Troxy ticket update

From The Cure:

WE ARE AWARE OF A SMALL NUMBER OF @TROXYLONDON TICKETS ON SECONDARY TICKET SITES AT INFLATED PRICES. CEASE-AND-DESIST LETTERS HAVE BEEN SENT TO @VIAGOGO & OTHERS ASKING FOR THESE TO BE REMOVED. PLEASE DO NOT BUY THESE TICKETS AS IT ONLY FEEDS THE BEAST 1/3 #leaveOutTheTout

TROXY TICKETS ARE NON-TRANSFERABLE. ANY TROXY TICKETS APPEARING ONLINE, ON ANY OTHER TICKET PROVIDER OTHER THAN @DICEFM, WILL NOT BE VALID. THE ORIGINAL PURCHASER MUST BE PRESENT, WITH ID, IN ORDER TO GAIN ENTRY.  2/3 #leaveOutTheTout

THE ONLY OFFICIAL RESALE IS VIA DICE’S ‘WAITLIST’ FUNCTION. THIS ALLOWS ORIGINAL TICKET HOLDERS WHO CAN NO LONGER ATTEND TO SELL THEIR TICKETS BACK TO DICE. THESE TICKETS CAN THEN BE RESOLD VIA THE WAITLIST AT FACE VALUE. 3/3 #leaveOutTheTout

I Can Never Say Goodbye clip

Teaser clip of I Can Never Say Goodbye is up on the Lost World site

https://www.songsofalost.world/

All codes have been sent

From The Cure:

All unique codes for The Cure’s  @TroxyLondon  show have now been sent. If you have NOT received yours, please check your spam or junk folders. For further assistance and to view the show’s terms and conditions, visit thecure.com/troxy/. Tickets go on sale at 3pm BST

Update:

Tickets for @TroxyLondon have now sold out! We saw huge demand for this intimate show and we hope those who  missed out are looking forward to the LIVE stream of the performance on YouTube on November 1st.

We ask however tempting that you do NOT buy tickets from secondary above face-value sites as checks will be in place at the venue and these tickets will be invalid. If you spot any tickets on these sites, please let us know via thecure.com/troxy/

5 stars for Lost World from Louder Than War

From Louder Than War:

The Cure Songs of a Lost World 

5/5

By John Robb

An album of elegiac, brooding masterpieces that deal with the heartbreak of loss with dark, masterful music dripping with melody, nuance and atmosphere.

As the late and great Bill Shankly once wisely remarked, ‘People say football’s a matter of life and death to me, and I say, ’listen, it’s more important than that.’ 

Bill knew a few things, but he may never have understood that pop culture at its best is even more important than life and death and even football, especially when it sings of both.

On their new album that sonically defies mortality and yet is steeped in the heartbreak of that mortality, The Cure, who feel like they have been in our lives forever like a monolithic backdrop, are coming to grips with the fading to the light of family and the post-punk generation as it steps into its own twilight zone with a powerful, brooding album that marks our own impermanence.

Few bands can deal with such profound shadows well and make it work without the cliches but then few bands are The Cure. The band have spent decades soundtracking the emotional and the personal and making it work in stadiums by making that personal public and into slices of precious art.

‘Songs Of A Lost World’ was written and recorded over the last decade plus with the spectre of death brooding in its shadows after the loss of Robert’s mother, father and ten year older brother, who turned him onto pop culture and took him to the Isle of White festival in 1970. The loss of close family members of Robert and other band members, plus sickness, brings all the pain, sadness, and nostalgia unleashed like a pandora’s box of emotions that are entwined with these songs. Heavy stuff like this is not to be run away from though and the Cure are perhaps the perfect vehicle to musically and lyrically reflect these runaway emotions. 

Over the decades, the band has soundtracked both life and death so perfectly. It’s like the way that generational godhead Bowie zigzagged from his effervescent sci-fi glam pop of the seventies to his own epitaph Blackstar album. Similarly, The Cure are post punk period sonic artists who can paint all these darker pictures and not shy away from life’s brief reality. 

To an outsider, the Cure may have had a somewhat schizoid musical journey from the intense genius of May 1982’s ‘Pornography’ album to the dayglo pop rush of their pop pomp, and yet both and all the other styles are crucial to their journey because, like the Beatles in the ’60s, the Cure work because, like all the best artists, they are free to embrace any style of music at whim and make it their own. 

