The Cure prove truly just like heaven at the Hollywood Bowl

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The Cure at the Hollywood Bowl
The Cure at the Hollywood Bowl

By Ben McShane

Kicking off three nights of sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl, the Cure’s Robert Smith came to stage Sunday like some sort of Martian vampire … in broad daylight? Presumably to reconcile Sunday’s noise curfew with the Cure’s reputation for marathon sets, the night began before most all-ages shows would, almost promptly at 7:30 p.m. How … civil, not that the aging crowd seemed to mind.

The Cure pledged career-spanning, rarity-studded shows for their current tour, and Sunday night’s entry made good on the promise. The setlist was heavy on peak-career (20 of 32 songs from a five-year span between 1982 and 1987), included rare gems seldom heard in the last decade (“Closedown,” “Want”), and featured two brand new ones debuting on this tour. One of them, “It Can Never Be the Same,” a sort of crescendo-ing post-rock promulgation, was a highlight of the set. Who said you can’t teach an old goth new tricks?

Guyliner gags aside, it’s hard to think of a more vital legacy act left on the circuit. After Bowie and Prince, both of whom left Earth for the stars this year, who else other than the Cure was more responsible for deconstructing popular past music and thrusting forward with new forms? To regard The Cure as goth rockers is too reductive; aesthetics aside, the gothic rock of their early career is just one dimension of a much grander post-punk enterprise. At the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday night, behind the pancake makeup mask in the light of day and the dark of night, an enraptured audience clad in black beheld pop-hooks (“Boys Don’t Cry”), funk (“Hot Hot Hot!!!”), smatterings of shoegaze (“Disintegration”), riffs of metal (a hard-rocking take on “Give Me It”) and even a little alternative rock radio. (We heard you, “Burn”!) What other artists on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam can do that?

The sprawling dissertation on sound was played with all the urgency of black coal turning to diamond, but give the old guys a break, they have to pace themselves for a long tour. What struck this writer most last night was the romance of it all. In an era of instant gratification and a porn-a-fied celebrity pop landscape, the Cure conducted a night that married mystery to familiarity, love and lust, despair and joy. It was a reminder of how poetry is precious, scarce in today’s popular conscience … and currently on a 28-date North American tour.

The night’s festivities may have begun in broad daylight, where no ethereal illusions could hold, but after the three-hour reverie, as aging geeks and goths headed for the exit, night had fallen and Mars appeared to the right of the moon, closer to Earth than it has been for a very long time.

Setlist: Plainsong, Pictures of You, Closedown, A Night Like This, Push, In Between Days, Last Dance, Lullaby, Fascination Street, The End of the World, Lovesong, Just Like Heaven, 2 Late, Trust, Want, One Hundred Years, Disintegration. Encore: It Can Never Be the Same, A Forest. Encore 2: Shake Dog Shake, Piggy in the Mirror, All I Want, Give Me It. Encore 3: Step Into the Light, Never Enough, Burn, Wrong Number. Encore 4: The Lovecats, Hot Hot Hot!!!, Close to Me, Why Can’t I Be You?, Boys Don’t Cry.