One day in 1975 the careers officer at St Wilfrid's Catholic School in Crawley, West Sussex asked 16-year-old Robert Smith and his classmates about their future aspirations.
“I said I wanted to be in a pop group and they all giggled,” Smith later recalled. “Another boy said he wanted to be an astronaut and they giggled at that too.”
One year on, Smith was determined to show the unbelievers that he wasn't joking, booking his band Malice, also featuring future The Cure bandmates Porl Thompson on guitar and Lol Tolhurst on drums, a gig at St Wilfrid's school hall, supporting a band called Amulet. The price of admission for what was only Malice's second show was just 30 pence. Smith didn't have the confidence to front the band, so Malice recruited a local journalist named Martin Creasy to handle vocals without a) ever having heard him sing and b) ever rehearsing with their newest member. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the group's set - which included covers of Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak, David Bowie's Suffragette City and Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady - was an unmitigated disaster... not least because Creasy insisted on performing while wearing a motorcycle crash helmet, making his vocals completely incomprehensible.
