FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘I’m alive. I’m dead’: The Cure in Concert, 1984
11.04.2013
09:46 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
I was never really a massive Cure fan or anything, but I was lucky enough to catch them at a career highlight, at one of the two London concerts taped for their 1984 live album, Concert: The Cure Live. I had a friend who wore a black leather motorcycle jacket with The Cure’s logo emblazoned on the back every day and he’d bought a bunch of tickets that it turned out no one else wanted. Bribed by a free ticket so he didn’t have to go alone, I went along with him to Hammersmith Odeon on May 9th, 1984.

I think it was the perfect time to see them. While it was still relatively “early” in the band’s history, The Cure had actually been around for quite a while at this point. Robert Smith had recharged his creative energies, playing guitar with Siouxsie and The Banshees and recording Blue Sunshine as The Glove with Steven Severin. The Top was an inspired album charting a new and more sonically-varied direction for the group. Certainly Concert features one of the best set lists—probably the very best—of any Cure tour before or since.

There were some super cool darkly psychedelic visuals projected above the band of things like goldfish shot from weird angles and an incredibly long, extremely slow and claustrophobic dolly shot down a long hotel hallway, probably the work of their longtime collaborator Tim Pope. In terms of trippy eye candy and a retina-searing light show, it was truly superb. The Top had just come out and the band were on good form, as you might expect them to be since they were obviously aware that there was a mobile recording studio outside the venue taping the show.

Here’s a concert from a few months later, taped in Glasgow at The Barrowlands on August 25, 1984 with a similar set list. Not nearly as atmospheric as the show I saw—which was much darker, with a lot of strobe lights (more like this clip, which IS the actual performance from Oxford that was used on the Concert album); the back projections are missing here, too, because they wouldn’t have worked for TV—but still it’s a smoking hot vintage set from The Cure.

I would be remiss in not remarking on something that has puzzled a lot of the YouTube viewers: Why is Lol Tolhurst pretending to play on songs where no keyboards are heard?

LOL, Tolhurst!

1. Shake Dog Shake
2. Primary
3. The Walk
4. The Hanging Garden
5. One Hundred Years
6. Give Me It
7. A Forest
8. Piggy in the Mirror
9. Happy the Man
10. Play for Today
11. The Caterpillar
12. 10.15 Saturday Night
13. Killing An Arab
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.04.2013
09:46 pm
|
Lego my video: Tim Pope reacts to seeing one of his videos for The Cure recreated in Lego
02.19.2013
01:07 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
This is a guest post from renowned director Tim Pope.

OK, I admit it: I am the one that chucked The Cure over a cliff in a wardrobe.

The main part of the video was committed to celluloid in a large, wet floored hanger in London—in fact one of the largest spaces I can remember ever filming in. Weird, given the fact that we were literally doing the claustrophobia of the cupboard’s interior.

The exterior bit was filmed at Beachy Head, a beauty spot in the UK’s west Sussex, where the snowy white rocks fall away to the ocean, 162 metres below. A frocked priest even drives this stretch of coastline in a Landrover vehicle to talk people out of committing suicide here, for which it has become synonymous, and there are on average sadly over three attempts a week.

Little did I know that I was shooting something I would be talking about thirty years later. To me, this was just another in a string of videos I made for the group. All in all, I probably did 37 Cure videos. I say “probably” because I honestly don’t know—let’s just leave that to the experts. Ask the average Goth in the street “how many videos did Tim Pope shoot for The Cure?’ and he or she will tell you, with precise dates, the meaning of the video and most of all about what haircut Robert sported that day. See, these videos seem to ‘run deep’ with people, indeed. I often, still to this day, get people contacting me to ask if their university thesis might be about our videos. I of course made, and do make, videos for many other artists, of which I am exceedingly proud: Neil Young, Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The The, Talk Talk, Paul Weller. More recently, Fatboy Slim, Amanda Palmer, The Kaiser Chiefs, others. But still it is generally The Cure ones that people want to come back to, especially as the fans seem particularly fervent and loyal.

