Post-Pandemic Listening Party
Post-Pandemic Listening Party
Songs of a Lost World, by The Cure
By Charlie Bertsch
“This doesn’t feel like a Cure show,” I thought, gazing out over the grassy slope of Albuequerque’s Isleta Amphitheater on the evening of 16 May 2023.
Although the band’s new album, Songs of a Lost World, definitely feels like a Cure album, every time I listen to it, my mind circles back to that surprising concert experience.
I had driven seven hours from my home in Tucson, grateful for the opportunity to see my favourite band one last time.
I was expecting a funereal vibe.
The footage I had seen from the European leg of the tour had been filmed in dark indoor arenas. And I had been concentrating on the songs the band was playing live for the first time, all of them slow and sombre.
Instead, I saw families spread out on blankets, children running about happily, and a bank of clouds on the Western horizon set aflame by the setting sun.
Although some individuals in my vicinity were dressed in all-black Goth attire and a few also sported the Eraserhead hair and Nosferatu make-up identified with band leader Robert Smith, the majority were dressed the same way they might have been for a Fourth of July fireworks show.
And then I remembered the price of my ticket.
Even with the aggravating fees that the Ticketmaster conglomerate had tacked onto its face value, it still cost me only $30, less than I had paid to see The Cure in the 1980s.
In other words, the spectacle unfolding before me was the direct result of the band’s repudiation of a business model intended to extract as much money as possible from people desperate for collective experiences after being cooped up at home during the pandemic.
Leading artists like Taylor Swift consented to this approach, in which tickets were priced as high as the market would bear, shutting out many diehard fans who could not afford them. Even Bruce Springsteen, a longtime advocate for the working class, reluctantly complied.
But not The Cure.
Improbably, a band that has never released an explicitly political song found a way to make a powerful statement against the neoliberal mindset that has saturated every last inch of consumer society.
Yes, The Cure have become resistance fighters. Not the Cold War stereotype, mind you. There are no photos of Robert Smith wearing fatigues and a Che Guevara beret. But they are role models for the war on needless greed all the same.
As I looked around, I was transported back to the concerts I had attended by the American band Fugazi in the 1990s, which had demonstrated that the anti-consumerist mindset of punk could be upscaled to arena-sized crowds.
Unlike Fugazi, however, The Cure are a major-label band, whose members are nearing retirement age.
And whereas the crowds at those Fugazi shows had exuded an aggressively masculine energy, full of self-righteousness, the people milling about on the lawn at Isla Amphitheater were relaxed and friendly.
Although I had read articles about The Cure’s principled stand before driving to Albuquerque, it wasn’t until I was inside the venue and settled down in a spot on the lawn that I fully understood its implications.
When ticket prices are reasonable, and the show will take place outdoors, going to see a band doesn’t feel like a big deal.
You can bring friends or family members who might not be that into the music but just want to go out. And if arranging childcare is too expensive or stressful, you can bring your kids as well.
This profoundly alters the nature of the concert experience.
While I was waiting for The Cure’s performance to begin, I struggled to process this realisation. I had been waiting a long time for this moment.
But instead of feeding off the energy of fellow fanatics, I felt like one of the figures in George Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
I worried that this impression would continue into the night.
How would I be able to immerse myself in the music when I was seemingly surrounded by people with other priorities?
Once The Cure started playing, though, it became clear that my fears were unfounded.
As the sky darkened, the band’s light show focused the crowd’s attention on the stage. Despite the fact that the volume was modest out on the amphitheatre’s lawn, distractions were not a problem.
Had the band opened with a string of hits, this would have been less surprising.
But of the fifteen songs The Cure played during their main set, only “Lovesong”, the much-covered song Robert Smith wrote as a wedding gift for his wife, truly qualified.
The only other songs in the set which had been released as singles were “Pictures of You”, also from the band’s 1989 magnum opus Disintegration, and “The Hanging Garden” from 1982’s brutally dark Pornography. And neither of those had made an impression on the American charts.
Everything else in The Cure’s main set in Albuquerque was a deep cut from one of the band’s albums or a new song.
Sustaining the interest of a large crowd with that type of material is a major flex, but it never felt like the band was showing off.
The longer that main set went on, the more apparent it became that the goodwill generated by The Cure’s refusal to bleed concert-goers dry was helping to overcome the centrifugal forces that can make live shows in the mobile-phone era deeply frustrating.
