***Published May 2009
When I was fourteen I stayed up until one in the morning on a school night to watch an MTV documentary on my favorite band Blink182. The set-up was that they named a band they loved, played a music video, then named another and so on.
About half way through they named some weird bunch of goths from the 80s called The Cure, then showed a music video involving them locked in a cupboard that was falling off of a cliff. It was awesome.
It took me about six months of research before I found out that the song was called ‘Close to Me’ and it was from their 1985 album The Head on the Door. Quickly The Cure replaced Blink182 as my favorite band and it stayed that way for a very, very long time.
Probably through forgetfulness, bad luck or just plain laziness it wasn’t for another six years that I finally got my boney little fingers on a ticket to see The Cure play live, and, as it turned out, was well worth the wait. Even worth waiting for uber-fashionable musical Topshop advert Crystal Castles to finish their support slot.
So, how can I sum up this gig? Well, the answer is I can’t. They played everything. And for a band with a back catalogue as diverse as theirs this is a bold statement. From the shamelessly romantic pop of ‘Just Like Heaven’ to the post punk of ‘Killing an Arab’ to the epic gloom of ‘Disintegration’. (I literally poo’d my pants when they played this). The way that a song from all thirteen albums was picked out acted almost like a history lesson. Paying respect to a certain portion of their fans, the aging goths who had clearly been listening non stop since 1981. - And these are real goths, not the kind who sit in their rooms and listen to Marilyn Manson because their mums made them do their homework instead of go out...
The part of their set that really got me, and I mean slapped me in the face, was their encore when they dug up such dinosaurs as 10:15 Saturday Night, Jumping some else's Train and then finally Boys Don’t Cry. Songs that singer Robert Smith had probably written in his late teens sometime in the 70s. The fact that a blissful little pop song like that could fill somewhere as huge as the 02 Arena has got to suggest something here.
I left that evening grinning, safe in the knowledge that if they had played ‘Close to Me’ (Not my favorite Cure song, just my favorite song ) it probably would have altered the way I listened to it - and why the hell would I want to alter the soundtrack to so much of my adolescence?
No comments:
Post a Comment