‘10:15 Saturday Night’: the song that won The Cure a record deal
In 1973, before the dawn of The Cure, the future poster boy of post-punk’s goth sect, Robert Smith, set out with his Crawley schoolmates to form their first band, Obelisk. This was a short-lived five-piece band with Smith in a surprising role on the piano, his first instrument before he considered picking up the guitar.
Smith later decided that he’d need to grab a guitar if he was ever to outshine his younger sister, Janet, who was allegedly a dab-hand on the ivory. He grew competent as a rhythm guitarist through the mid-1970s and began to play in an altered line-up and formation of Obelisk, called Malice. Governed by Smith’s early taste in rock, the band mainly stuck to David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix covers.
After morphing into a stable trio, now known as Easy Cure, Smith was flanked by Mike Dempsey on bass guitar and Lol Tolhurst on percussion. Having gained a small following in the south of the UK, Easy Cure recorded their first demos at the Sound and Vision Studios in London. The demos were sent first to the German record label Hansa, who had been advertising in London following their success with Boney M.
Hansa hastily signed the group and invited them back to London for additional sessions. However, at this early juncture, Smith voiced concern; he was worried that they seemed to be more focused on how the band looked than how they sounded.
Smith’s suspicions were confirmed after Hansa expressed their views on the next batch of demos from the young punks. The label told the band: “Even people in prison wouldn’t like this!” when referring to the avant-garde punk sound of the early recordings like ‘Plastic Passion’ and ‘Killing An Arab’. Hansa subsequently cut ties with Easy Cure, but fortunately, Smith insisted that the label return all of the rights to the early tracks.
During an interview with Radio X, Tolhurst reflected on this pivotal time. “We could have lost a lot of good songs, and they could have probably made a lot of money out of something they really didn’t want,” he said. “So it probably worked out best for both of us. But to lose songs like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’… that would have been a terrible, terrible thing”.
By 1978, Easy Cure had finally been renamed The Cure. Smith recalled: “I had always thought Easy Cure was a bit hippyish, a bit American-sounding, a bit West Coast, and I hated it, which put Lol’s back up as he’d thought of it. Every other group we liked had ‘The’ in front of their name, but The Easy Cure sounded stupid, so we just changed it to The Cure instead.”
Following their close shave with Hansa, The Cure continued to send out demos in hopes of signing to a more trustworthy label. Thankfully, in the summer of 1978, Chris Parry of Fiction Records stumbled across ’10:15 Saturday Night’, one of Smith’s earliest concoctions, while sorting through some paperwork in his office.
According to the Three Imaginary Boys liner notes, the blossoming label owner had been listening to some assorted demo tapes from the mailbox in a perfunctory manner, with most of his attention reserved for admin tasks, when the spine-tingling “drip drip drip drip drip” caught him off guard. Parry made haste to locate this Easy Cure group, eventually tracing the dips back to The Cure.
During their first meeting, Smith invited Parry to watch the band perform at the Laker’s Hotel in Redhill. After the gig, Parry invited them for a drink at a nearby pub, The Home Cottage, where he told The Cure he wanted them to be his first signing. Parry subsequently became The Cure’s manager and producer through their meteoric rise to global stardom.
Alongside ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, ’10:15 Saturday Night’ remains one of The Cure’s most enduring early hits. Recalling the moment he wrote the formative classic, Smith once explained that the song’s narrative was true to life. Aged 16, Smith found himself sitting at the kitchen table – not in the sink – feeling “utterly morose” as he watched the tap drip drip drip drip…
Listen to the classic track below.
