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