2000

The Cure

Adelaide Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

With his back-combed black thatch, his scarlet lipstick and his dark drecky outfits Robert Smith, founder and undisputed leader of The Cure, has been the Edward Scissorhands of pop music for nearly twenty five years. It is strange to think that I have listened to The Cure since the Faith album back in 1981 and yet, apart from boppy singles like Boys Don’t Cry, The Love Cats and The Walk, I can still hardly tell one track from another.

It is as though their twenty or so albums are all one song. The Cure  sound is as distinctive as it is undifferentiated. Over the kitchen pot lid drumming come those thrummy lead bass lines, and of course Smith’s oddly febrile vocals. Listening to them now the early songs are so obviously part of the power pop sound of their time and yet that voice and the nervy, bony bass were already  signatures good for two decades of hypnotic, highly successful Goth pop.

Touring, it is generally believed,  for the last time, Smith – along with longtime bassist Simon Gallup, guitarist Perry Bamonte , drummer Jason Cooper and keyboard player Roger O’Donnell –  is not only in good, if somewhat portly form but also has plenty of puff. Having dispensed with a support act the band plays a non-stop show lasting just under three hours. The setlist ranges across the entire Cure canon but the new album Bloodflowers is the jumping off point.

Through the murky stage lighting,  a swirling wurlitzer sound and thudding drum beat ushers in the almost opaque Mr Smith. Strumming on a 12 string acoustic he lays down the rhythms before the plaintive vocals begin. Out of This World. Words out of the bedroom diaries of endless adolescence. We always have to go back to real life/ one last time before its over/one last time before we have to go back again.

There is a banality in these simple repetitions. The band used to be called the Easy Cure and you can understand why. This is Joy Division without the pain, suburban inertia cloaked in the romantic pose of melancholy. But the Gothic was always a languid delusion. Look at Thomas Chatterton, that marvellous Pet Shop boy, or Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, drinking vinegar to keep his skin pale. Robert Smith,  intoning his  mesmerically blank verse is no less evocative. So what if he acts like Heathcliff and sleeps safe in his bed in Thrushcross Grange.

After eight minutes or so  Out of This World morphs into the churning slow dirge  Watching Me Fall – slipping out the ordinary world into someone else’s life. Smith’s command of the occasion is unmistakable. His vocals have a relentless insistence and an eerie authority. The crowd, Cure fans -the truest of true believers, signatories to petitions enticing Smith to leave the house, to travel on aeroplanes, to grace us with a visit to our fatal shore – is in his thrall. Some are in Goth regalia,  like petals on a wet black bough. The band toils to create a dense rhythmic storm, layering guitar chords over the brooding bass and thunderous drum. It is a massive sound, impeccably managed.

The band takes a wild mood swing with Want, following with Fascination Street and Open from the Wish album. The Loudest Sound has a long and winding intro before Smith steps forward through the thick stage lighting, sprays of purple and yellow, to ponder aloud about having nothing left to say. Pictures of You gets the crowd animated as do the catchy riffs of Shake Dog Shake, Simon Gallup hunched like a whippet as he thrashes out bass figures you can hear through your sternum.

The stage lighting  has gone Sargasso for an extended reading of From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, the band submerged now in a fluid, intuitive performance that is almost seamless. In Between Days gets the punters revved and Smith, taciturn except to say people say he should speak more on stage, confides that it was reading Patrick White which inspired White Cockatoos.

This is a marathon event covering nearly thirty songs. Highlights include The Kiss,  garnished with wah wah pedal and Smith strapping on yet another black guitar – this time a Rickenbacker. Then there is One Hundred Years, 39 and the current title song, Bloodflowers. The encores come in clusters- There is No If, Trust and a very together version of Disintegration. From Pornography comes Cold and the title track, from the mists of time comes Play For Today, Just Like Heaven- and, to conclude, a long unfurling version of A Forest.

As they leave the stage Robert Smith salutes the crowd and vanishes backstage. He and the band have played us to a standstill. It has been a technically accomplished event with  great sound and artfully integrated lighting. But despite the sheer scale of production and the skill of the band the show is strangely distant. Smith has recited his feelings, his anxieties, his hostilities, we might even say his yearnings.

But there is something glassy, something numb in the experience. We are back to the bedroom boredom again, the simulacrum of angst. The incantations have driven away nothing, because no danger was imminent. For all their songs and albums named with abstract nouns like Faith and Trust and Wish and Want and Treasure and Doubt there is very little curiosity or depth or insight or actual meaning. This is the secret of the band’s success and also their great limitation. The Cure were never meant to heal our sickness, only to bring us near perfect analgesia.

Commissioned by The Adelaide Review but not published.