Saturday, November 2, 2024

Robert interview with the New York Times

From the New York Times:

How Robert Smith of the Cure Became Rock’s Most Dogged Activist

With his band’s first new album in 16 years out Friday, post-punk’s dark prince discusses enduring on his own terms and clashing with the most powerful company in live music.

At Brighton Electric, a warren of rock rehearsal spaces in an old brick tram depot in this English seaside town, young guitar luggers stream in and out while the thudding jams of baby bands reverberate throughout the building.

But a corridor in the back leads to a spacious, gear-crammed private studio occupied by the Cure — the multiplatinum band that defined a gloomy strand of British post-punk, and scored international hits with spiky confections like “Friday I’m in Love.” On a recent Sunday evening, the band was gathered to prepare for promotional gigs supporting “Songs of a Lost World,” its first studio album in 16 years, due Friday.

Seated beside his guitar rig was Robert Smith, the group’s leader, explaining his reluctance in recent years do an interview. “I don’t really want my head to be drawn back into this idea that I’m ‘Robert Smith of the Cure,’” he said, raising a blue-shadowed brow. “It just doesn’t suit me anymore.”

Yet at 65, he is still unmistakable as Robert Smith of the Cure, dressed all in black, with a smear of lipstick and his signature tangled mop of dark hair, now a shade of ash. At the Cure’s commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, he was a dandy prince of the alternative scene, his disheveled haystack inspiring not just a look but also an entire indie-kid personality type — the lovesick goth — while the band charted a path through melancholic angst (“Boys Don’t Cry”), danceable ear candy (“Just Like Heaven”) and an expansive, moody neo-psychedelia (“Pictures of You”) that made it a model for generations of artists.

Inducting the Cure into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said that Smith had used his “singular vision to create that rarest of things — a completely self-contained world with its own sound, its own look, its own vibe, its own aesthetic, its own rules.”

Formed in 1976, the Cure — with Smith its only constant member — has remained vital well after it departed the upper rungs of the charts, with a fiercely loyal fan base that flocks to the band’s sprawling, three-hour live shows. Recently Smith has also unexpectedly become a prominent voice calling for reform in the bewildering world of concert ticketing, where prices are spinning out of control and fans are often left feeling frustrated, confused or ripped off.

In a series of social media posts last year that rallied fans and enthralled the music industry, Smith drew attention to the problems that surrounded the sale of tickets for the band’s most recent tour. He channeled fan complaints, railed against scalpers and complained to Ticketmaster over fees that in some cases had doubled the cost of an order. “I am as sickened as you all are,” he told fans in a characteristic all-caps post on X.

Coming just a few months after Ticketmaster’s meltdown during the presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, his efforts added pressure to the company and its corporate parent, Live Nation, and demonstrated the power that a star can wield, if only they are willing to stick their neck out. Within a day of Smith’s complaint, Ticketmaster agreed to issue partial refunds to fans.

“It was one of those moments I thought, ‘No, I’m not letting this go,’” Smith recalled. “And so I didn’t.”

Over more than two hours of conversation, Smith spoke about the long gestation of “Songs of a Lost World,” his late-career shift into hands-on management of the Cure’s business and the lessons he learned from his clash with the most powerful company in live music. Far from the sullen creature listeners may imagine from his songs, Smith was chatty and open, giving long, thoughtful answers and smiling at his self-deprecating humor.

And he spoke with some astonishment at simply surviving a life of rock, to the point where the Cure is now approaching the half-century mark — an odd milestone for a man who sang the words “Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die” in 1985.

“If I go back to how I was when I was a younger man, my plan was to keep doing this till I fall over,” Smith said in the studio. “My idea of when I fell over wasn’t this old.”

“SONGS OF A LOST WORLD,” the Cure’s 14th studio album, might well have never happened.

When the last iteration of the Cure fell apart, after the tour that followed the band’s 2008 album, “4:13 Dream,” Smith said he was left feeling drained. He no longer wanted to be in the band, and toyed with making a solo album. But after a break he reconfigured the group, and by 2011 restarted it as a live vehicle; for nearly a decade, the Cure toured solely on its thick back catalog, with no new recordings (despite some teases along the way).

Smith was still writing songs, and after curating the Meltdown festival in London in 2018 — the 40th anniversary of the Cure’s first single — he felt reinvigorated. Recording sessions the next year generated enough material for multiple albums, though the coronavirus pandemic delayed completing them.

