Two hours into the Cure’s relatively intimate launch gig for new album Songs of a Lost World, Robert Smith begs the sound desk not to use the tape of thunder and rain that has been shaking the jaded grandeur of the Troxy while the band were offstage between encores. “It’s a bit Hammer Horror,” he says. “Play some sunshine.”
Summoning the emotional weather, in all its light and darkness, is what the Cure do so wonderfully tonight. Smith has always sung of the anxiety of mortality and desire. And although, sonically, Songs of a Lost World could have come out at any point over the past few decades, it suggests that honing your craft can be more interesting than reinvention for the sake of it.
Often led by the garrulous bass of Simon Gallup, the band are heavier and more focused than they’ve been in years, while also knowing when to pull back. Smith has said that these new songs are among the most directly personal he has ever written, and during I Can Never Say Goodbye, the music gradually fades, leaving him to sing “Something wicked this way comes to take away my brother’s life” alone, in a poignant moment of grief for his late sibling.
It’s this sort of intensity of performance that makes Songs of a Lost World fit so well with the giddiness of the following two hours of hits – especially the half of 1980’s Seventeen Seconds that gets played in its own encore. That the Cure can seamlessly journey from the pure pop of Friday I’m in Love and Inbetween Days to the anxious fizz of At Night, the beautiful dirge of Fascination Street and the palpitating menace of A Forest, and that it all feels so alive alongside the new album, suggests there is no sign of ossification as the band approach their half century: “We’re nearly out of time … but just for tonight,” says Smith.
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During Pictures of You, a couple who were not even born when the song was released in 1989 leap up for a passionate snog. They get it. Few bands have sung the joy of stealing a moment of lust in the storms and chaos of life quite so beautifully as the Cure.