Often on a cab ride, when it comes in the conversation to the part about what your job is, I will portray myself as a plumber, or private detective, or fireman. Anything, but to talk about ‘that’ video. However hard I try, though, it always seems to come back to: “Oh, you did the wardrobe video! I love that video! It’s my favorite from the eighties!” I guess it’s going to be etched on my gravestone: “Tim Pope. Yeah, he did the wardrobe video.” Still, mustn’t grumble, eh? Like they say, “better to be remembered for something.” There were others that (amongst the guesstimated canon of 37) have gone in deep to people’s psyches, seemingly penetrating their inner beings like syrup tentacles. “Lovecats” for The Cure saw Robert dance in circles about a room, talking about “cagey tigers,” while he sent the audience giddy with his cat-like choreography—oh, and I punched him on the nose with a stuffed cat.

“Love Song” saw him and band—Simon, Porl, Boris, Roger—in a cave of penises; shocking even to me when I saw the film back in the harsh light of the editing suite: “Oh God, I’ve gone too far this time!” “Inbetween Days”, where I placed the (very expensive) camera in a shopping basket attached to a piece of rope, so we could give the effect of Robert chucking the camera away, and then catching it again. “Lullaby”—and here we come to the point of why I am writing this now—where Robert (to quote the lyric) “feels like” he’s “being eaten by a thousand million shivering furry holes” (One of the best lines of any pop song, ever, surely?). What was I to do with the video?

Famously, Robert was shocked to see my interpretation of a spider’s mouth—go check the video for yourself and tell me if you think what ‘eats’ him resembles any part of the female anatomy. In other parts of the video, where he is bed-bound, he spent a day inside a spiderweb made from glue like candy floss and doubtless had colorful, solvent-based dreams that night. The byproduct of the glue was that it pulled out half of his hair when he tried to remove it from his face. Which, when you are a RS, is, I guess, bad news—bad news if you are anyone, really.

These videos are all part of my misspent youth—the equivalence of the “naughty things” others got up to behind bicycle sheds. Mine just happened to be a little more, erm, public. I am used to seeing piss-takes, versions, ripoffs, of my work with The Cure, but I was particularly taken with the intriguing version of “Lullaby” in, wait for it, Lego.

Yes, like most people, I have built many a building or airplane from this iconic stuff, but never a video. See it here on Dangerous Minds for the first time. Part of me wants to know why someone would go to all this trouble? To replicate an entire video, frame by frame, cut by cut, shot by shot—wow! My congratulations to the person who made it, credited on the end title card as “Lucas Tuzar.” Lucas says something, in further words, about it being “for Nicola Tuzar’s birthday” and a few others “all of them are big The Cure fans”. I don’t know if he means “big” in terms of their physical size, or he is referencing their passion for the group. Probably the latter, I would guess.

So, there you have it: one of my videos now made in Lego. Thank you, Lucas!

You can see more of my videos at my website www.timpope.tv, or you can get my Twitter feed @timpopedirector.

Below, the original Tim Pope-directed “Lullaby” from 1989:
 


 
The Lego remake:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
02.19.2013
01:07 pm
|
Hot Hot Hot!!! A make-up session with The Cure
01.22.2013
03:46 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 

A behind-the-scenes look at a 1991 make-up session with The Cure.

And here, I thought Robert Smith just woke up that way!
 

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
01.22.2013
03:46 pm
|
The Cure live at the San Miguel Primavera Sound festival in June
09.17.2012
01:54 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
The Cure onstage at the San Miguel Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona on June 1, 2012.

Great set—with good audio quality—but with each passing year Cure leader Robert Smith looks more and more like a roly-poly version of “The Joker.” His look is getting to be a bit tragic for a man his age. I wonder if his fans would abandon him if he ever cut his hair (like when Felicity‘s Keri Russell cut hers) or gave up on the smeared-lipstick thing?