It’s in this emotional and creative space that, after 16 years, they finally release their new album and it’s back to the dark energy Cure. Following its long and arduous journey through the rumour mill has been fascinating – once there was talk of a double and solo album or the two sides of the Cure coming out on different records. When I was in Rockfield Studios a couple of years ago, the staff there said the band had been in, and a dark and captivating album was getting micro mixed.

They were right. 

The 8 songs that have finally made the cut are beautiful slices of Smithsonian art. Slotting somewhere between ‘Pornography’ and ‘Disintegration’ but with a new Cure 3.0 take on their own inner space, they amp up the melancholy for yet another new version of the Cure with elegiac, brooding masterpieces that are dripping with melody, nuance, and atmosphere.

It’s been a long and strange journey for the band who we fell in with on those early Peel sessions and a debut album that was short sharp shocks of literate new wave pop/noir that seemed to place them in that angular space beyond Buzzcocks with fellow travellers Wire and early XTC. Then, as a harbinger for the way their music would shapeshift, the introspective, moodier next two albums, ‘Seventeen Seconds’ and ‘Faith’, framed them as a parallel southern outpost of the darker, brave new post-punk world of Joy Division before ‘Pornography’ went deep into the art of darkness with its clattering rhythms and stark soundscapes. 

It remains one of the great albums. 

No band could stay in that space for too long, though, and they imploded, temporarily losing charismatic bassist Simon Gallup with Robert moving to the delightful Syd Barrett lysergic pop and occupying eighties Top Of The Pops space without losing any of that quark, strangeness and charm that was always core to their genius.

During this phase, Simon Gallup rejoined, bringing his exquisite melodic bass lines back with him. The band got hairier and wilder as albums tumbled past. They somehow broke out of their bedsit constituency and became one of the biggest bands in the world. Their new stadium live sets were immaculate displays of musical prowess and captured all their many moods. They seemed to have become a touring machine, and in recent years, it seemed with little hope of a new album.

But here it is, and its eight songs are perfectly placed to take you on their dark star trip. It may not be the double album that people were hoping for, but value is all about the right stuff and not loads of stuff. The eight tracks pull you into a deeply personal space and into the eye of an emotional hurricane. All the classic Cure hallmarks are there, from that aching bass masterclass to the minimalistic and powerful drum clatter (the drum sounds are great on this album – truly apocalyptic!) to Robert’s spiralling guitars and the American former Bowie axeman Reeves Gabrels lead lines that fit so well into the very English Cure soup. Robert Smith’s newly acquired classical piano parts add a new flavour to the mix whilst astonishingly, his pure voice is untainted by the years and has remained a constant since those long-lost days of the late seventies.

Opening up with ‘Alone’ and its apocalyptic imagery, the passage of time and the temporary nature of existence and permanence is all over this album. The track is the first ‘single’ from the album, and the seven minute slice of pounding melancholy floats way above the bickering pop space. It’s a post radio single that understands that music exists beyond the constraints of media constraints and floats in its own ether in the 21st century and exists on its own emotional terms. 

Based on ‘Dregs’ – the Ernest Dowson poem, this is Smith going in deep, it’s like the classic Cure bleak house of ‘Pornography’ perhaps one of the most harrowing albums ever recorded with the widescreen vistas of ‘Disintegration’ creating a new terrain that ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ visits. A perfect opener that, like all the songs, thrives on its long intro demanding patience as it pulls you into its swirling, pounding emotional skree. 

‘A Fragile Thing’ deals with the fragility of love and the inevitable end – an emotional space sat opposite to the rictus grin of most pop music but somehow, this is a pop music on its own terms, complete with a hook and a glimmer of hope in its lyrics of yearning for love until the very end. In all of pop’s endless posturing, the key inspirational pillars, like existence itself, always come back to sex, love and death and the music to capture it.

‘Warsong’ is a heavy workout that is hypnotic in its ambition, darkness and regret as Robert’s voice is full of emotion and despair as he sings beautifully of relationships and, perhaps, it can also be extrapolated as soundtracking the endless chaos of the world at large and the human need to fight driving us as much as the need for love. ‘Drone Nodrone’ is driven by prowling bass chords and somehow nods back to the earliest Cure in its shapeshifting shadows with the kind of chorus that made ‘Killing An Arab’ the band’s first crossover slice of pop/noir. 

‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ is the heart of the album, a song full of despair and the emotional angst at watching a loved one die in front of you with the attendant countdown of the breaths combined with the flailing inevitable and then the strange peace and emptiness of death as life ebbs from a close one. Musically and lyrically, the song captures that moment when someone who was once so alive and vibrant, perhaps like Robert’s older brother, slips away. It’s heartbreaking stuff built around Robert’s new skills as a classical piano player and a song of raw emotional honesty and power that it feels is perhaps what post-punk and The Cure have spent decades working towards. Answering the big generational questions like how do you deal with the temporary nature of existence and the heartbreak of life in groundbreaking music with none of the cliches? This was a journey we were all on after punk turned our heads, and few have made it to this point as creatively powerful as this. Now, we face our own mortality as the clocks tick tock away. 

Some of the coolest moments on the album are where the band unzip their sound and recalibrate them in a different order, ‘All I Ever Am’ is another exquisite ebb and flow of instrumentation with the bass playing a fucked up lead line like a 21sct century take on ‘All Cats Are Grey’ over a pulsating string synth section and thundering shattered drum rhythms – it’s a hypnotic instrumental to and fro with that post punk maxim of every instrument playing lead and building a base for the aching and yet dark pop/noir vocal to emote in.

‘Endsong’ is perhaps the bleakest piece of pop culture poetry since Ian Curtis and Joy Division. A crescendo clattering drum laments about the end of everything and the shadowy grim reaper. It was always going to be the curtain call on an album that deals with a turbulent time in Smith’s life. ‘The future’s uncertain and the end is always near’, as Jim Morrison once sang – it’s the perfect gothic lament and so is Endsong and whilst the Cure were never Goth or certainly never Goff, they were always gothic in their grandeur and their dealing with the darkest shadows and turning them into stunning slices of great pop art. 

For years we waited for the follow up to Pornography whilst enjoying and understanding all their curveballs and tangents. We surfed the pop period and loved the lysergic wonk of it all, gorged on the beauty and sadness of Disintegration, but here we are with a bleak album that dares to own up to the most profound truths in life with a stark yet melodic powerful music and those deeply personal gorgeous vocals.

Songs Of A Lost World is a stunning work that could be their own end song but we know the Cure better than that and there are more twists and turns to come… 

New UltraCures are sold out

New Simon signature bass

 From Michael Ciravolo at Schecter:

new Schecter Simon Gallup Limited Edition Signature Edition Bass ⚜️

https://www.schecterguitars.com/product/17473

Last Reminder

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4 stars for Lost World from Mojo

From Mojo:

The Cure Songs Of A Lost World Review: An audaciously bleak, beautiful journey

Haunted by bereavement, The Cure’s first album in 16 years finds Robert Smith coming to terms with mortality in majestic style.

by Victoria Segal 

★★★★

There is no blue plaque at The Railway in Crawley, no photographs celebrating the most culturally significant moment in the pub’s history: the first official gig by The Cure (formerly Easy Cure) in 1978. Yet The Rocket has once again become embroiled in The Cure’s epic story. On September 13, a dark poster appeared outside, reading “Songs Of A Lost World” and a date: “I. XI. MMXXIV.”

Sixteen years after the release of 4:13 Dream, The Cure’s long-promised 14th album is finally a reality, and it’s clear now why The Cure launched it at their point of origin. Songs Of A Lost World is a record about endings, about loss and grief, about the compromises and confusions that cling to a person as they move through their lives, warping and distorting their original intentions. There is real poignancy in looking back to a time and place where life was still a clean slate, before you find yourself – as Smith does on the closing track, Endsong – looking up at the sky and wondering where you’ve gone. Maybe it does matter if we all die, after all.

When these songs first emerged, on the European leg of 2022’s Shows Of A Lost World tour, the band would open and close their main set the same way: with Alone, its opening line “This is the end of every song we sing,”; and Endsong, which finishes “Left alone with nothing / The end of every song / Nothing.”

The new album follows this sequencing, a kind of dust-to-dust musical palindrome that locks the album into its fate, exits and entrances blocked. Death and disillusionment are hardly unusual Cure elements, but these eight songs have the same concentrated intensity as 1989’s Disintegration, a record similarly preoccupied with broken dreams, ebbing potential, mortality. That record was a product of Smith’s horror at turning 30, then an unimaginable milestone of decay. In 2024, it’s inevitable that falling apart means something very different. “Before I used to write about stuff that I thought I understood,” said Smith in 2019. “Now I know I understand it.”

That year, Smith revealed he had recently lost his father, his mother and his older brother Richard, the latter instrumental in introducing him to Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart and his companion in an earlier musical venture, The Crawley Goat Band. Richard lived in Poland for years; harrowing SOALW song I Can Never Say Goodbye was first played on October 22, 2022, at Krakow’s Tauron Arena. It’s the song at the eye of the album’s emotional storm, Smith singing “Something wicked this way comes / To steal away my brother’s life”.

