Happy Friday. This Friday, I’m in love with the recent past. This morning I walked my dog listening to a playlist I made of the 28 songs The Cure played at the show I attended with Patrik Sandberg in Edinburgh the other week. I’ve done this every morning since I returned from the UK, trying to relive the experience. Highly recommend traveling across the pond to see one of your favorite bands with one of your favorite people. Really one of the best uses of that one wild and precious life people (me) are always going on about.
I used my mind to conjure “Plainsong” as the opener (soul left my body) and even though Patrik said they wouldn’t, they did play “Close To Me” (soul returned to my body in pulsing, joyous triumph).1 Robert Smith’s voice sounds like it has not changed an iota since 1981. They played “A Forest”!!! (Can you even). I will forever cherish my visual of Patrik, eyes closed, emanating pure bliss, dancing to “A Night Like This.” A perfect, perfect night like this. Did we wander the edge of the airport for an hour afterwards, trying to find a way home? Maybe! “You never looked as lost as this” - me to Patrik. “I’m coming to find you if it takes me all night” - our Uber driver, a beautiful ending.
I do forget sometimes how alchemizing live shows can be. The frequency (doing woman in STEM cosplay here) of the sound waves physically washing over you, the energy crackling between you and every other person (generational goth) in the room (or Scottish field next to the airport, as it were), it’s beyond language really. Downing Aperol Spritzes and dancing dancing dancing for hours, you loosen your spirit and your fascia. You access another dimension of the self (and Self).
Occupational hazard I suppose, but throughout, I kept thinking of The Cure in contrast to The Smiths. I’ve obviously never attended a Smiths concert but it struck me that of course The Cure concert put me squarely back in my body; The Cure’s music is earth-bound. Robert Smith is famously a Taurus, and his love is tactile, enduring, grounded, rooted in the quotidian. It’s such a gorgeous sight, to see you eat in the middle of the night. The Smiths made music about longing in the abstract, yearning without much skin in the game. Morrissey is a Gemini, he deals in the airy intellectualizing of love, love as theory, as concept. He (mostly) centers himself. Life is happening to him. But he does want! Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Still, the other seems incidental, transient, interchangeable even. Robert Smith is (mostly) orbiting the other, noticing her, admiring her, trying to understand her, reacting to her. He is projecting the divine and seeing it reflected back in her eyes. You, strange as angels.
I love both bands so much I could puke. But if life is always pulling you toward something and away from something else (isn’t it?), I hope that I’m (bit by bit, back and forth, in no linear fashion) moving away from the intellectual and towards the physical, out of the brain and into the body. Oddly the lyric echoing around my head afterwards was a Smiths one, from one of my favorite songs, “Rusholme Ruffians.” But my faith in love is still devout…
I’ll be back next week with new music recs for you but in the meantime I think this song from 2023 is really slept on and definitely a child of The Cure xx
This is the best remix of “Close To Me”
The first time I traveled overseas for a gig was to see Suede at Butlins (iykyk) in 2016. The #1 song I wanted to hear was "He's Dead" because I'm obsessed with bootleg performances of that song from the '90s & I truly believe I manifested it that night. To the point that Brett Anderson said afterward, "felt like I was back in 1993 for a minute" Manifesting the songs you want to hear live is one of the very best feelings. Glad that it happened for you!
literally cried seeing the plainsong clip and reading this