The Cure, Chicago 2023

I also love the excruciating intensity of “Warsong,” the dark rock n’roll wardrum beat and licks of “Drone:Nodrone” (the only ass-shaker on the record) and the deep emotionality of “I Can Never Say Goodbye” which is about the death of Robert Smith’s brother: “It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”

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I really love this entire album but my favorite tracks are “10.15 Saturday Night” with the tap drip drip drip dripping; it was the B-side to their single “Killing an Arab.”  Also great is the boppy rhythm of “Accuracy,” the frenetic pop energy of  “Grinding Halt,” the buzzy Buzzcocky snark of “Object,” and the way “Fire in Cairo” taught me to spell Cairo in a lilting singsong fashion. The best track is the album’s title track “Three Imaginary Boys” which portends the direction The Cure would take: a goth-pop sound that borders on sinister but is still kinda danceable.

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The Cure sounded incredible – Robert Smith’s voice is still exactly the same (he claimed he was having an “off-night” vocals-wise but we certainly couldn’t tell). The set list was….outstanding. It’s too long to list here because, again, they played for 3 hours.

But my favorites and/or unexpected pleasures included: “Shake Dog Shake” (OMG one of the first Cure songs I think I ever heard, probably on the radio from an old King Biscuit Flour Hour concert recording from 1984), their 1981 single “Charlotte Sometimes,” “Push,” “A Night Like This” and “In Between Days” (from Head on the Door), the 1983 single “The Walk” plus a slew of their earliest songs including “A Forest” (from the 1980 LP Seventeen Seconds), “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Killing an Arab” (Smith sang “killing another” – for obvious reasons the original title did not age well) and, fittingly, the b-side to “Killing” which also appeared on their 1979 debut album Three Imaginary Boys: “10:15 Saturday Night.” (Note: they did not actually play it at 10:15 but rather as the second-to-last song at the end of their 2nd or 3rd encore – I lost track – which was closer to midnight). The video we shot of that song posted below!

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I absolutely adore Seventeen Seconds and vividly recall the first time I heard the single “A Forest” (#31 UK), sometime in the early-to mid-80’s on an old King Biscuit Flour Hour radio show recording, probably rebroadcast on a local college station. I was totally transfixed: blown away by the music’s ability to bring up feelings and experiences that I had in no way ever experienced (I would have been about 12 or 13 years old with zero concept of what “goth” was. Up to that point my reflections on forests included Girl Scout camp, which I loved, and picking berries or looking for rare flowers with my mom, which I hated – bugs, mud, getting scratched by pickers and branches, etc). My other favorite songs are “Play For Today,” the darkly jangled “M” and the title track “Seventeen Seconds.” Seventeen Seconds went to #20 in the UK and 40 years after its release, squeaked onto the US charts at #186 in 2020.

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