01. Plainsong
02. Pictures Of You
03. High
04. The End Of The World
05. Lovesong
06. Push
07. Inbetween Days
08. Just Like Heaven
09. From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea
10. Hungry Ghost
11. Play For Today
12. A Forest (Happy Birthday Dear Simon)
13. Bananafishbones
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.17.2012
01:54 pm
|
Babyface (and skinny) Robert Smith & The Cure at Dutch rock fest, 1980
04.16.2012
03:01 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Watch a young, fresh-faced Robert Smith and The Cure running through seven songs at the “Berg En Bos” Dutch rock festival, held in Apeldoorn in 1980. The band’s line-up at the time was Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Laurence Tolhurst and Matthieu Hartley.

The set list: “A Reflection,” “Play For Today, “In Your House,” “M,” “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” “Another Journey By Train,” and “A Forest.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
04.16.2012
03:01 pm
|
One pill makes you larger: Siouxsie and the Banshees’ lysergic ‘Home’ movie, 1984
02.01.2012
01:18 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
I saw Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Play At Home Channel 4 television special when it originally aired in 1984, and as a rather enthusiastic aficionado of LSD at the time, it was immediately apparent to me that this trippy trip down the rabbit hole was a program made for acidheads, by acidheads. No other drugs could explain this one! I’d have to say that this was probably in the top five of the very oddest things I’d ever seen on network television at that point. I can’t imagine what “normal” people must’ve made of it at the time.

The Play At Home series offered four musical acts—New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, Virginia Astley and the Banshees, during the period that Robert Smith of The Cure was in the band—an hour of TV to do pretty much whatever they wanted. When they saw what the Banshees cooked up, I’m sure the execs were both thrilled and nervous (What happened to Channel 4 over the years???).

The Banshees’ Play At Home episode was finally released as a DVD extra on the reissue of the 1983 Nocturne concert film in 2006. Note inclusion of music from side-projects The Creatures and The Glove. Longtime Banshees producer Mike Hedges makes an appearance as the Queen of Hearts and Annie Hogan, once Marc Almond’s musical collaborator, can be seen as the Doormouse.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
02.01.2012
01:18 pm
|
The Glove: Robert Smith and Steven Severin’s experimental side-project, 1983
01.30.2012
03:51 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
During Robert Smith’s tenure as the guitarist in Siouxsie and the Banshees (1982-84), a period that yielded the “Dear Prudence” hit single, as well as Hyena and live Nocturne album, Smith and Banshees’ bassist Steven Severin also formed The Glove, a side-project with vocalist/dancer Jeanette Landray (Smith’s Cure contract forbade him from singing with another group).

The Glove produced just one album, the experimental, druggy, yet still poppy-sounding Blue Sunshine (yes, they copped the title from the cult film about the bad LSD) and two singles, “Like an Animal” and “Punish Me with Kisses.”

The 2006 reissue of Blue Sunshine as a 2 CD set features a disc of demos with Smith singing instead of Landray.

Below, “A Blues in Drag”:
 

 
After the jump, the video for “Punish Me With Kisses”:

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
01.30.2012
03:51 pm
|
Crystal Castles ft. Robert Smith - ‘Not in Love’
11.11.2010
07:07 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
The Cure‘s majestic Robert Smith has recorded vocals for Canadian duo Crystal Castle’s ‘Not in Love’ taken from their self-titled second album. The track is released on 6 December 2010 on Fiction Records - the perfect antidote to the ghastly ‘X-Factor’.
 

 
With thanks to Nicola Black
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
11.11.2010
07:07 am
|
Depression’s Evolutionary Roots
08.26.2009
08:03 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Fascinating article in Scientific American that possibly answers why depression still plagues roughly 30-50% of all people, everywhere.  Since the brain plays such an essential role in promoting survival and reproduction, and depression can debilitate so thoroughly, why hasn’t mankind simply evolved beyond it?

Well, according to Doctors Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., maybe it’s time we start considering depression a “useful” disorder.  One which is, “in fact, an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.”  The pair backs this up with some brain-confusing brain chemistry, then moves on to make some simpler sense:

This is not to say that depression is not a problem.  Depressed people often have trouble performing everyday activities, they can?

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
|
08.26.2009
08:03 pm
|
Page 3 of 3  < 1 2 3