig they had been booked for at the Rocket, so, sensing an opportunity to actually get us out there in front of real people, I called Fred. "Er, yes ... the Rocket public house?" The phone was answered by Fred himself in the voice I presumed he usually reserved for outstanding creditors. "Yes, hello, Fred? I heard that Amulet can't play the pub this week. They all have bad colds, they asked us to fill in for them?" Fred sounded a little suspicious, "And what are you lot called, then?" "Easy Cure." (...) "So what kind of music does Easy Cure play?" asked Fred. I panicked slightly. I hadn't really thought about that one. We just wrote songs from our own experiences and thoughts. I don't think we thought about labels, although we were certainly influenced by the current rash of punk bands we were now seeing whenever we could. In addition to The Stranglers at the Red Deer and Crawley College we saw Buzzcocks at the Lyceum. "Um, well, we do some of our own stuff and a few popular covers," I offered hopefully. "Yeah, well, they like to hear something they know, so play something they know," said Fred, hammering his point home. "Be here at 6 p.m., start playing at 6:30-7 p.m. You play two sets and you have to finish before last orders at 10:30 p.m." To this day I've no idea what they paid us. I probably didn't take it in, as I was just so happy to get our first proper paying gig! And so it started. Paying our dues in the Rocket at first to the regulars, and gradually, over the next year or so, to increasingly varied audiences from the area as word spread. Of course, we had to play some covers, as Fred had predicted. "Locomotive Breath" by Jethro Tull, made completely punky by leaving out the long piano intro and flute(!), was one I recall that was particularly liked by the Rocket's older patrons. Gradually we honed our set to include more of our own material, crammed together on that tiny stage in the corner of the pub, and learned what every band must learn if they hope to establish themselves as a real band. We perfected the subtle signals between us all to enable the songs to come out sounding right and keep the show rolling along with intensity and power. We learned our stagecraft on that small stage all through the year, in between seeing some of the best bands of the punk revolution.