In a 2013 post about The Cure, I wrote that I was in attendance at one of the 1984 Hammersmith Odeon shows recorded for their live Concert album, and that I felt like this was the perfect time to have seen the group, with a high watermark setlist that harkened back to their earliest days through to the lighter poppier sound that began emerging after the existential wallop of their Pornography album. I was promptly disabused of that notion in the comments and on Facebook with a near unanimous opinion emerging that the Pornography tour was—no arguing—the very best tour they ever did.

I think “they” might be right. Exhibit the first, this 30-minute live set taped for French television’s L’Echo Des Bananes program in 1982, in a Paris recording studio with no audience. When I saw them, they were a five-piece and super slick, with a great light show and amazing projections. Here they’re a seemingly nuclear-powered three member unit who require none of the showbiz frills to deliver the thrills and it’s… outrageously good stuff.

Listening to the Pornography album some thirty plus years after it first came out, well, it’s still one of the most brutal and raw listening experiences one can possibly have. I wouldn’t classify myself as a Cure fanatic, but this album I rate an absolute psychedelic mindfuck masterpiece. It’s a great album to listen to on acid (guilty, many times over) and the band themselves have admitted to ingesting quite a lot of LSD (and booze) during its recording. Imagine the state of mind that you’d have to put yourself in to make music like this!. The album art is apt, it’s like they’re playing through flames.
 

 
What may also have contributed to the blistering intensity of the 1982 tour—never mind the blunt force power of the material from Pornography—is what was apparently quite intense hatred that had developed between bandleader Robert Smith and bass guitarist Simon Gallup, who promptly quit after the tour’s completion. In fact, then-drummer Lol Tolhurst found that his two partners had both split back to England as a result of a fistfight backstage after a concert in Strasbourg, before Smith’s dad set his son straight, scolding him to get back out on tour because “People have bought tickets!” Two weeks later, after a final concert in Brussels, the three imaginary boys were no more.

Setlist: “Cold,” “Hanging Garden,” “One Hundred Years,” “A Forest,” “Figure Head,” “Play for Today”

There’s very little footage of this tour, so savor this. It’s incredible what these three guys do here, each of them a one-man band. Dig the bass synthesizer pedals!