Still waiting for The Cure . . .
Nine years is a long time. Too long.
And so at last it comes to pass, after all these years. The Cure are finally on their way to play in New Zealand after nine years of badgering from local fans, playing Auckland’s Vector Arena on Thursday, July 21.
Nine years. The cheek of it! During that time there have been several world tours, passing as close as Australia, but New Zealand fans have been repeatedly left out in the cold.
Nine years is a very long time. I mean, it only took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the freakin’ Sistine Chapel. If he’d had nine years up his sleeve, he could have got to the end, looked up at it, thought ‘‘Yeah, nah, I could do better’’, and repainted the whole thing from scratch, with a year off at the end to recover.
Nine years ago, Helen Clark was prime minister, on the verge of being rolled by the Nats, led by ponytail fetishist John Key.
Nine years ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone, and Dick Hubbard took a break from counting out the yoghurt-coated raisins and nut clusters in every box of muesli to have a go as Auckland’s mayor.
Just think: a child conceived after sexual congress between two over-excited goths when they got home from The Cure’s last gig here in 2007 would now be a perky 8-year-old, heading off to primary school in their own little Siouxsie and The Banshees T-shirt, skinny jeans, and Doc Martens, whistling that earworm chorus from The Love Cats.
Still, better late than never. The main thing is The Cure are coming, and there is high excitement around the nation.
Pharmacies have reported great fluttering flocks of black-clad fans descending like ravens on the cosmetics aisles to stock up on eye liner and MAC Ruby Woo lipstick, the latter the precise blood red shade favoured by Cure singer Robert Smith himself.
The trick on gig night will be to apply these without the aid of a mirror, in order to emulate Smith’s trademark ‘‘sad panda’’ eyes and smeary ‘‘too much drunken pashing at the office Christmas party’’ lips.
The Cure have toured here four times before. On the first occasion in 1980, I was in the audience myself, having hitched from Rotorua to Hamilton to be there.
I got picked up by a motorist who was going to the same show, and we tore cross-country blasting a cassette of their second album, Seventeen Seconds, which had just come out. After a day of irresponsible pre-loading, I staggered along to the Founder’s Theatre and had a fine old time.
The band’s last visit, in August 2007, nearly didn’t happen at all. An Auckland show was belatedly tacked onto the Australian tour after Taranaki fans Gordon Pitcairn and Alastair Ross organised a successful petition.
‘‘It was amazing that we helped get them here,’’ said Ross when I tracked him down in the ’Naki earlier this week. ‘‘And it’s even more amazing that they’re finally coming back. Did I buy a ticket? Of course!’’
Now 44, Ross has been a Cure fanboy since he was 13 and overheard a girl on a bus playing the immortal Boys Don’t Cry. Cue an obsession that once involved getting around New Plymouth with a huge rat’s nest of backcombed hair and convening with fellow provincial fans.
Ross suffered for his Cureophilia, becoming a target for local skinheads less convinced of the merits of Seventeen Seconds or A Forest, or bogan thugs not yet ready to embrace the sight of young men in lippy.
But his love endured. One of his life’s highlights was meeting Robert Smith backstage after the Melbourne gig in 2007, a trip paid for by the late lamented Campbell Live. ‘‘TV3 flew us over there to meet him, and I was sh***ing myself. But he was lovely. I got a photo of us together on my cellphone. He was really friendly, which was lucky, because I was so nervous, especially with the Campbell Live cameras being there. I was, like, ‘Oh, my God!’. Robert Smith is still one of my biggest inspirations, both personally and musically.’’
When Ross talked to Smith in 2007, the singer confirmed the petition had been instrumental in getting them over here. ‘‘They’d had all this pressure to play more shows in Australia, but that petition gave them the extra impetus to come here instead for one Auckland show. It showed them what an enthusiastic audience they had over here, and the fact that their gig sold out so quickly confirmed that.’’
Yes, agreed. But they haven’t been here since. In 2014, when the band announced a world tour, Ross kicked off another petition, raising more than 1500 signatures in a bid to get an Auckland date tacked on.
No such luck. The Cure flew past, their jetliner just a distant smudge on the horizon, followed across the Tasman by a trail of fluttering bats.
‘‘The main thing is, they’re coming now, so we can all get to see them for one last time.’’
Hang on. What do you mean one last time? Obsessive uber-fan that he is, with his quite possibly black nail polished-fingers in any amount of Curerelated pies, does Mr Ross know something the rest of us don’t?
Will this be the last ever Cure tour? ‘‘Perhaps. Or it might just be the last ever tour they do to New Zealand. (Cure keyboardist) Roger O’Donnell posted on Twitter recently saying something like ‘‘Looking forward to one last tour’’. People immediately freaked out that the band might be splitting up, or maybe they’re just not going to do epic world tours any more.’’
Yes, or perhaps O’Donnell is simply leaving the band to potter in his garden.