The Cure @ Wembley Arena

To be honest, all I was expecting from last Thursday's gig was an ageing goth band playing their old goth antems to an ageing goth audience. But I saw something quite different.

The gig started exactly as I thought, with songs from Disintegration that fell flat. Similarly, 'A Strange Day' lacked the energy and gloominess of the usual live performances.
Things started to get better as more poppy songs were played: 'The Walk', 'A Night Like This' started to sound like The Cure. But this is not the part of the Cure I like, and their best songs ('Shake Dog Shake', '100 Years') were not actually so good. Only 'From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea', with a slight punk twist, was really amazing.
A few new songs were played, such as 'The Boy I Never Knew', which actually sounds good.

The main set ended after 2 hours, and the Encores started. And that's when the gig really took off. First, we got a bunch of rarely-played, totally-revamped songs such as 'Why Can't I Be You', that sent the crowd dancing like mad, it felt like a club in the 80's, no longer like a gig. Then, they played a bunch of songs from 17 seconds: 'M', 'A Forest' and 'Play for Today', that again send the crowd mad. And finally, they ended with almost the entire Boys Don't Cry album, played in less that 25 minutes: 'Three Imaginary Boys' (with the Foxy Lady intro), 'Boys Don't Cry', 'Jumping Someone Else's Train', 'Grinding Halt', 'Fire in Cairo', '10:15 Saturday Night' and finally, 'Killing an Arab'.

My interpretation is that as a quartet, Robert Smith wanted to go back towards the Punk early days of the Cure. So he plays the hits in the main set, for the average audience, but saves the real stuff for the encores. Which leads to a set of more than 3 hours, but who would complain? That's two gigs for the price of one...

Here's my recording of 'A Forest':