A wonderful night of music captured in fantastic video and audio from The Cure’s sold-out Shows of A Lost World tour.
Added: Links to article and youtube site to the remastered version of their 1991 documentary The Cure – Play Out
Photo: Uploaded by Jess7 Fire At Will
07 June 2023 | James Porteous | Clipper Media News
I came to The Cure quite late in life. It was 2000, in fact. I was browsing the second-floor collection at a huge Tower Records in a wayward suburb of Toronto during my lunch break when “Watching Me Fall” suddenly arrived at full blast. I stood for some time, taking it in, the passion, the power, the everything.
Fearful that the moment might pass without resolution, I made my way to the front desk and blurted out: ‘Who the hell is this?’
The poor kid looked at me like I had escaped from a stone age zoo.
‘The Cure,’ he said.
‘Oh,” I replied.
Sure I had heard of them, but nothing could have prepared me for the power and the passion I was hearing. And at full volume!
I held out my hand. He handed me the CD and I paid and returned to work feeling despondent that I would not be able to relive the experience until I got home from work and conceding that my home stereo system would never hope to replicate the power of what I had heard.
So here I am, 23 years later, and once again The Cure has appeared out of nowhere to knock me off my feet once again.
Nothing could have prepared me for the power and passion caught in this superb audio and visual version of this show.
And sorry, but this is also great fun, musically and otherwise!
Perhaps I have escaped from a stone age zoo.
James Porteous | Clipper Music
Uploaded by Jess7 Fire At Will
One first main set, two short intermissions and two planned encore sets.
As noted below, Robert Smith is the band’s sole remaining original member, the Cure’s live lineup — with guitarists Perry Bamonte and Reeves Gabrels, bassist Simon Gallup, keyboardist Roger O’Donnell and drummer Jason Cooper — is long on musicians he’s played with for decades.
9:45 – Pictures Of You
17:02 – A Night Like This
21:25 – Love Song
25:12 – And Nothing Is Forever
32:41 – The Last Day Of Summer
38:35 – A Fragile Thing
43:30 – Burn
50:00 – Another Happy Birthday
54:28 – Charlotte Sometimes
59:08 – Push
1:03:58 – Primary
1:08:18 – Shake Dog Shake
1:13:18 – From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea
1:21:38 – End Song
1:35:39 I Can Never Say Goodbye
1:41:57 It Can Never Be the Same
1:48:26 A Thousand Hours
1:52:05 At Night
1:57:58 A Forest
2:09:22 Lullaby
2:14:20 Six Different Ways
2:18:18 The Walk
2:21:50 Friday I’m in Love
2:25:47 Doing the Unstuck
2:30:21 Close to Me
2:34:20 In Between Days
2:37:20 Just Like Heaven
Here is an aud recording of this show for anyone who might like to listen to this show on the go. It is not bad at all although this YT version is by far the best I have seen/heard.
2023-05-23 Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California
Robert Smith of the Cure performs at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
Tuesday was gray, but for Cure fans, it was all love at the Hollywood Bowl
24 May 2023 | BY MIKAEL WOOD | Los Angeles Times
Robert Smith stood onstage Tuesday evening and let the final notes of the Cure’s “A Night Like This” — in which the 64-year-old goth-rock icon promises, “I want to change” — ring out over the capacity crowd at the Hollywood Bowl.
“The last time we played that,” Smith told the audience, “I thought to myself: Do I really want to change?”
It’s hard to see why he would: Nearly half a century after the release of the British band’s debut single, the Cure is enjoying a moment right now, the kind coveted by pop stars one-third Smith’s age.
Tuesday’s gig under cloudy skies was the first of three sold-out dates at the Bowl on a tour for which the Cure sought to keep ticket prices relatively low; Smith’s willingness to publicly criticize Ticketmaster — he even got the company to refund fans for a portion of its much-hated handling fees — has given him something of a folk-hero vibe on social media even as he gets accustomed to being a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted the Cure in 2019.
The tour is building anticipation for a long-promised studio album, the Cure’s first in 15 years; here the band played a handful of impressive new songs, including one Smith said it had never performed before. With its generous blend of hits and deep cuts spread over nearly three hours, though, the Cure’s current live show also feels like expertly designed fan service — this summer’s black-mascara counterpart to Taylor Swift’s splashy and bedazzled Eras tour.
The Cure isn’t the only celebrated survivor from its generation of U.K. post-punk and new wave acts. Depeche Mode is on the road in very fine form behind its strongest LP in years, and just this past weekend Siouxsie (who once counted Smith as a member of her Banshees) made a celebrated return to the American stage at Pasadena’s Cruel World festival. In November, Kate Bush will follow the Cure and Depeche Mode into the Rock Hall thanks in part to last year’s discovery of her old song “Running Up That Hill” by young viewers of Netflix’s “Stranger Things.”
Why exactly this stuff seems to be in the air comes down to some extent to fortuitous exposure like that and like HBO’s recent use of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” in “The Last of Us.” But there’s also something about this luxuriously gloomy music — the way in which it honors the exuberance of misery — that means it’s always drawing new fans.