Smith works in his home studio on the south coast of England, after leaving London when he turned 30 in a determined lifestyle change after years of rock-star-level drinking and drug use. He has been married for 36 years, and his daily life suggests the jumbled diaries of a middle-class retiree and an obsessive auteur. He goes for long walks listening to music on an iPod and has never owned a smartphone.

“I have the music room at home,” he said. “My ideal Saturday night is often just having a few drinks and making loud noise. I mean, it’s the reason why I wanted to be in a band.”

But “Songs of a Lost World,” which Smith says is the first entry in a possible trilogy, is one of the darkest albums he has made. It is an eight-song suite of despair, rage and brooding thoughts of a life — and maybe a planet — that has fallen into what he calls an “inexorable slide.” “Alone,” the first track, harks back to “Disintegration,” the band’s gloomy psychedelic masterpiece from 1989. With a slowly pulsing pattern of synthesizers, bass and piano creating a backdrop of broken grandeur, Smith sings lines adapted from the Victorian poet Ernest Dowson (“This is the end of every song that we sing”) in his instantly recognizable crying tenor.

“I think it’s natural, as you grow older, to feel more and more despairing of what goes on,” Smith said. “Because you’ve seen it all before and you see the same mistakes being made. And I feel like we’re going backwards.”

“A Fragile Thing,” about a relationship strained to the breaking point, has a classic Cure bass line — bouncy and spare — by Simon Gallup, who has been part of the band for most of its nearly five-decade run. The lineup on “Songs of a Lost World” also includes two longtime players, Jason Cooper on drums and Roger O’Donnell on keyboards, along with the guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who had a long association with David Bowie and has been in the Cure since 2012.

The new album’s lyrics, Smith said, reflect personal stories of loss and mortality; “I Can Never Say Goodbye” is about the death of Smith’s older brother Richard, who had introduced him to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Smith’s early idol. “Songs of a Lost World” is only the second Cure album (after “The Head on the Door,” 39 years ago) on which Smith has sole writing credit on all tracks.

Still, the sense of a broader breakdown looms behind nearly every track. An early iteration of “Warsong,” about a relationship in constant conflict, dealt more directly with the world’s endless cycles of war. But Smith strove to keep the songs from being explicitly political. For one thing, he said, he would be an easy target for complaints.

"I wear lipstick, I’m 65,” he said. “I’m not the person to stand up to say what’s wrong with the world.”

BUT SMITH DOES NOT back off from a fight, as was evident from his battle with Ticketmaster last year.

For the Cure’s first North American tour in seven years, Smith was determined to keep prices affordable, making sure that each venue had seats at $20 or $25 — an extraordinarily low entry point for an arena show at a time when the average cost of a seat for one of the top 100 tours is $131, according to the trade publication Pollstar.

In part, he was thinking about his youngest fans. Though he has no children, “I have an enormous family now, a wider family,” he said. “And I know how they struggle just to live.”

From the start, there were signs of trouble. The band’s business contacts insisted that the prices were unrealistic, that Smith’s plans “ran contrary to all proven business practice and that it would be a complete disaster,” Smith said.

But he didn’t buy it. In the years after “4:13 Dream,” the Cure was without a label or management, and Smith began to study closely the economics of the business he had been in since he was a teenager. He decided that a tour could be run profitably on a small budget and with modest ticket prices. To ensure that tickets ended up with fans and not scalpers, he used Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan registration system and made tickets nontransferable. The band also did not use dynamic pricing, which allows prices to fluctuate (usually up) with demand — a scheme that has been used by stars like Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and Oasis, and which Smith bitterly calls a “scam.”

Soon after tickets went on sale, things began to go haywire. Fans complained of problems, and scalpers went as far as trading “aged” Ticketmaster accounts to get their hands on Cure seats. Then a screenshot ricocheted through social media showing that fees added $92 to an order of four $20 tickets. On March 15, 2023, Smith said he had asked Ticketmaster to justify those fees; the next day, he said the company had agreed to return up to $10 for each Verified Fan order. In a podcast interview last year, Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation, said the decision had cost the company a “million dollars or so.”

Speaking about it now, Smith still seethes over his interactions with the live behemoths.

“What sparked me was because they wouldn’t take me seriously. It’s as simple as that,” Smith said. “I was spoken to in a certain way by a certain individual. And something in me was like, what? You know, it’s like a ‘Run along, Sonny’ kind of moment.”

