aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser
‘GIGS FROM YESTERYEAR, WHEN I WAS YOUNG + PRETTY AS A PICTURE’
#10 The Cure, Essen Grugahalle (May 1989)
Dear friends,
another nice pick from Little Loser, at least as far as I’m concerned. Believe it or not, I came rather late to The Cure’s party – partly because of having been too young, partly of having had to explore old punk stuff first. So consequently I missed the first five or even six albums upon their specific release dates by and large … I mean, yes, I heard the more accessible ‘highlights’ here and there back then, of course, ‘Boys’ and/or ‘Arab‘ and so forth, but the bulk of the albums remained unknown to me for quite some time.
So when ‘The Walk’ came out in 1983, I started to go backwards – not always an easy task, it must be said. I always liked them better when they were not that mellow, you know … probably this is why – even today – I regard ‘The Head On The Door’ as their masterpiece. After that came ‘Kiss Me’, which was not too shabby either, but certainly not as good as ‘Disintegration’ from 1989. They played Germany in order to promote the album (they chose ‘The Prayer Tour’ instead of ‘Disintegration Tour’, because it would probably have sounded as if it were their last tour) and I took the chance to see them in Essen’s Grugahalle. Not the nicest of venues perhaps, but I was awestruck with what The Cure had to offer that night:
As you can tell they played ‘Disintegration’ in its entirety apart from ‘Lovesong’ plus a ton of really great stuff from past days. If memory serves correctly the gig lasted nearly three hours, all of the band were in top form, the light was great and the combination of this all created a deep emotional intensity. I know this sounds a bit like the old I-was-at-Lesser-Free-Trade-Hall – story, but not too long before this concert I saw The Jesus & Mary Chain playing in blinding lights with their backs to the audience … and then buzzing off the stage after 20 minutes. This may not be the best comparison ever, but The Cure showed me that there is more to a good concert than interesting songs and some fake coolness.
Now, you all know the songs by heart anyway, so I thought I’d give you the versions from that specific night as there was a bootleg of this gig, halfway commonly available at the time. But even with today’s technique, it remains an audience recording and thus the quality is sub-standard …. “to have output, you must have input”, as Joe Strummer rightly said in his wisdom. But the gig can also be found in full length on this big video platform, if you’re interested.
The original Disintegration album just had ten tracks on it, but there also was a version remastered onto two discs (so there’s a couple of extra tracks) by Robert Smith, sonically superb with an upped dynamic range on most tracks. So, from this version:
• ‘Pictures Of You’
• ‘Lovesong’
• ‘Fascination Street’
plus the two bonus tracks mentioned above:
• ‘Homesick’
• ‘Untitled’
Enjoy,
Dirk
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 