Towards the end of November 1981 we took our equipment down to London and dropped it off for transportation with The Cure’s road crew who didn’t know wether to laugh or cry as we unloaded what looked like a van load of stuff that had come straight off the film set of ‘Out of Africa’.
We then went to the Fiction records offices for a meeting with their secretary who sat us down and told us not to smash up hotel rooms and to keep out of The Cure’s dressing room unless we were invited. That night we slept on the floor of her office and in the morning set off on our first tour.
We traveled up the motorways in a minibus, through the wet November landscape and the industrial midlands to our first show in Sheffield and then continued northwards. Someone had a cassette player so we played whatever tapes we had around and chatted to Simon and Lol mainly, as Robert slept most of the time on the back seat. I have no idea what we talked about but I remember laughing a lot and in quieter moments watching the countryside change as we headed towards Scotland.
There was another support band called ’13 13’ with Steven Severin the bassist from The Banshees and Lydia Lunch and they must have been with us in the bus at least some of the time but strangely all I remember of them is Mr Severin ghosting around service stations like a film star in his black shades and sharp bleached hair cut.
We were the first band on so it was early and the venues were still filling up but we were always well received. We drank copiously; beer and gin, and I smoked like a maniac. Some of the songs we played would eventually form the backbone of our first album, others are now all but forgotten. Colour slides were projected on a big screen behind us of photographs I’d taken of daffodils, leafless branches, clouds… close-ups of sunlight on the doors, walls and stairs of our house.
Then each night we’d watch The Cure from the auditorium. Once or twice I was so tired from performing and general overindulgence, I sat up in a quiet spot on the balcony and drifted in and out of light sleep to ‘All cats are grey’… ‘Faith’… ‘Play for today’ - which as you might imagine was a rare pleasure.
After the show we would usually go back stage and chat with them - Robert in particular was keen to have our opinions on the performances although personally I wasn’t much help as I thought they were brilliant every night and couldn’t tell the difference between shows he was happy or disappointed with.
There were always long queues of people waiting at their dressing room door for signatures. I watched them sign record after record with their bold, stylised child writing… Lol, Robert, Simon. Then one night someone asked me for my signature; I wasn’t expecting it and instinctively signed my full name Simon-Huw-Jones with an exaggerated, debonair flourish. This only sticks in my mind because it was symbolic of our feelings at that time; we were full of admiration and respect for The Cure but we didn’t want to be like them, they were anyway streets ahead of us technically and had certain song writing abilities we would never have, but their sound, image and collective charisma had a strong magnetism - so impulsively, even in small, insignificant ways like that, we were conscious of keeping our distance.
My favourite gig was in Glasgow at The Pavilion. It was the best audience reaction we had and we made some good friends there. After the show I remember everyone going to see ‘The Duritti column’ at a club called ‘Night moves’, a fine venue where in the future we would headline ourselves.
The ‘hotels’, for us, were more often than not B&B’s in streets of terraced houses and provided a memorable backdrop to our travels as most of the rooms were time warped in the 60’s or earlier and looked like stage sets of John Osborne plays. We were served huge English breakfasts by elderly couples who eyed us with parental concern and/or deep suspicion. Then the mini bus would pick us up and we’d move on. We hadn’t smashed up the rooms.
The tour ended at Hammersmith Palais in London. For us it had been an amazing adventure, we didn’t think about record deals or the music press or networking or anything like that - it was just about playing our music, moving from city to city… and that, I felt, was what I wanted to do above all else.