This was particularly obvious during the five songs that had not yet been officially released: “It Can Never Be the Same”, which they first played in 2016; and the four numbers they had debuted during this tour, “Alone”, “And Nothing Is Forever”, “A Fragile Thing”, and “Endsong”.
After the tour began the previous October, I watched footage from show after show, from Riga to London.
I compared versions of live staples like “A Forest” and “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and tried to figure out whether Robert Smith was still communicating ambivalence about playing hits like “Close to Me” and “Friday I’m in Love”.
But most of all I wanted to acquaint myself with the new songs The Cure were performing, the ones which were supposed to appear on a new album that Smith had been promising for years.
In interviews from the pandemic, Smith had insisted that the record would have to be released prior to the band’s upcoming shows.
It doesn’t make sense to tour a record that nobody has heard, he explained. Yet even though the T-shirts selling at the merch table read “Shows of a Lost World,” that hard deadline had come and gone with no mention of a release date.
That’s why, like many diehard Cure fans, I reasoned that I would have to content myself with hearing the band play their new material live.
When I had last seen them in 2016, after a detour-plagued drive to El Paso that had also taken me seven hours, The Cure played two songs that still hadn’t made it onto an official release. Maybe this was just the new normal.
As I watched the band’s Albuquerque show, however, I found it difficult to pay special attention to those five new songs.
Typically, when artists who have been around as long as The Cure play their recent work, the interest of the audience wanes. But that didn’t happen at Isleta Amphitheater.
On the contrary, their new material was so perfectly integrated into the setlist that I kept forgetting that it was new. And most people in the crowd seemed to feel the same way.
In effect, those five unreleased songs were treated as old favourites.
I suppose that’s what they were for obsessives like me, who had watched dozens of live shows from the tour.
Yet even people who were only familiar with the band’s best-known work weren’t talking or looking at their phones. They were fully immersed in music they had never heard before.
Eighteen months since that Albuquerque show and over two years after that tour began, The Cure finally released the new album that Smith promised.
For most parts of the world, the date was 1 November. In my case, because I live in the western United States, it started streaming on Halloween night.
I went straight home from visiting Tomb Town, the haunted maze that my family has been visiting for decades, to listen to Songs of a Lost World on auto-repeat.
Heard on the streaming platform Spotify, the studio versions of the five new songs the band had already played on tour are more densely layered than they sounded in concert, which makes the sound rather claustrophobic, particularly when Jason Cooper’s thundering drums enter the mix.
It’s possible that the versions released on physical media will feel more spacious, making the music more headphone-friendly. But my instincts tell me otherwise.
The more I listen to Songs of a Lost World, the more the album reminds me of Disintegration.
When that album came out, I was surprised to see an advisory in the liner notes reading, “This music has been mixed to be played loud. So turn it up.” Yet that did, indeed, turn out to be the case.
Despite Disintegration being regarded as The Cure’s masterpiece by many people, I preferred the sound of its predecessor Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, which sounded less cluttered on the headphones I used when listening in my apartment.
I came to appreciate Disintegration more when I finally had the chance to hear it played at high volume through my then-new girlfriend’s classic 70s-era stereo system the following year. I imagine that will also prove to be the case when I am able to play the compact disc of Songs of a Lost World through that same stereo system later today.
Since all eight of the songs listed on the forthcoming album had already been recorded by the band in 2019, I was confused by their decision not to perform three of them on tour in 2022 and 2023.
Now that I have finally had the opportunity to hear “Wardance”, “Drone/Nodrone”, and “All I Ever Am”, I still find the decision confusing. Although the latter two are played at a somewhat faster tempo, they could have been included in The Cure’s setlists without much difficulty. And “Wardance” aligns perfectly with the five songs they had already premiered.
As advance reviews of Songs of a Lost World have already noted, the record feels more cohesive than any album since 1992’s Wish or possibly even Disintegration itself. In fact, this is how Robert Smith himself characterised it in the long interview he gave prior to its release.
The songs The Cure had already performed sound even more sombre than they did live.
My sense is that someone who suffers from synesthesia or reproduces the condition with pharmaceutical assistance would not find the music very colourful. In that regard, Songs of a Lost World resembles the band’s spare early albums Seventeen Seconds and Faith.
But perhaps that impression derives more from Robert Smith’s lyrics than the music.
