THE make up is still as splotchy as ever the hairdo still hangs like a spider" dangling from the ceiling the black threads still look undead those Cureheads never change. Like rock `n' roll zombies, they walked The Point last night, moving inexorably towards the stage, where a certain Mr R. Smith held them in thrall, as he has done for the past 19 years. Cureheads never change, but then neither do The Cure they still sound as doomy and echo laden as ever, and the only discernible difference seems to be that their music becomes denser and more labyrinthine with every album.
The Cure's current tour has already run into problems dates had to be postponed because Robert Smith was suffering from flu, then more dates had to be put back because nobody could figure out how to run the complex light show (didn't it come with a manual?). Dublin was one of the few places not affected by the rescheduling, and so The Cure went onstage at 8.20 last night, allowing themselves plenty of time to do a nice long, droning, bordering on the monotonous set.
As I watched the band work their peculiarly dark alchemy it struck me just how far The Cure have disappeared into a twilight zone of rock's consciousness. Although every note, every sound, every nuance was totally familiar to me, I hadn't a clue which song, was being played, whether Disintegration, Wish or even Wild Mood Swings. For me, The Cure passed away into the ether sometime after The Head On The Door, and the only songs which I recognised from the past decade were hits like Lullabye and Friday I'm In Love. That's ten years out of The Cure's career that I'd haven't really missed at all.
Although there's a relentless finality about The Cure's music, sometimes it blooms into something resembling joie de vivre, and it's at these moments that you realise the singularity of Robert Smith's talent. However, these flashes of inspiration seemed few and far between, and for most of the 21/2 hours we had to settle for second hand, mascara stained insights.
The encore brought back the ghosts of past tunes, but songs like Dressing Up and Close To Me sounded somewhat motheaten, as though they'd been brought out of a particularly musty closet. Charlotte Sometimes and Primary still had some fuel left in them, but the sparse, claustrophobic Play For Today and the stinging Boys Don't Cry were too ephemeral for the big arena delivery. 10:15 Saturday Night and Killing An Arab just sounded scrappy, like mere morsels being fed to that rather large and awkward creature the Cure myth. As long as the world's resources of mascara remain undepleted, the creature will surely live on.
