The Cure
Pornography Tour 1982 [Bootleg]

Around this time in the history of the "Crawley" group, most of the events are centered that (sifting through urban legends) on one hand will lead to the temporary cessation of the existence of the Cure themselves (until their reappearance on the green vinyl of Flexi Pop), and on the other (from the perspective of the 2000s) will pave the way for a salvific artistic and human maturation. Let us say immediately that the dark-manifesto "Pornography" musically represents a peak that will never be surpassed, beyond the fact that one might prefer the minimalist-nocturnal-psychedelic "Seventeen Seconds" or the more subtly distressing "Faith". "Pornography" is an explosive breakdown, a creative climax, and a turning point toward greater appreciation of the pop component: a set of factors that could not have been predictable in 1982.

Robert Smith recounts (with subtle self-irony) "We'd leave the Fiction flat at nine at night, go and get drug, take drugs and record..." "Then we'd finish at nine in the morning, go and get drunk, take drugs and go to bed..." Apart from Smith and Co.'s "punctuality," biographer Johnny Black narrates that "it's from these rather violent and extreme sessions that the single took shape". Whether it's fiction or reality matters little because "Pornography" is a work that manages to be miraculously both a point of no return and a point of balance, the latter supported by Smith's existential anger (probably the "latent" feeling of the other two works as well), finally truly liberated and expressed, channeled into dense, poetic, highly artistic songs, whether they are pounding, obsessive and "on the edge" or imbued with the melancholic "calm after the storm".

An album marked by a deeply romantic poetics (I wouldn't read it in a decadent key, too many accounts don't add up), also given Robert Smith's great sensitivity to literature and poetry (from Coleridge to Shelley). An English Romanticism, which unlike its continental expressions was less imbued with symbolism and grand existential background systems and more directly connected to emotions, sadness, joy, the sense of time passing, and so on. One cannot read the Cure's work without taking into account this literary background. The reasons for the temporary crisis that the Cure went through in the years '82-'83, until the regrouping in 1985, were manifold. First and foremost, the unexpected "success" of "Pornography" sales gave the band the incentive for a very dense and exhausting worldwide tour, which first brought Robert Smith, engaged full-time with the Cure and part-time as a guitarist and collaborator with SiouXSie & The Banshees, to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion, compounded by a not-so-quiet relationship with Simon Gallup, which was the casus belli: the two quarreled up to fisticuffs in a pub in Strasbourg, continued to beat each other up outside the venue (after being expelled), and the tour ended tumultuously.

Of that tour, this unofficial document is a real gem: the Cure at the Olympia in Paris, a legendary theater and temple of Music that saw Edith Piaf and the francophone "Chansonnaires" parade by, is already something so unprecedented as to arouse incredible curiosity. The set-list revisits, as might be guessed, primarily the recent "Trilogy" Seventeen-Faith-Pornography. The attack is with "Figurehead", percussive, cadenced, rolling on the heavy bass lines of Simon Gallup, the triangulation being completed by the guitar riff played in such a particular, psychedelic style, "suspended" almost leaving a finale open, and the vocal and instrumental echoes in which the (unmistakable) style of the Cure is forged. Next comes "M", from the previous "Seventeen Seconds", powerful and similar in the counterpoint between bass and drums, then "The Drowning Man", spectacular climax of "Faith", to close a first "act" marked by three songs similar in the structure of the rhythm section, with driving bass and drumming that in this case becomes tribal with phases in counter-time. Next is "Short Term Effect" bringing back the flight on "Pornography" coordinates, one of the most poetic texts ever ("apparent movement, like a falling bird, cold in the instant it touches the bloodied ground") where a quasi-"pop" melody seems to emerge among percussive dissonances and vocal distortion effects.

"Cold", dark-gothic masterpiece with slowed and seemingly "out-of-phase" drumming dominated by dense and dark keyboards and (the apparent effect of) a Church organ. The visionary psychedelia and the experimental peak reached concludes an ideal "second act", punctuated by rhythmic slow down, heightened atmospheric pathos, and imagistic suggestion that seemingly less melodic and predictable music creates in an audience by now literally enchanted. The next phase begins with one of the emblematic manifestos of the Cure, the autobiographical and visionary "Three Imaginary Boys", more sustained, more rock, and more melodically accessible. In the same vein comes "Primary", (let's say the Cure-ian counterpart to "Isolation") rhythmic and slightly more "accessible" than other songs of "Faith", but in a progression in rhythmic acceleration culminating in the acclaimed "One Hundred Years", the "Perfect Dark Song" in which rhythmic dynamism reaches a paroxysm creating in the live-set a unique and indistinguishable vortex of guitar-bass-keyboards-drums and on which Robert Smith's voice rises to obsessively repeat the same phrases at the end of a frantic and infinite text imbued with despair, a sense of being lost in an existential maze with no way out, with Smith's vocalizations representing the sublimation of fears, the catharsis of nightmares and liberation: Robert is in his voice the ethereal and "heavenly" Poet who collects and faces the worst horrors, the most frightening monsters of a subconscious of the human soul, and through the beauty of Poetry (image-music) and Song (voice-body), returns them to the audience in the form of Art, condensation of the darkest and unattainable meanings of existence. All this are the Cure. Magic, Death, Music. Love, Art, Absolute. With the manifesto of the entire Dark movement, the frustrating tension has reached its climax. What follows is a sort of conventional "third act", where Cure's more romantically "dark" and melancholic side emerges: "A Strange Day", another lyrical and musical masterpiece from "Pornography", structurally similar to the previous "Short Term Effect", with the break and solo guitar suspended without any other instrument, and Smith's refrain without any other instrument, represents one of the highest moments of the live in Paris. "Pornography" is the most noise-experimental track of the album presented in the tour, with echoes of industrial effects, Smith's sung-declamation submerged by layers of instruments. "Killing An Arab", visionary and almost "Herzog-ian" succession of flashes of the images it crosses, connection however sui generis with certain punk, is the (almost) closure of the live. Which is entrusted to "Forever", an unreleased song (and it will remain so for a long time).

The Olympia that welcomed the English group with "Forever" bids them farewell with the warmth one reserves for a cult band already destined to enter everyone's imagination: from Underground to Legend, it's not a usual fate. I don't know if Robert Smith at that time as it's said "sometimes left the stage in tears", but I am sure that from the Olympia audience more than someone left, that evening, with authentic emotion, which came to "fill the eyes, and from the eyes fall", as when Music (with a capital M...) touches the strings of the heart.

A rock-band among many others, but different, unique, and unrepeatable. Let's Play Forever.

SET-LIST

the figurehead, m, the drowning man, a short term effect, cold, three imaginary boys, primary, one hundred years, a strange day, pornography, killing an arab, forever