“And it just gradually escalated until I was thinking, ‘No, I’m not backing down. This resolves how I want it to resolve,’” he added. “In my weird view of the world, I thought because we were doing the shows, and we were who we were, that we had the upper hand.”

The episode went viral in part because it was so rare. In the heavily consolidated music industry today, virtually no artists at Smith’s level act as whistle-blowers. And Smith is still disappointed at the public silence that greeted him from other artists.

“People are terrified of upsetting Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” he said. “It’s really bizarre, actually, because the power of the artist, it’s the ultimate power.”

It also became a flashpoint in the long-building complaints over Live Nation’s extensive power in the concert business, which is now the focus of an antitrust suit filed by the Justice Department. The government has accused Live Nation of being an illegal monopoly whose business stifles competition and drives up prices for consumers.

In a statement, Ticketmaster said: “To the Cure’s credit, their ticket price was so much lower than typical that even the smallest fees set by venues didn’t make sense. We stepped in to help fans by refunding fees. And since then, we’ve actively monitored fees on lower priced tickets. When flags go off, some venues reduce fees, some leave them as is, and in some cases Ticketmaster has stepped in to cover a portion of the fees.”

The company also noted that most of its services fees are paid to venues. On the Cure’s tour, many of those venues were owned or operated by Live Nation.

The tour ended up being the Cure’s most successful ever, selling about $37.5 million in tickets in North America (it included legs in Europe and South America as well). Smith is also proud of the merchandise sales; by offering T-shirts for $25 instead of $50, he said, the Cure sold twice as many.

Yet he scoffs at a suggestion that his campaign was a victory. He called the episode a mere “skirmish,” and said that Ticketmaster’s refund did not fundamentally change anything about a system driven to maximize profit at the expense of fans.

“Live Nation were perceived to have caved in,” he said. “But their decision was made because it looked good. It was optics.” He added, with exasperation, “In the grand scheme of things, it’s like peanuts.”

Still, by challenging the system, Smith did inspire many artists to consider making changes to how they tour, said Kevin Erickson, the executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, an advocacy group.

“Robert did something incredible here,” Erickson said. “It has emboldened a whole lot of artists that he’s influenced, and they are talking more about these things, even if these are not conversations that have yet risen to the level of media coverage.”

Smith made clear that he had no regrets.

“In a small way, by understanding how we do what we do,” Smith said, “when we actually walk out onstage and I become that person who sings, I feel really happy about how we’ve got there.”

Friday, November 1, 2024

The Cure play Troxy London tonight

Setlist: Alone, And Nothing Is Forever, A Fragile Thing, Warsong, Drone:NoDrone, I Can Never Say Goodbye, All I Ever Am, Endsong 

Intermission 

Plainsong, Pictures of You, High, Lovesong, Burn, Fascination Street, A Night Like This, Push, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, Disintegration 

Encore 1: At Night, M, Secrets, Play for Today, A Forest

Encore 2: Lullaby, The Walk, Friday I'm in Love, Close to Me, Why Can't I Be You?, Boys Don't Cry

Watch the official Livestream here.

So happy Daniel got to do another one!

Troxy merch is up

More Cure at the BBC photos

From The Cure:

THANKS FOR HAVING US @BBCRADIO2 @JOWHILEY & @BBC6MUSIC  @HUWSTEPHENS
WATCH/LISTEN: bio.to/TheCureBBC










So happy that Roger is back!

Fun times at the BBC

Photos from the 6 Music Session

Vamberator's debut album is out

'Age of Loneliness', the debut album from Vamberator, the new band from Jem Tayle and Boris Williams, is out today.
https://vamberator.bandcamp.com/album/age-of-loneliness

Troxy times for tonight

From Richard Bellia:

THE CURE / TROXY 1st NOV 2024

DOORS 6PM 

ALBUM SHOW 8PM

OLD SONGS SHOW 9PM

EOS 11PM

AFTERSHOW UNTIL 2AM


From Troxy:




New interview with Robert

From NPR:

‘How it will end is how it will end,’ but The Cure isn’t over, yet

"I think I had a bit of a crisis of confidence, actually, through the last decade," Robert Smith says of the gap between Cure albums, "I sort of thought I'd written everything I had to write, but as it turns out, I haven't."

