It's been awhile since my last live show report, but I've been steadily listening to the ample material in the 1996 tour.
There are some really standout shows as I near my final 25 shows from this tour, such as 1996-09-15 Hartford, Meadows Music Theatre [J.J. SBD].
Although Wild Mood Swings is not my dream setlist, I would have loved to have been at this American show, with The 13th, The Figurehead, Like Cockatoos. How can you not want to hear A Forest and Forever back to back? Unheard of in the new millenium. In like vein, 1996-12-14 Manchester, UK (Al. St. DAT M0) FLAC snuck in The Same Deep Water as You and again The 13th. This latter performance seemed like the band was embarassed at how silly the 13th was, and they cut the number short.
But embracing silliness is part of our love of The Cure, right? At least I think so. Let's get silly with the 13th!
With that in mind, some of the WMS tracks have grown on me via repetition. I look forward to hearing Club America, Treasure, Trap and Return seem now like old friends. Like Stockholm Syndrome, I am held hostage to the WMS setlist after hearing it for so many months.
Still, something is happening when I look forward to hearing Round & Round & Round. I used to click past that track whenever it came up previous.
We're a long way off from the 2000 tour, but when I listen to those live Bloodflowers tracks I feel pensive and thoughtful. Wild Mood Swings is really just about silly fun, of Robert Smith trying to have some fun with the dreary 1990s Seattle sound movement. And Bare holds up as well today as anything he's thought of.
Last Edit: Oct 2, 2018 10:18:29 GMT 1 by AForestFan
(It's hard to dodge the minefield of Cure4All complete stolen uploads on youtube. Why do they work so hard to remove all attribution to these audience recordings? Oh well.)
A busy weekend for me, but I'm still listening to 1996. This time it's 1996-11-05, Rennes, Salle Omnisports (France).
My wife tested positive on three pregnancy tests this weekend, so it looks like a new generation Cure fandom is on the way. I hope the songs of The Cure will continue to hold their appeal long after the artists and their original listeners are dust. Let the legacy continue...
A busy weekend for me, but I'm still listening to 1996. This time it's 1996-11-05, Rennes, Salle Omnisports (France).
My wife tested positive on three pregnancy tests this weekend, so it looks like a new generation Cure fandom is on the way. I hope the songs of The Cure will continue to hold their appeal long after the artists and their original listeners are dust. Let the legacy continue...
I know it's old new by now, but just seeing this, so congratulations, AForestFan!
Lots of exposure to TC in utero is in order. Hope your wife is feeling well.
We fight more often while she's pregnant. Last night, I spent almost three hours trying to figure out why my other computer running Windows 10 corrupted itself while deleting a network card driver. Now it won't boot, and my wife was angry at me for not paying attention to her during that time. -sigh-
I guess getting WinBlows to work will never be the subject of a Cure song.
Last Edit: Oct 5, 2018 10:21:04 GMT 1 by AForestFan
Spending a lazy Sunday listening to 1981-05-29 Brussels, (Bruxelles) Ancienne Belgique,Bel, Flac
It occurs to me that what a different band that was then. I love hearing Lol Tolhurst's crisp drums on Three Imaginary Boys and The Drowning Man. These songs sound like cover numbers in later years.
Of course, I was very different in 1981. I was just barely a teen and had no musical taste or preference. I doubt I would have appreciated this show had I heard it then, but who knows? What if I had been exposed to the Seventeen Seconds album at this time? I never heard of the band until "Let's GO to Bed" made top-40 airplay in the tristate area of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
Great to hear the crowd so racuous. This was a setlist that defined the band at the time.
I guess this could also be considered a blessing on the tours I personally attended. Perhaps hearing these precise songs in this setlist would not be a "dream setlist" after all. Each era had the songs that the band lineup defined as their time. Better just to appreciate the band in all their permutations.
And, I suppose we're lucky Robert Smith didn't remain as Siouxshe's fill-in guitar player!
I have twelve different audience recordings from 1979. One is a FLAC that I recut into more logical track starts.
Listening to them over, I can picture these teenagers, the 'three imaginary boys', jumping headfirst into the music world. Playing angry clubs of bottle throwing hooligans. How did they survive?
I guess they didn't, not as a band anymore, so we listen to the survivors and the music that inspires them today.
I didn't know that the band members were in various other bands in 1977 and 1978. Nice to hear their sound as "polished" in 1979, it's pretty sharp and practiced.
Post by negative8ball on Nov 4, 2018 18:21:22 GMT 1
Your point about the "polish" of the band is interesting... because each incarnation has had a different kind of "crisp" sound, to my ears... a different kind of "polish" in each case - the snap of 79/80, the contained-chaos of the mid-80s, the stadium band in the late-80s/early-90s etc.
Each version becomes super adept at the thing they're pursuing.
Hi Negative8Ball, sorry for the late reply. Long work week.
Because I am doing work now on a desktop computer that has no internet connection, I put a "greatest live sampler" of eighties-2000 concerts on the disconnected desktop. It's got the five-speaker 5.1 surround sound with a bass speaker, so the live audience recordings really stand out.
Today I am doing a bit of housecleaning, ripping my old collection of ZZ Top albums. ZZ Top was my first true music love, it's how I defined my teenage years. The Cure's "Staring at the Sea" CD compilation started me in a new direction in 1989, but ZZ Top was my first music devotion, where you simply had to have "*everything*" of a band. I still use my ZZ Top keychain:
This is because I just caught Billy F Gibbons doing a solo show this week. His blistering blues riffs at the end of each song was like a revelation to me. I'm amazed that he's still got it, ZZ Top's First Album came out in 1971.
Anyway, while I have the opportunity of rummaging around my old CD boxes (who has those anymore?), I pulled out my CDs of Wish and Bloodflowers. Never really liked either album, but I LOVE the tours they put on to promote them. I'd like to rip them at max MP3 resolution and hear them again, for the first time.
I was reading up on Bloodflowers at wiki. Of course a wonderful discovery I made this year (thanks to this forum) was that Japanese, Australian, and Columbian editions of BLoodflowers had an extra track called "Coming Up".
But what I also did not know was that I already had another Bloodflowers bonus track, "Possession". It's on my 4-disc Join the Dots B-sides compilation that I bought a long time ago.
Are these different versions of the same track? Guess it didn't work for the regular album release. Enjoy.