I remember very clearly from the Prayer tour show in Stockholm that Robert introduced Untitled with "This one doesn't have a title yet"
Indeed, and I think there might be more truth to this than humour.
When I was playing the Disintegration CD singles back in the 1990s (I think Untitled is on the Lullaby one), I considered whether Untitled was not the song name. But rather a placeholder for something that didn't exist, like [Untitled] or (Untitled).
I've happily settled on that for the decades since. If you listen to the lyrics, I'm sure a case could be made for selecting a song title. But Robert chose to leave it as such and that's a fine close to the album itself.
The Live section of this forum is busy in 2019, and that's a good thing. But I have resumed my Live concert review and so commence an exciting new chapter.
First, I rapidly got through the The Cure shows I have from 1998-1999, sixteen in total. These shows were hit and miss. An example from that period 1998-08-07_-_Zambujeira_do_Mar__Portugal, was not the band's finest. Was this a band on the way out?
This brings us around to the amazing 2000 'Bloodflowers' tour. It was this tour that was partly responsible for my wanting to review and narrate the various Cure shows through the years in this thread. It's an amazing tour laced with the regret that it wasn't until 2008 that I started attending live Cure shows. What could have been, I would have really liked to attend one of these in person...
But this tour is special to me for another reason. The album didn't move me. I bought it at the Best Buy store (when they still had a 2,000 square foot audio CD section), played it through, and shrugged. Just sounded like poetry set to music. That was my review. I put it in the shelf and forgot about it, just ascribing Bloodflowers to yet another example of the long slide of The Cure to irrelevance and obscurity.
Now fast-forward to 2008 and onwards. I've discovered The Cure online community (various websites including the old defunct CCC), and found that shows from the 2000 tour were quite interesting. Songs that I found dull and lifeless on the album mix came to life during the live shows. I began to appreciate Robert's intended new direction for his sound into the new millenium.
So here we are in 2019, and I have happily reached the 2000 concerts in my live Cure collection. I start (as usual, randomly based on album folder name rather than true chronology) with 2000-10-17, Melbourne, Rod Laver Arena at Melbourne Park (Australia). I actually live for a year (2014) about 200 kilometers from Melbourne Australia but never went there.
This Melbourne show is what turns out to be a pretty standard tour setlist, introduce the fans to the new stuff, and starts letting them dance with the older "Inbetween Days" material after. I like having "Sinking" on this setlist as well. Funny how Robert is sneaking a number of these Bloodflowers tracks into the 2019 tour, such as "39". Oh, I guess it's just 39.
One could look at something like the 2000 tour as RS sticking to the fans "You're not going to hear your hits, I'm going to make you listen to these moody Bloodflowers themes till you fall silent". But that's not it at all, I think. Robert Smith was telling each audience that this is where he was now as a musician, songwriter, and person. And we were invited to come along in his journey going into 2000 and beyond.
I have over one hundred shows from the 2000 tour, although a lot of that number are alternate audience recordings. A considerable collection for an album that I didn't listen to that much.
Ironically, my favorite track from the album is something the record label cheapskates didn't see fit to include on my purchased CD. That would be "Coming Up", a Japan Bloodflowers exclusive. It was this sort of nonsense that ticked me off about the 2004 release (The Cure), with all sorts of tracks released all over the world just not in your country's official CD. (Possession and Coming Up were finally included on the Join the Dots official release).
Anyway, don't know if I'll get through this tour anytime soon, but that's the fun of having an excess of The Cure. And we have new shows to enjoy this year as well, when it rains it rains The Cure!
Heh, well at least you got one 2000 show, so half is fine. Well I got to hear Bloodflowers in Miami in 2016 during their double show which I attended with my wife.
Now on 05.06.2000 Greenwood Village - Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre.They squeezed in a 2000 performance of All Cats are Grey, and we both missed that. But it's all good as long as there was a courteous audience taper here and there...
Now enjoying 2000 02 28 New York. Robert mentions being sloppy by "mixing up the setlist". I don't think any audience member ever made that complaint of the band.
Getting a lot of 2000 shows with If Only Tonight We Could Sleep followed by an encore of The Figurehead. Can't say I'd complain about that.