The Cure has been one of England’s most influential bands since the release of its debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, in 1979. Led by its only consistent member, Robert Smith, the group mixes dour-but-accessible post-punk with playful, even euphoric notes of pop and new-wave music. After a string of commercial and critical successes in the ’80s and early ’90s, The Cure’s output began slowing, only to dry up entirely after its 13th album, 2008’s 4:13 Dream. But the band kept headlining festivals, writing music and performing concerts, and even recorded a significant batch of songs in 2019 — the same year The Cure was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Still, there are 16 years between 4:13 Dream and the new record that dropped Friday. As suggested by its title, Songs of a Lost World, it’s thematically dark — in a 2021 interview, Smith teased its contents by dubbing it “very, very doom and gloom” — but it’s also sonically rich and inviting, often recalling the cohesiveness and sweeping beauty of 1989’s classic Disintegration.

In an interview for Morning Edition, Smith sat down to discuss the long gap between records, the Prince-style vault of unreleased Cure songs and his battles to keep ticket prices low at The Cure’s concerts. He also answers a question he dubs “a bit bleak” — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit like asking a question of the Pope and having him reply that it’s “a bit Catholic.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Stephen Thompson: As a greedy and entitled Cure fan, I have to ask: What took so long?

Robert Smith: There's no such thing as a greedy and entitled Cure fan.

I'm not sure, really. Obviously I've been fielding that question from various quarters — although not so much in interviews, just from people around me. Since the summer, I seem to have just decided that it needs to get done.

We recorded a lot of songs in 2019 and, then through COVID, I kind of got distracted and started working on some solo stuff. We started touring to get back into the groove and that ran through to pretty much the end of last year. And I suddenly thought, “Well, I'd probably better get something finished.”

I think the mistake I made was I was trying to get 30 songs all finished together, so they all somehow hung together. And I realized at the start of this year that that really wasn't going to happen. So I reduced it down to 20, and then I reduced it down 10, and then I finally emerged with eight that I thought worked together best. But I have left behind quite a few of my favorite songs, weirdly enough.

I wanted this album — the first one from those sessions — to be kind of a statement. It’s shorter than most Cure albums have been since we were releasing stuff on vinyl in the ‘80s — it comes in under 50 minutes. There's no real light — there's a little bit of light to throw the shade into relief. But it's pretty much exactly how I wanted it. So I'm very happy that it's done. But I am at a slight loss as to how it's taken 16 years to get here. The short answer is: I have no idea.

You've used a phrase in one interview where you promised/warned that this record would be “very doom and gloom.” You've said that “I Can Never Say Goodbye” is about the death of your brother Richard. Other songs are touching on death and loss and regret. How much is this a concept album about death and how did that affect the process of recording it?

A concept album about death? That didn’t really cross my mind. I think a sense of loss permeates the album. I think that’s slightly different to musing exclusively on death. And also the changing nature of reality. As you grow older, you do tend to feel like you're being left behind by the world. And sometimes it's a great feeling. I think we're kind of designed to welcome that idea of actually slowing down and seeing the world spinning away from us. But in other ways, having younger people around and an extended family, you start to see how dark things look for a younger generation. And I feel kind of slightly responsible, personally responsible.

I kind of know what the next album is already. I know what the next nine songs are because five of them have been sitting there living together. We've actually played three of them live. So they're “new songs” in inverted commas. These are actually songs that, I think, Cure fans have been expecting to emerge with definitive versions. They’ve been waiting for them for a long, long time, longer than 16 years in some cases.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but what is the next record? Is it thematically similar to this? Is that where you put all the joy?

No, the third one. In my mind, it's like a redemptive kind of arc. That's how I see it in terms of concepts. Mainly it's, like, notes pinned on my wall, reminding me what I should and shouldn't be doing. So it is a transitional record, the next one — depending on how it’s sequenced and what songs end up on it. There are four incredibly sad songs still to come and I'm tempted to try and marry those with some that are slightly more left-field for the next record, and then leave the third record for something that's very much more light and upbeat. That's my intention; whether I get there or not is another thing entirely.

You mentioned that most of these songs have been around for a really long time. In some cases, these songs are from 2010, 2011. Are you like Prince? Is there like a massive Cure vault?

There is, yeah. It's the only thing that stops us [from] releasing two albums a year because I have to write the words. And as I grow older, I find it very, very difficult to write words that I can sing honestly or sing emotionally.