From start to finish, they convey longing for a past that is rapidly disappearing from view.
On “Alone”, he sings of “fire burned out to ash”; on “Warsong”, of “bitter ends”; and on “Drone/Nodrone”, he is “pretty much done.”
“All I Ever Am” opens with the line “I think too much of all that’s gone.”
The chorus of “Endsong” hammers the point home with even more vigor:
It’s all gone, it’s all gone
I will lose myself in time
It won’t be long
It’s all gone, it’s all gone, it’s all gone
“I know, I know,” Smith sings on “And Nothing Is Forever,” as if he were ruefully shaking his head, “my world has grown old.”
Most ageing rock stars are eager to turn back the clock, proving that they can still summon the exuberant insouciance of their prime.
Robert Smith wants none of that.
Instead of a cringe-worthy search for the fountain of youth, Songs of a Lost World confronts mortality head-on.
This might seem like an end-of-career statement, especially to people who mostly know The Cure from their poppier songs.
But longtime fans know that Smith’s lyrics have been communicating this sentiment for decades.
The title song for the band’s second album, Seventeen Seconds, composed when Smith was only 21, begins with the lines, “Time slips away/And the light begins to fade/And everything is quiet now.”
On the title track of Faith, released the following year, Smith informs us that he is ”losing hold” and “can’t just carry on this way”.
“Sinking”, from 1985’s The Head on the Door, when Smith was 26, confronts us with the disturbing image of someone who is already slowing down and can’t seem to remember anything at all.
The final song on Disintegration provides a list of things the singer was never able to do, then declares, “And now the time is gone.”
That album’s 1992 follow-up, Wish, ends with the appropriately titled “End”, which begins with words that could easily have appeared on Songs of a Lost World:
I think I’ve reached that point
Where giving up and going on
Are both the same dead end to me
And both the same old song
This surely explains why the new songs The Cure played at Isla Amphitheater fit together so seamlessly with decades-old numbers. And it also explains why the band still feels relevant today, despite having reached the age when most rock musicians seem out of touch.
I can’t imagine Robert Smith ever singing lines like “I hope I die before I get old”.
Sitting on a blanket next to me at the Albuquerque show was a Native American couple in their sixties, more or less Smith’s age. They were there with their children and teenage grandchildren. But they made sure to tell me that they had been fans of The Cure for a long time.
I asked them how long.
“I got their first album at Wax Trax in Denver in 1979,” the woman replied. “Their music reminds us to welcome sadness. Because that’s the only way we can truly be content.”
If I had to guess, I would say that most of the crowd at Isla Amphitheater would have agreed with that sentiment. They were there to feel, even if that meant suffering in solidarity.
I have no doubt that Songs of a Lost World will be playing on auto-repeat in my home and car until I have memorised every last bit of it.
But it will be a less intense experience than the one I had in 1987, when I purchased a cassette of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me at HMV in London and then listened to it for the first time on my pseudo-Walkman as I toured the city with my parents.
In the age of YouTube, when fans can record high-fidelity mobile phone videos almost as good as old professional concert films, the shock of the new isn’t what it used to be.
And what we remember experiencing ourselves is inextricably bound up with the recordings of others.
After I returned home from my trip to Albuquerque in May 2023, I immediately searched for clips from the concert. As was the case for many of the stops on The Cure’s European tour, someone uploaded comprehensive footage from the front row.
The more I watched these videos, the more my memories of seeing the show from the Isleta Amphitheater lawn began to merge with them.
But being with other people adds depth to the experience that cannot be channelled through a screen.
I didn’t forget the beautiful sunset I witnessed from high above and the soft rain that fell on me during the show.
Nor did I forget the people who watched the show alongside me: the Baby Boomer woman by herself who insisted on standing even though her knees were killing her; the young couple to my right that alternated between singing along and making out; the teenagers whose knowledge of the band’s catalogue seemed the equal of my own; and the six-year-old boy who pointed to his mother and said, “That’s my mommy. She loves The Cure so much that she wanted me to see them too.”
I saw a lot of tears that night, tears of sadness mingled with tears of joy, tears that only fell because people were able to experience the music with each other, finding solace in the remembrance of all that we have lost.
I’m feeling them in my own eyes as I write these words.
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Photograph courtesy of Charlie Bertsch. All rights reserved.