A Live One- The Cure Cleveland Music Hall ‘85
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
This look may not be fit now, but just wait twenty years.
Cleveland Music Hall 85 by The Cure in 320 mp3s
The Cure embarked on The Head on the Door tour in 1985 with a No. 7 album in the UK and a No. 59 one here in the States. They first came to America a year before, and meant to conquer the American market with this tour. ‘In Between Days’ broke the Top 100 here barely, hitting 99. The No. 1 single in America the week ending on October 19, 1985 was a-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’, which just bumped Dire Strait’s ‘Money for Nothing’ from its four week perch. There is nothing in the rest of the Top 10 which would leave anyone to believe the Cure would have any more success than they had the year before.
The pop charts did not indicate the band’s popularity with college radio stations here, who played ‘Days’ and ‘Close to Me’ constantly. The groundwork the band laid with these tours would pay off with the release the next year of the singles compilation Standing On a Beach. By the summer of 1986 they would headline Glastonbury. They were one of the biggest bands in the world.
Beach is when I became a big fan. I bought the cassette for my sister Kate for Christmas. I, of course, dubbed a copy right away for myself. Because of the fact that goths were (are) such big Cure fans, you kind of had to keep your appreciation for them under wraps. I wasn’t about to buy any Cure merchandise. Hey, I wanted to survive childhood, alright?
The Cure to this day remain one of my all-time favorite earphone bands. Some bands just sound better in more intimate settings. And the Cure are one.
The Cleveland show I’m sharing was the fifteenth on their North American jaunt. It’s a great set. A lot of critics like to divide the Cure’s career into two phases, as if their pop material should be separate from their early stuff. Bollocks! The band’s music grew toward a more pop sound, but it has always been grounded in a firm appreciation for psychedelia. The Cure love the more experimental British bands of the late ’60s- Floyd, Soft Machine, and King Crimson. You can hear it live. Everything they played that night in Cleveland is of a piece. I can easily hear the same creative force in ‘Days’ as in ‘A Forest’.
I once told a co-worker/DJ that you could build a mash-up career using just Cure bass lines in every mix. You might not think the Cure rock, but they sure do rumble.
Now could somebody please tell Robert Smith he could leave the ’80s. Please. The man is starting to look like Mrs. Haversham.
O'Hare Arpt., IL
I still love em Mikey!
Quote