Tonight, The Cure's sole UK Reflections show, is something of a remorseless sonic excavation down into the quite literally deepest catacombs of the back catalogue, Robert Smith and a fluctuating cast of four exhuming the first three records (rightly discounting those unorthodox compilations for the irritable American audience). The annular Belgravia behemoth of a venue is tonight painted black as streams of monochrome meander up its ornate staircases, and it becomes a veritable cauldron of multiculturalism, the English language barely discernible as anxious chatter is delivered in an eclectic blend of tongues, tones, and intonation. Similarly, there's minimal linguistic "patter" from Smith throughout, despite his concentrated efforts to come out with extraordinary utterances. In the wake of The Hanging Garden at the death of tonight's second encore he murmurs unintelligibly about acid, before insinuating that an exceptionally exuberant Let's Go To Bed demonstrates the perils of recreational drug abuse. It's one of many wonderfully mystifying occasions on a night to relish and reflect upon indulgently.
For this celebration is pure indulgence in every sense, and not solely for we as an über-attentive audience. It's self-indulgent to boot, yes, although is justifiably so as tonight serves not merely as a communal commemoration of three truly seminal, timeless works but also as a remembrance and review of how and indeed who (inherently bad bands with innately great Smith-scribed names excluded) The Cure have inspired since the understated 1979 release of Three Imaginary Boys. Tonight falling on a Tuesday isn't the solitary reason therefore for the omission of Friday I'm In Love, a great 'hit' yodelled for ill-advisedly and obnoxiously by a boor in a nearby box, and at 7.45 Tuesday Night Smith, backed by Simon Gallup and Jason Cooper, ambles diffidently into 10.15 Saturday Night. Its Clash-like trash can shimmy sounds alive and exorbitantly, gloriously amplified, offbeat harmonics and mechanical rhythms as contemporarily relevant as anything. Now or ever. Accuracy meanwhile, delivered with apt precision, has matured into a rather more imposing, muscular and potent brute, Gallup's pummelling bass line rumbling down a post-punk slant. Methodically the trio worm through the original tracklisting, standing strangely immobile to Grinding Halt, rattling off an unremarkable Ordinary Day, and squawking to Object with teeth-bearing snarl. If Smith may hate it, he hides his revulsion tremendously. Of course it's then Subway Song, hinging on that trundling bass line Mike Dirnt daren't say didn't inspire Hitchin' A Ride: Smith tootles away on a harmonica as it clatters into action, while Gallup hunches over his bass as it almost scrapes the stage with his every erratic posture. Dangling lower than Peter Hook's self-assurance would be were he not such a megalomaniacal, oblivious oaf Gallup's four strings, despite never featuring on Three Imaginary Boys, add immense verve to Smith's almost feline nature and taciturnity. Staunchly loyal to the record, Foxy Lady is aired almost enthusiastically despite Smith's contempt for its inclusion on the album, his blasé reaction to initial guitar solecism on the pleasantly scatty Hendrix cover perhaps an insinuation of his thirty-year dissatisfaction. The surfy blues seconds of The Weedy Burton are also included as they sign out of '79, Smith admitting that their rapport with the genre was in the end irreconcilable as he questions quite why it was ever incorporated into the finalised tracklisting.
Seventeen Seconds, in comparison, is starkly earmarked as a dreary and difficult second album that fails to unstick itself from a mire of murk and wallow until A Forest. Here, the practically unfeasibly impeccable sound of the entire evening is aided in vision by trunks of verdant luminescence that sprout from out behind Cooper's drum riser and while stage and spectacle have been manipulated in a similar manner previously (from the raging spotlight-born flames and fog of Fire In Cairo, to the arctic dry ice breezes that swathe the stage during Secrets), only now is such graphic engineering fully exploited. Thus although A Forest still stands tall even over the entirety of The Cure's discography, the crowd-bellowed synth lines of Play For Today provide the only other spine-tingling moment off an album that ought to wield the mischievously sinister ability to whimsically set the nervous system to spasmodic malfunction.
Faith, conversely, comes across as all the more morose, more laden with portentous doom, more memorable on the whole, and is here exhibited as a bona fide masterwork. All too often overlooked by the casual admirer, from the initial chorus-drenched, ruthless thud of bass on an attention-engulfing The Holy Hour right through to the decelerating denouement drums of the title-track, it's riveting. So compulsive, so complete. For the duration and in accordance with each album, the colour and shade of Smith's Jazzmaster has changed in correspondence with mood and overriding aesthetic, and it's here as black as the absent Porl Thompson's eyeliner. Similarly the onstage equipment reflects the era to which the band temporarily relocate, as electronic percussion is here provided by the returning Lol Tohurst and Roger O'Donnell's synths become increasingly prominent. As Smith impassively growls: "Rape me like a child / Christened in blood", the intensity of atmosphere peaks, the withdrawn frontman unwittingly becoming the grizzled method actor upon which every gaze is involuntarily transfixed. His every move a picture, they predominantly resemble that incarnated on the cover of the Join the Dots collection, his unusual yet becoming silhouette looming large on the almighty organ that forms the evening's backdrop.
For every one of their three encores Smith must once again get in character, again relodge himself in the correct year as each one tugs us back to '79(ish), '80(ish), and '81(ish) respectively. Absolutely imperative in order to prevent him waking up and thinking: "Fuck! Where am I? What year is it?", this sequence merely adds to this fascinating documentation of The Cure, a national treasure and a royally supreme band. Boys Don't Cry is swiftly followed by a particularly jittery, confrontational Killing An Arab, which is in turn succeeded by the jangles and jolts of Jumping Someone Else's Train. During the sultry slink of Let's Go To Bed, Smith asserts: "You think you're tired now but wait until nine" with minimal irony, as if content to continue until the none-too-early hours of tomorrow. Few have heeded his counseling and headed for slumber, the majority instead opting to girate interpretatively to the Asiatic gleam of The Walk. Jazz hands and finger clicks at the ready, The Lovecats ties up the unravelled yarn, or at least tides things over for now although after three hours Smith looks unchanged yet equally dishevelled. Indeed he barely looks to have aged an instant since '79 behind a slap or two of make-up and beneath a cobweb of hair that looks as though unwashed since the very same year. In fact he looks as though only momentarily orientated "the right way around" for the show itself having spent every nocturnal waking minute since Bestival upside down in some grungy bat cave. Tickets may have set back all in attendance around half the levy for that entire weekend, although reflections on these three hours will surely be stapled onto the brain for just as long. For now however we can but rub our grubby Meathooks together in eager expectancy of Pornography, The Top, and The Head on the Door.
