'Gardaí clash with punk rockers': When the Cure caused a riot in Cork 

The article doesn’t mention that the trouble took place outside the Arcadia Ballroom while the UK rock band The Cure were on stage. It was the second time that The Cure had been in Ireland. 

Their first visit was a support slot with Siouxsie and the Banshees in Belfast’s Ulster Hall in 1979. On this trip they had played the Ulster Hall and the Trinity Ball before arriving in Cork.

Elvera Butler was the promoter of the gigs at the Arcadia. She booked The Cure for both the Trinity Ball and Cork. “I ran a bus down from Dublin as I hadn’t done a public gig in Dublin, only the Trinity Ball,” remembers Butler. 

“I don’t remember any bother whatsoever; it was probably just a few guards being overzealous as maybe the gig had got some publicity beforehand as a “punk” gig. No doubt people had travelled to Cork early and had been drinking.”

Ricky Dineen, who at the time played guitar with Cork punk band Nun Attax was at the gig. “Funny but in the gig we were totally unaware of the trouble outside,” recalls Dineen. “It sounded like a bunch of young lads on a day out and not able to handle their drink. Both the guards and the paper greatly dramatised it.”

The nine Cure fans appeared before Justice Clifford at Cork District Court on Monday 25 May 1981 and that afternoon’s Evening Echo reported that the charges of being drunk and disorderly, “against a number of punk rock type youths were struck out.” The Cure’s links with Ireland run far deeper than a few dramatic headlines about “punk rockers” in 1981.

When The Cure played Malahide Castle in 2019 Robert Smith, the band’s founder, songwriter and frontman told the crowd: “It’s weird for me being back here because I stayed here for a long time.”

Smith continued: “I spent about a year here in the old days. This afternoon was really weird seeing all the places where I used to go. Following the DART home, that’s what I used to do, just get on the railway tracks and follow the DART.”

 Smith was referring to the period in the mid-80s when he lived in Dalkey. In 2012 he told Hot Press that, “I came over in 1986 for a few weeks’ break and ended up spending a year-and-a-half there, I rented a cottage just outside Dalkey, it’s beautiful down there. I used to walk back along the DART line. I went to Ireland on holiday a lot when I was very young because of my grandparents’ family connections. I was reconnecting with that.”

It was during this period that Dublin band The Garden Hasn’t Changed Much managed to get their music to Smith. “He was living in Dalkey at the time and we dropped the tape in there, “remembers Mark Bourke, the band’s singer. “We didn’t see him or meet him. We just left the tape with a lady who answered the door. He liked our song ‘All There Is’. It was nice of him to send us feedback.”

Stories of Smith’s generosity to younger musicians are legion, but the kindness he extended to another Irish band a few years earlier is extraordinary.

Zerra One were an Irish two-piece band: Wexford born Paul Bell sang and played keyboards and Dubliner Aindrias Ó Gruama (aka Grimmo) played guitar. In 1982 Zerra One were living in London, hustling for gigs and trying to get people to listen to their music. They knew that The Cure were recording an album at RAK Studios in central London so Bell dropped off their demo tape.

“Robert said he would listen to it, he told me to take the studio’s number and give him a call in a couple of days,” recalls Bell. “I rang the studio from a payphone just off Kilburn High Road. When Robert said he thought the songs were amazing I nearly fainted. I genuinely felt weak and had to compose myself to be able to speak to him.”

Smith asked the lads if they wanted to hang out in the studio. “We went down the next evening and for most of the next two weeks we were there nearly every day,” says Bell. “We were on the dole and we were not eating well. The lads had catering in the studio and Robert made it clear that we were to treat it as ours so anything we wanted we could have.”

Bell and Ó Gruama couldn’t believe what happened next. Smith offered Zerra One, an unknown band from Ireland, the support slot on The Cure’s forthcoming UK and European tour. 

“Robert said that we could travel with them,” remembers Bell. “We could stay in the same hotels as them, use their sound engineer, monitor engineer and lighting guy, that we would have the same catering as them and that they would pay us £100 per show on top of all that.”

“We were really excited,” says Ó Gruama. “We had been listening to their albums Faith and Seventeen Seconds. When we first met them in RAK studios we heard a playback of the album, whose music would accompany us all throughout the summer of 1982, Pornography. They are, all three of them, seminal records and remain very special to me.”

The tour started in April 1982 with 14 dates around the UK. Back at the hotel, after the third gig, Smith was listening to a cassette recording of that night’s Zerra One performance. “After listening to it for a while, Robert said that our sound mix was all wrong,” recalls Ó Gruama. “He suggested that he would mix the sound himself for our next show.”

“How would it work when there’s 3,000-5,000 people in these venues?,” Bell asked the Cure frontman. “How are you going to do our sound and then get backstage? You would be absolutely mobbed.”

“Robert turned to Paul,” says Ó Gruama. “He said that he’d just be another Robert Smith lookalike amongst many. It was true, nobody did recognise him partly because his face wasn’t as well known then as it was to become later on in the 80s.”

After the UK dates the tour continued for another six weeks across Europe with Smith doing sound every night for Zerra One. “It was a truly amazing thing for him to do for the rest of the UK and European tour,” says Bell.

“I remember Hammersmith Odeon like it was yesterday. We had only played a couple of small gigs before this tour. It was all such an adventure that every venue was huge for us, both physically and emotionally. But Hammersmith and Paris Olympia were two great venues. Cure fans were so kind to us. They seemed to like us.”

“I remember Robert being very excited to be performing on the same stage that Edith Piaf had sung on,” says Ó Gruama about the gig at the Olympia in Paris. “There is a live recording of that show. You can hear the audience jeer and whistle in disappointment as we come on, because of course they are there to see The Cure, but by the end of our first song they’d long stopped whistling and gave us a generous round of applause. That was our experience in most places.” 

Ó Gruama has nothing but fond memories of the tour: “The Cure were unbelievably generous. Little did we know it at the time, it turned out to be the last tour the three imaginary boys, Robert, Simon Gallup and Lol Tulhurst, would play.” 

Bell agrees with his former bandmate: “It felt like a real brotherhood. Robert, Simon Gallup and Lol Tulhurst, Grimmo and me. There was no separation except for the time The Cure were on stage. I have never felt so accepted, so liked and well looked after in the music business before or since.”

Zerra One released two albums before disbanding in 1987. Paul Bell teamed up with Cry Before Dawn’s Brendan Wade to form The Swans. Aindrias Ó Gruama joined Cathal Coughlan in The Fatima Mansions. The Cure released Songs From a Lost World, their fourteenth studio album in November 2024.

• Paul McDermott will interview Simon Price, author of Curepedia: An A-Z of The Cure, at Sugar Club, Dublin (April 11); and Prim’s Bookshop, Kinsale (April 12).