Vinyl Diaries VIII: The Cure

photo by me



The Cure
Sydney Entertainment Centre
August 9

Three hours. It's a long time to be under bright lights wearing enough waxen make-up you could effortlessly mill among the figures at Madame Tussaud's. It must seem even longer when you're squeezing your heart and a fair lashing of soul out through six strings and a microphone. Yet for the rest of us, it passed all too quickly.

The Cure - you may have heard of them. English chaps, been around a little while now; write fairly decent songs, play them quite well.

This was their first trip to Australian in seven years and many who saw those 2000 shows must have wondered if that was the last they would see. Thankfully, not so. A little heavy on Bloodflowers material, that tour was nevertheless one of the most remarkable I had seen up to that point, a drenching, mica-flecked encounter that served as a bruising culmination of a teen obsession.

This time aorund, without an album out until the end of the year, the shackles were off - The Cure were able to deliver a fan-friendly parade of delicious musical high points spanning nigh on 30 years.

Announcing their arrival with the dark, swirling epic Open from the near-faultlessWish, they signalled their intention to confront and exorcise some musical demons along the way. Catchier numbers may follow, but patience would be its own reward.

A dip into Disintegration was to follow, a bass-thrumping exhortation that we join them on a sojourn down the sideshow alley that is Fascination Street.

Simon Gallup's hammering bass-line propels this beast along, although Porl Thompson's shimmering guitar adds blinding showers of scattered notes. Porl was in blistering form the whole night, helping us see glimpses of the gritty heart beating beneath. Impossible not to notice was the fun they were all having, the realisation that they were doing what they loved and the sense that they felt damn lucky to be doing so.

This was The Cure grippingly unadorned - gone was the lush keyboard wash of 2000, in its place an immediacy and directness that breathed new life into old favourites, stripping them back to their beautiful skeletons.

Alt.End let the tension slip a little, before the wishful whimsy that is the other end of The Cure oeuvre made its first appearance with A Night Like This. The Walk and its new-wave-goes-oriental clash was a timely blast of fun. There is a hint of saccharine to End Of The World, but the sting is in the plaintive chorus brimming with heartbroken, maxed-out love... but things take a turn for the better for poor Robert in Lovesong, making him whole again, young again, fun again. The Big Hand gives Robert a little respite and lets the guitars dazzle up front, Porl wringing out some nice tail-chasing moments.

Then it's time to get a little excited, as a glittering Pictures of You butters us up for the sticky web arachnoid brilliance of Lullaby, a disturbingly, spine-tingingly claustrophobic nightmare of creeping paranoia – it truly is “much too late to get away".

Catch, Hot Hot Hot, The Blood and Push made an enjoyable cluster, and what other band could then breezily rip through a run that included such jaw-droppingly divine pop moments as Inbetween Days and Just Like Heaven, swerve into the hammering punk punch of Primary and the terrorising haunted house howl of Us Or Them and snarl on into Never Enough, then slide into the drowning brilliance of From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea? I suppose it’s a rhetorical question, but if you can think of anyone, please let me know…

This was easily the high point of the show thus far, the band gelling perfectly with Jason Cooper's precision drumming, plenty of colourful meandering in the bass, jagged guitars slicing through and then Robert's voice soaring over the whole affair. The jittery urgency was contagious and the whole beautiful mess just built and built until we could hardly breathe.

It seemed to take its toll, however, and the intensity just couldn't be maintained through the still enjoyable Strange Day, Wrong Number, The Baby Screams and One Hundred Years.

It was back with a vengeance, thankfully, for the murky, low-slung simper of End, closing the first set as perfectly as it closes Wish. It was dark, dirty and delicious, an abrasive sludge of musical misanthropy.

At this point, as they leave the stage, I wonder whether perhaps The Cure really are the woe-betiding miserable miscreants many might accuse. It all makes perfect sense and the hat seems to fit.

But then, how to explain encore number one: the upbeat, polished pop gem trio of Lets Go To Bed, Close To Me and Why Can't I Be You? Surely this is not the band that had just left the stage.... But such, I think, is at the heart of their timeless appeal, these bipolar, late-night moodswings in which no one end of the spectrum has any right to claim to be the 'real' Cure over any other.

The real mystery is how it doesn't jar - how they can toddle off stage (nearly spent by this point, dripping with sweat and barely able to lift their feet), then come back a few minutes later for encore number two and dive into At Night and M, jitter through Play For Today and then - presaged by a fleeting glimpse of trees on the screen at the back of the stage that sent my heart jumping into my throat - deliver a stunningly foreboding A Forest.

Teasingly, this was built up as slowly as can be, trace elements levered into place, dropped away, then brought back, but all in a way that had us blindingly following the bread crumbs we were sure we had left behind us, but which were now looking like they were heading somewhere we really shouldn't be going.

It was so perfectly executed, such a flawless 'ending' - with Gallup's double-note bass outro hanging in the air and the heart - that it was sorely tempting to leave at that point. How could it be topped? They were looking thoroughly shagged and surely the last rabbit had been pulled out of the hat.

But I stayed. Then when they returned and told us "we've decided to finish with this song" I have to admit to being a little disappointed at a run-through of Three Imaginary Boys that felt a little paint-by-numbers. But they were fibbing - and so. They danced on into Fire In Cairo and fired the audience and seemingly themselves back up with a remarkable Boys Don't Cry. So it's an obvious one, but I'm a sucker for it, an old old favourite that owes a lot more to the Violent Femmes than I think I ever realised.

Avoiding another urge to flee, I'm damned pleased to have stayed as they were seeming to be more and more re-energised by the moment. Robert thickened his accent for the nicely stilted Jumping Someone Else's Train and throwback stomping shock of Grinding Halt. What more could they possible do? I was hoping not to finish with a Lovecats or Friday I'm in Love (despite a soft spot for such frippery), so was more than a little chuffed to recognise the tap dripdripdripdripdripdrip of 10:15 Saturday Night and more than a little excited by their closing choice - the twisted, punk-drunk screw-you literary absurdism of Killling An Arab.

Three hours and a few odd minutes later, I felt like I’d been through the wringer – it’s impossible to imagine what it must have been like for them. So why was it so hard to see them leave the stage, and why the urge to go through it all again right there and then?