I've been exploring the idea of… because we've never done a film soundtrack, I'm putting out feelers to actually use some of the music that we recorded — because there are probably upwards of 100 songs — to see if they could be used instrumentally. Even if I'm in it for another 100 years, I'm not going to write that many words!

So having concluded this album and half of the next one, I do feel more confident about my abilities again. I think I had a bit of a crisis of confidence, actually, through the last decade. I sort of thought I'd written everything I had to write, but as it turns out, I haven't.

Have you been surprised by the success of any of your songs? Do you have favorite Cure songs where you record it and you think, “People are going to love this?” Or do you get the feedback and you're like, “Well, I really thought people were going to connect with that” and maybe they didn't?

The others [in the band] would never know what I was going to sing until I sang it. So they'd be in the studio and they’d finished recording, and I’d occasionally throw in a few lines, just for rhythm and stuff. Then I’d do a vocal take, and that would be the moment when the band would sort of stand up and I could see that they're reacting to it. And that gave me an indication. “Just Like Heaven” happened like that. When I sang the words to “Friday I’m in Love,” everyone was going, “Oh, I rather like this.”

What’s more gratifying for me is when songs that people don't think will connect, but I hope do. When we go out and we play them on stage and they become fan favorites. That's actually much more satisfying to me as a writer and as a singer. Songs like “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and “Pictures of You” kind of bridge those two worlds. The obvious ones are the obvious ones: “Close to Me.” When we did that, I kind of knew that it was going to get played on the radio.

The way we work has changed. Where I'm aiming the songs, it’s not really for posterity.

I was certainly shocked to find “Alone” being played on the radio over the last month. I mean, I was genuinely taken aback. It got more airplay than some of our singles! I realize there is a desire for new Cure music — even though it's not really “new.” I think that's the strange thing about this whole project, is that we've played five of the eight songs on stage. In fact, we've played them at most of the 90 shows we've done over the last couple of years.

So you're looking to tour this record in late 2025 and, in recent years, I know you've battled with Ticketmaster in an attempt to keep prices low — like, $25 a ticket low — which is something when you're playing for hours the way you do. Is that rooted in a desire to give the audience a bang for its buck? Is it your punk roots showing?

It primarily stems from a show that I attended in the ‘70s, which is a David Bowie show on the Station to Station tour. A couple of us went up there and it cost a lot of money. In those days, I didn't have any money. We had to get up to town, we bought tickets, we go and have a couple of drinks — the whole thing costs much more than I actually had in my pocket. So I was horrified that — although he was great, he was absolutely fantastic — but I think he played for like an hour and that was it. And I was like, “What just happened?” We spent, like, three or four months talking about this and waiting for it, and then it's over. I didn't feel short-changed as much as just really sad. Because I wanted it twice as long. I wanted to hear more songs. It always stuck with me.

If you enjoy doing what you're doing, why don't you play for a bit longer? Because surely the people in front of you are enjoying it. I've realized over the years that… we've sometimes played too long, I think, but I think as we’ve grown older as a band, it allows us to explore more songs. It also allows us to create more of an atmosphere, create more of a show.

The Ticketmaster thing was never really a war. It's been misunderstood to some degree in that if it wasn't Ticketmaster, it’d be someone else. I was expressing my frustration with a system that tries to monetize everything and ruins everything in the process. It was just an example of fees that were being added and no one knew what they were. It was driven by the fact that I asked them privately — because we’ve agreed to a $25 ticket and it's costing people $51 — where's the other $26 going? Because it's not coming to me. The band isn't getting it. So who's getting it? So they would explain to me — in dribs and drabs, up to a point — where it was going. But always leaving this slightly gray area. Eventually, I think they just thought it was more trouble than it was worth, so they cut it. They reimbursed people.

I was slightly disheartened by the fact that not that many artists stood up at the same time as me and said, “Yes, hold on. This isn't right.” You know, bigger artists or artists whose voice really matters. Unfortunately, people run scared of big corporations nowadays, like Live Nation, Ticketmaster and Spotify. People are very afraid to criticize what they're doing. I suppose because I'm at the tail end of what we’re doing, I just don't care. I was kind of told to, like, “Run along, sonny” and “Shut up.” For one moment, I was back at school, thinking, “You can't talk to me like that.”

