Like the Cure – but without the greatest hits
Cureation Robert Smith’s Meltdown, Royal Festival Hall
When I was 14, I thought Robert Smith was the only person who understood me. There was something about the plaintive introspection of Smith’s voice that felt deeply personal – although the international success of The Cure suggested it was universal, too. It suddenly struck me that there were a lot of people at this concert – that marked the end of Smith’s curation of the Meltdown Festival at the South Bank – who were on their own. All these years later, it was as if those solitary souls, once given succour by the sort of suburban outsiderness that Smith offers, were reconnecting with a forgotten part of their adolescence.
That voice was the highlight. It soared around the Festival Hall like an unleashed spirit, commanding the room. That’s no mean feat when you’re in a band known in particular for creating meandering haunting melodies dressed up in a fair amount of goth metal fuzz. Smith was wellserved by the rest of The Cure’s current line-up, particularly Roger O’donnell’s acute and sensitive keyboard playing, and Simon Gallup on bass, who always had a habit of inserting some urgency amid the dreamy soundscapes.
Smith has barely changed: his hair still like an exploding armchair, his demeanour a little like Margaret Rutherford attending a Hallowe’en party, and his rapport with the audience gentle and unforced. He made no bones about the nature of the gig, which was to perform a selection of tracks from every album over a career that spans 40 years. The first half went from 1979 to 2008 (the year of their most recent studio album); and the second started at this point and worked back to 1979.
Certainly, there was a merit to this: The Cure is a band whose more obscure material deserves to be heard. Among the rarities given a welldeserved airing were Like Cockatoos from 1987, fuelled by a sort of cinematic sense of drama and accompanied by a back projection of birds fluttering against a marmalade sky; and Sinking (from 1985), which hinted at the synth-pop era in which the band came of age. Numbers from The Cure’s more recent era compared unfavourably, although Jupiter Crash from the 1996 album Wild Mood
Swings was marked by an irresistible sense of attack. With 28 tracks performed over nearly two and a half hours, Smith seemed to give his fans incredible value for money.
Except, in a way, he didn’t. I’m not a fan of greatest hits concerts – I feel like the audience should trust the quirks of a setlist – but over such a sprawling evening, one could really have done with a few defining numbers. There was Pictures of You (1989) admittedly, and A Forest (their first hit single from 1980, which still sounds fresh and utterly original), and the evening concluded with a rousing, full-throttle Boys Don’t Cry (1979). But where was
Close to Me or The Caterpillar or In Between Days? A woman dandling her baby in a papoose in one of the flying boxes looked a little bereft. Was she hoping for Lullaby?
I suspect that Smith is saving the big hitters for a 40th anniversary concert at Hyde Park next month (which has an exclusivity deal that prevents the band from promoting themselves as The Cure anywhere else in 2018). That’s a shame: past glories need to be glorified sometimes – and those gorgeous, mournful moments of Eighties indie (some of the best that the Eighties had to offer) would have worked so beautifully in the capacious airy atmosphere of the Festival Hall.