Of course the idea of goth would continue to reverberate in an era when teenagers just have to pick up their phones to find a reason to be depressed.
Headlining the Bowl almost seven years to the day since the Cure’s previous visit — and wearing a black T-shirt advertising the defunct Hollywood Star Lanes bowling alley — Smith found as much feeling as he ever has in oldies like “Pictures of You” and “Lovesong” as he floated his lovelorn yelp over dreamy overlapping guitar lines. (Though Smith is the band’s sole remaining original member, the Cure’s live lineup — with guitarists Perry Bamonte and Reeves Gabrels, bassist Simon Gallup, keyboardist Roger O’Donnell and drummer Jason Cooper — is long on musicians he’s played with for decades.)
“Charlotte Sometimes” and “Push” were surging rockers riding muscular rhythm-section grooves; “Shake Dog Shake” showed off Smith’s childhood fascination with Jimi Hendrix. At times you could think of the Cure as a sort of emo-psych jam band, stretching out the likes of “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” to find untapped reserves of luscious melancholy.
The Cure’s new songs were both the stormiest and the most sentimental of the night, with florid keyboard licks against synthesized strings that called to mind Aerosmith’s late-’90s power-ballad phase; indeed, the seeds of the grandly emotional “Another Happy Birthday,” which Smith said the Cure was playing for the first time Tuesday, are thought by the group’s most devoted to date back to 1997.
As the clock ticked toward the Bowl’s 11 p.m curfew, Smith and his mates wham-bammed through their biggest hits — “Friday I’m in Love,” delirious with agony; “In Between Days,” shuffling and funky; “Just Like Heaven,” a mad, passionate tumble — before closing with “Boys Don’t Cry,” where the pride Smith still takes in a sense of vulnerability could bring a tear to your eye.
When it was over, the frontman stuck around onstage for a few minutes, soaking up the crowd’s adoration — a renewable resource, it turns out, but not one he sees fit to squander.
The Cure release updated version of documentary ‘Play Out’
Arun StarkeyTHU 1ST DEC 2022 15.02 GMT
The Cure have released an upgraded and extended version of their 1991 reveal-all documentary, Play Out. To the delight of the band’s fans, all two hours have been uploaded to YouTube, with it a time capsule back to the time that the Crawley outfit were gearing up to release the album that broke them in America, Wish.
Directed by Peter Fowler, Play Out follows The Cure as they undertake a host of significant shows. At the start, frontman Robert Smith walks into a soundcheck at a relatively small-sized venue, and later in the film they debut a selection of what are now hailed as classic songs at intimate shows such as this. Elsewhere, they headline Wembley and perform on MTV Unplugged, setting the scene for the arrival of Wish. Notably, the expanded version goes much deeper into the band than the original.
The re-release of Play Out coincides with the 30th-anniversary reissue of Wish, which remains their most commercially successful album, boasting cuts such as ‘Friday I’m In Love’, ‘High’ and ‘A Letter to Elise’. The new version features 45 songs, and in addition to the original tracks, there are demos, four songs from the cassette Lost Wishes, unreleased numbers and more.
The Cure have made the headlines frequently as of late. During a concert in Assago, Italy, earlier this month, they debuted the new track ‘A Fragile Thing’, which is rumoured to feature on their upcoming 14th album.
“It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum,” Smith said of the new record in a conversation with NME. “I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously, it had an effect on me,” he said back in 2019. “It’s not relentlessly doom and gloom. It has soundscapes on it, like Disintegration, I suppose. I was trying to create a big palette, a big wash of sound.”
Tracklisting and time codes:
T&C II Club London – 17th January 1991 Behind The Scenes 0:14
Wendy Time 1:25
The Big Hand 7:13
Away (Cut) 11:58
Let’s Go To Bed 16:51
A Strange Day 20:15
10.15 Saturday Night 24:17
Killing An Arab 28:28
Wembley Arena – London – The Great British Music Weekend – 19th January 1991 Behind The Scenes 32:09
Pictures Of You 39:41
Fascination Street 47:19
Lullaby 52:24
A Forest 56:40
Backstage At The Wembley Arena 1:06:49
Jonathan Ross Show – 23rd January 1991 Rehearsals (“Hello I Love You”, “Just Like Heaven”, “The Walk”, “Bland with an Edge”) 1:10:17
Harold And Joe 1:13:28
E – Zee Hire Rehearsal Studio – London – 22nd January 1991 The Blood 1:17:35
The Walk 1:22:50
MTV – “Unplugged” – 24th January 1991 Backstage At The MTV Studios 1:26:27
Just Like Heaven 1:39:12
A Letter To Elise 1:43:40
If Only Tonight We Could Sleep 1:48:23
Boys Don’t Cry 1:51:56
Dominion Theatre – London – 9th February 1991 Rehearsals For “The Brit Awards” 1:55:07
London – 10th February 1991 At The Fiction Office 2:00:13
Backstage At The Dominion Theatre 2:03:57
Never Enough 2:06:18
“The Brit Awards” Presentation By Roger Daltrey 2:10:40