I think eventually it will change to some degree. I think that they'll have to be more transparent in what fees are. But it really doesn't address the bigger problem of how essentially everywhere you turn is being monetized. It's not the world that I grew up in, and I really don't like it.

How do you keep your voice intact? Because I have to say… first album in 16 years. I expected maybe a little bit of degradation in your voice. But it sounds the same. After nearly 50 years of putting out records, how do you treat your voice to get it to sound the same?

It's just genes, honestly. Genes are at the root of all the things I think are good and bad about me. I really don't do anything in particular. I have routines now when I'm going to sing, but really if I'm honest, I'm surprised when I open my mouth, what comes out. Because honestly, I shouldn't even be upright! Never mind sounding the same.

Turning 50 was a big deal for me. And I did address what I was doing wrong. And if I really wanted to get to 60, what I should probably do differently. I think my voice has benefited from that. I changed my lifestyle quite considerably and I think that probably I just feel better.

I think a lot of it is mental, as well. Because we play live and I walk out in front of people and I sing, and they respond. I feel like what's coming out of my mouth is good. It's connecting with people. And so that inspires you to keep singing. If my voice started to go, what could I do? It's just one of those things. So I'm really pleased it hasn't, but it’s going to at some point. I'm going to turn into Lee Marvin. It’s inevitable.

You've spent a lot of time in the archives during the pandemic revisiting your legacy, pulling out old songs. Given how much your music reflects on loss and endings, have you given thought to what you would want your final musical statement to be?

Good grief! This is a bit bleak, isn’t it?

Wow! Robert Smith from The Cure!

That’s why I’m hoping to get to the third, happier album! Just to throw everyone off! I've always maintained that I never really worried about legacy and posterity. I don't have children, so therefore I don’t have grandchildren. I think that what I do, it's just there. And how it will end is how it will end.

I don't think much of my life as a work of art in itself. What I've done with The Cure at different times has been very, very satisfying, and as a body of work, I'm really proud of it. But I don't honestly see it as an uninterrupted line from me at 17 years old to me now. It's had, like, four or five very natural breaks: changes in lineup, changes of mood. Being part of it hasn't been a constant. It's a strange thing to say, but I haven't been the same person in every iteration of The Cure, so I don't see it as one thing. I don't see my life as one thing. It’s weird, maybe there’s something the matter with me.

People, I think, have a vision of Robert Smith from The Cure, and maybe their imagination of your daily life is… I don't know, that you rise in the morning from a coffin or something.

I don’t rise in the morning from a coffin! Come on!

What is the most on-brand thing that you do in your daily life? And what in your daily life would most surprise people?

I suppose I look like I look, whether I'm onstage or off. I mean, my hair looks the same. My face looks the same. I wear black. I don't walk around in a pink, silk kimono at home. I listen to a lot of music, I play music. In that sense, I'm who you would expect me to be.

To give you an example of things you wouldn't expect: I've got sheep. There you go! I've got sheep that are all named. And I tend to them when they're sick. There you go — you’d never have guessed that, would you? That’s something different, yeah.

Robert Smith: Sheep Doctor.

Shepherd! Yeah. My own mental self-image is gradually changing. So I may well be growing a beard over the next couple of years.

All I Ever Am Lyric Video

Radio 2 In Concert & interview

Anonymous heART Project auction is up

The @heartresearchuk auction is up.


DRONE: NODRONE - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030793797


WARSONG - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030793091


ALL I EVER AM - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030794980


 A FRAGILE THING - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030793378


I CAN NEVER SAY GOODBYE - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030794239

Thursday, October 31, 2024

6 Music interview & live session

Troxy soundcheck

So while we were all listening to the Radio 2 concert, The Cure were doing a soundcheck at Troxy for tomorrow night's show:

Just Like Heaven, Warsong, Drone: NoDrone, A Fragile Thing, Secrets, M, Play For Today, Fascination Street, Alone, And Nothing Is Forever, A Fragile Thing, Warsong, Endsong.

Thanks, @liqueurband!

A Fragile Thing (Radio 2 In Concert)

I Can Never Say Goodbye (6 Music session)

6 Music session & Radio 2 video is up

For everyone in the UK, and anyone with a VPN that works with iPlayer, video of The Cure's BBC 6 Music session is up. In black and white at Robert's request.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0jzvv4n/6-music-session-the-cure-live


And here's the Radio 2 video.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0jzxdqn/radio-2-in-concert-the-cure

BBC schedule for today/tonight