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| The Cure,
Astoria, London |
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| Live,
Dan Wolff,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F4
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Promoting their new album Bloodflowers with their first U.K. in over two years, The Cure return and seem more pissed off than ever. It has always been a boring cliché about how miserable the band have been despite writing some of the catchiest pop tunes known, but tonight it feels like Robert Smith's world will implode at any second. As the set thunders along it becomes more apparent that Lovecats or Friday I'm In Love are unlikely to be aired. If you after a greatest hits set, this is the wrong time and place as the main set consists of no singles, only new songs and album tracks.
Dragging themselves on stage they start with two new ones, the forlorn Out Of This World and the eleven minute Watching Me Fall which will probably not get too much radio air-play. The one, and luckily only track from 1996's awful Wild Mood Swings is next, the fittingly painful sounding Want (as in 'I Want The Sky To Fall In'). After Fasination Street we are treated to two more from the new album, a Cure-by-numbers Last Day Of Summer and the almost optimistic sounding Maybe Someday. Smith seems to only to play the most angry or mournful songs tonight including If Only Tonight We Could Sleep from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Prayers For Rain and the bitter, brilliant One Hundred Years. He also hardly acknowledges the audience either by speaking to them (with the exception of 'Thank You' once in a while) or even looking at them. Set closer Bloodflowers sums up the evening and leaves the crowd wanting more familiar material.
For the first encore it is fitting they play A Strange Day from their most angriest album ever Pornography from 1982. The only single played at all tonight is twenty years old but still sounding spine-chilling, A Forest. After going and coming back for the final time, Smith spits out the bile of A Figurehead (also from Pornography) and finishes with the final sounding Disintegration. Sounding better than they have for a long time and back to form after one average and one poor album it's difficult to know where The Cure fit in. Yet again we have been told this will be their last album (yawn) but at least they can go out with reputation restored.
9-FEB-2000
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