Mick Tarrant was sat in his office at the Midnight Express nightclub in Bournemouth one afternoon in July 1983, dealing with beer deliveries and other mundane admin chores, when he received a surprising call.
by Martin O'Gorman Faith is a transitional album for The Cure, but then 1981 was a transitional year for music. In retrospect, “Post-punk” was beginning to morph into “New Pop”, but at the time it was the year that Adam Ant stopped being a loser and became a superstar. While the charts were full of … Continue reading 18 April 1981: Faith at 40
Crowd chatter: “Let’s see if we can see Ross. ROSS!” https://youtu.be/yIP-f9CDqvs The surviving tape of the first night of the Picture Tour is incomplete, but given what remains, we’re not missing out on much. The sound is pretty dodgy at the start but I can’t work out if that’s a fault of the recording which … Continue reading 18 April 1981: The Picture Tour, Aylesbury Maxwell Hall
In 1992, The Cure seemed unstoppable: the biggest cult band in Britain, huge in the US, enormous in Europe, able to fill arenas with ease and dependable festival headliners. After the huge success of Disintegration, the band’s next studio album would need to be exceptional to top it. But it did - and here’s how. … Continue reading 21 April 1992: The wonderful world of Wish
As it's RS's birthday today, here are some quotes from the archive about his childhood, school and upbringing. “I was born in Blackpool and the first few years of my life were spent up there. When I came down South, I actually had quite a broad Northern accent and the piss was taken out of … Continue reading Robert Smith: The early years
An annoying autobiographical entry... Tomorrow I’m flying to Bucharest to see The Cure perform at the Piața Constituției, in front of Ceausescu's enormous parliament building. The significance of this is that the date of the show - 22 July 2019 - is exactly 30 years to the day that I first saw The Cure at … Continue reading 22 July 1989: The Prayer Tour at Wembley
While we’re still basking in the critical acclaim that has surrounded The Cure since their Glastonbury set, let’s have a look back to what was probably the peak of their popularity in the run between The Head On The Door in 1985 and Wish in 1992: the Prayer Tour. As we’ve seen, the setlists were … Continue reading 8 July 1989: The Prayer Tour hits Paris
Like the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall Of Fame viral video earlier this year, the spectacle of The Cure playing Glastonbury this year offered the chance to watch the band get caught up in the confusing vortex of the mainstream press. The broadsheets tend to send journalists down to Worthy Farm en masse to get a … Continue reading 30 June 2019: The Cure at Glastonbury 2019 – what the papers said
“Boys Don’t Cry” - a career-defining, classic single. Pure pop. A three-minute wonder. Timeless, if you like. So why didn’t it even scrape the lower end of the UK singles chart in its release in the summer of 1979? Released on Friday, 29 June ’79, the single was timed to coincide with The Cure’s headline … Continue reading 29 June 1979: Who killed “Boys Don’t Cry”?
As we saw last week, Paul Morley’s vitriolic review of the Three Imaginary Boys album in the NME so incensed The Cure that Robert Smith immediately exercised his right of reply while recording a BBC session on 9 May, the day that the music press hit the stands. The backing track of “Grinding Halt” was … Continue reading 16 May 1979: The lyrics of “Desperate Journalist”
Crying For Yesterday 