“Delirious excitement”: The show Robert Smith called the best live experience ever
We cover a lot of bands here at Far Out, and the majority of them are easy to describe. That’s not an insult to the band in any way, but a lot of artists have pretty clear intent: they make rock music, or protest music, or they make you want to dance, or cry and all things in between. However, there are some bands whose descriptions don’t run off the tips of fingers quite as easily, and one of them is The Cure.
It would be easy to hurl all of the standard descriptions at you. They make gothic music laced with shoegaze and pop, sure, job’s a good ‘un, but the issue with their description lies in how their music makes people feel. So many of their songs are miserable, draped in heartbreak, longing and melancholy, and yet the way they write, the chord progressions and the beauty within the vocals, regardless of themes, bring nothing but smiles.
Take their most recent album, for example, Songs of a Lost World. It may be one of the most devastatingly heartbreaking pieces of music that The Cure have ever put together, and yet the way that that music is constructed borders on euphoric. How do you ever begin to make heads or tails of music that has upsetting themes and also instils such joy in the listener? It’s counterintuitive, essentially the opposite of what romanticism within art is, and we can’t get enough.
Robert Smith seems to have a similar issue with his music. He is naturally grateful that his career has been so good and that so many people connect with what The Cure are doing, but he can’t help being plagued by sadness when considering the finite nature of things. When he is playing live, despite the euphoria instilled by a live performance, he struggles to shrug off the weight of his melancholy.
It’s the highlight of a lot of musicians’ careers when they get to play in front of the people who love their music. When those moments are backed by great music, production and performance, it’s hard to find a high that matches it. Smith was playing The Cure Trilogy concerts, and while he recognised how great those gigs were, he was also bogged down by the knowledge that they would end. These doubled up as being the best live shows he had ever played and some of the saddest.
He spoke about the shows when discussing how much he tries to convey Keats’ poetry through his music. “It’s a poetry which can express exactly what I aspire to convey with my music,” he said, adding, “The Trilogy concerts in Berlin have been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. It was a strange feeling: the delirious excitement and the atmosphere of our sad songs were causing the same emotions which are in that Keats verse.”
He concluded, “In one of the happiest moments of your life, you find yourself being aware that everything will come to an end. It’s the cure of my life: improbably, I can’t enjoy completely a thing, because I know well that, sooner or later, that happiness will disappear. It’s horrible.”
The contradiction of The Cure continues into Robert Smith’s acknowledgement of the contradiction of how he approaches music as well as his experience of life. They’re a band we will never fully understand, and will probably dance to with tears in our eyes, and maybe that’s the beauty of it.
