Crawley legends The Cure win place in music Hall of Fame

The band - whose original members all grew up in Crawley - has built up a dedicated following on both sides of the Atlantic.

After an induction speech by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, The Cure frontman Robert Smith said he’d like to thank everyone who had been in the band, naming Boris Williams, Porl (now Pearl) Thompson, Perry Bamonte, Matthieu Hartley, Phil Thornalley and ‘much-missed’ Andy Anderson.

He also said he was grateful to Chris Parry, who ‘saw something in us that most people didn’t’.

The band will always we linked with Crawley - the band’s original lineup, then known as Malice - played their first gig at St Wilfrid’s School in 1976.

At times band members have had some harsh things to say about their home town. Founder Lol Tolhurst, writing in his memoir Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys, described Crawley as ‘a place where it is always raining and a slate grey sky hangs over everything... a suburban swamp built around shops, schools and factories’.

He was a little more restrained when talking to the Crawley Observer in 2008, when he said: “Looking back on the times it was apparent we were influenced greatly by our surroundings in the same way bands like The Clash were influenced by theirs.

“We even had a song on our first album, Three Imaginary Boys, that was directly inspired by the railway underpass in Horley called Subway Song. All the eccentric characters we grew up around influenced us greatly too.

“Remember, although it was the 70s, Crawley and surrounding areas were still undergoing a lot of changes since World War Two and we were part of that too, I feel.”