The Cure NME Big Gig 2009 - O2 arena 26/2/09

***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?

I'm gonna tell you about Mr Aslam

This summer I met a guy called Mr Aslam.

That's him. And his horse. His horse didn't have a name, which made me think of that song a little.

I think it must have been the third or fourth day of my holiday. Through some bizarre fit of circumstance my ten day stay in Delhi turned into a flight to Kashmir, a stay on a Dal Lake house boat and then a trek around the mountains. The guy who owned the house boat offered to drive me to stay with a family about seventy miles away from the Lake in the mountains - for a ridiculous price of course, I'm a pretty ignorant traveller.

The house was teetering on the inside of a colossal V-shape carved into a mountain, at the very bottom a white river ran endlessly. I was introduced to Mr Aslam. He was my age (20) and had three children. He made his money showing nervous looking backpackers around the mountains, sometimes for months at a time.

I think we must have sat here for about two hours. He asked me which religion I was, to make things simpler I just said Christian. His response was something like this:

'That's okay, you are from Jesus Christ. I am Muslim. No matter. Your skin is white, I am brown. It's the same...'

It was around about that time that I realised that he was my favourite person ever.

He started singing for a while, then he asked me to sing something. The only thing that come into my head was 'Let Down' by Radiohead. He gave me a really strange 'funny westerner' look when I explained that the line I was singing was about growing wings and flying away.

We went even further away from the village and the track kind of sort of disappeared. Except for these totally insane bridges, made from logs and rocks.

He asked me to ride the horse across it, I said I'd prefer not to. So without a second thought he takes the horse across the bridge. He was ten foot above the river, which would have dragged his helpless body for many miles before it would even consider letting him touch land again.

We continued for a while longer, then he sat me down on a rock and said he'd be back in five minutes.

...Then five minutes later he comes back with a rucksack full of fucking fish.

The fish (trout I learned) got made into a curry that evening. It was probably the freshest meal I've ever eaten. When the House Boat owner returned he said it was up to me to decide how much money I should give the boy.

"The boy?.." I thought "The guy's got three kids.."

Before I left I gave Mr Aslam 1000-Rupees (£15.00), which I worked out would have kept his kids in school for three months.

Thinking back, I had absolutely no idea where the hell I was. I can look at a map and think 'Okay there's Dal Lake, I was within 70 miles of that'. But Dal Lake is huge. I could have been anywhere.