On a record so alert to the cataclysmic effects of mortality, it’s remarkable how fundamentally unchanged Smith’s voice is, uncracked into a Bob Dylan croak or plunged to new Leonard Cohen depths. Yet there’s no kittenish levity on this record, nothing approaching a pop song – no equivalent of Disintegration’s spidery Lullaby to break the mood. The Never Enough grooves of the spectacular Drone slide closest to a gear-change, but even there, the ground is unsteady. “I’m breaking up again,” sings Smith. Disintegration, in other words, with all its oceanic expanses, its cold glittering light.

Opener Alone is the first station on the album’s audaciously bleak, beautiful journey, inspired by tubercular Victorian poet Ernest Dowson, and his poem Dregs: “The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof / (This is the end of every song man sings!)” It’s a telling addition to Smith’s lace-edged, blood-speckled treasury of Poe, Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

If Alone’s pain is couched in universal terms, And Nothing Lasts Forever comes from a very specific set of circumstances, “a promise I made to someone that I would be with them when they died,” Smith writes in a note sent to reviewers. “But for reasons beyond my control, I didn’t keep that promise. It upset me dreadfully.” There’s a painful, escalating catch in Smith’s phrasing, twisting the opulent backing into something more desperate, the light of an implacable pink moon just detectable in the piano.

Death is at the core of Songs Of A Lost World, but it’s not the only loss. The torrential dialogue of A Fragile Thing rolls in the deepest romantic gloom – “‘Every time you kiss me I could cry,’ she said” – while Warsong, opening with a martial drone reminiscent of Disintegration-era rarity, Pirate Ships, is flooded with deep emotional water.

Another kind of loss explored by SOALW is loss of self, a concept refracted in the crunched-spine funk of Drone: Nodrone, inspired, says Smith, by a drone that flew over his garden, throwing him into a confusion of doubt. Was he being spied on, or not? Smith doesn’t know what to think, and not knowing what to think is almost worse than being watched. Yet it’s also a song about not being sure who you are any more – even if your identity, your image, seems as to be as solid as Smith’s.

All I Ever Am, meanwhile, pushes the rock star towards the nightmare of a “dark and empty stage,” an unfillable void. Smith talks about a “strange feeling of dissociation”, which peaks in Endsong’s grand celestial collapse, recorded around the 50th anniversary of the moon landings and testament to Smith’s life-long stargazing tendencies. “I was outside looking up and back a lot that summer, lamenting age and an increasingly broken world, and always seemed to return to the same two questions; where did that old world go and where did I go?”

Endsong might feel like an asteroid-sized, extinction-event full-stop, but it’s not impossible that The Cure could simply be entering another phase in their remarkable career. The album artwork looks like an ancient stone head, an Atlantis relic, its features so worn away they are barely visible. Yet it’s a 1975 piece by the Slovenian sculptor Janez Pirnat, and the face could just as easily be emerging from the stone as vanishing back into it.

While The Cure are fortunate to have a regenerating fanbase - a generation of fans at 2023 shows who’d never been alive for the real-time release of a new album - the audience who have grown up with them will be staring down the barrel of the same gun as Smith, facing similar griefs, uncertainties, questions. With Songs Of A Lost World, The Cure, often seen as the soundtrack to an eternally doomy adolescence, might just be coming of age.

Robert's 5 year plan

From Consequence:

The Cure’s Robert Smith has revealed he has a time window in mind for his band’s retirement. In a lengthy interview with Matt Everitt published on the group’s official website, Smith explained his final plans for The Cure revolve around the respective 50th anniversary celebrations of the group in 2028 and their debut album in 2029.

The final lap will begin with The Cure’s next world tour, which Smith aims to start “autumn next year” after completing the follow-up to their upcoming album, Songs of a Lost World. After that, the band will play “quite regularly” through their 50th anniversary, which they’ll also mark with a previously teased documentary film.

“Seriously, I have to finish the second album,” Smith told Everitt. “We were going to play festivals next year, but a couple weeks ago, I decided that we weren’t going to play anything next summer. The next time we go out on stage will be autumn next year.”

He continued, “But then we’ll probably be playing quite regularly through until the next anniversary — the 2028 anniversary that’s just looming on the horizon. The 2018 one, I started to think about in late 2016, thinking, ‘I’ve got a year and a half, it’s easy!’ And I still didn’t manage to get there in time. Now, I’m starting to think, ‘2028, I must get things in order;’ so [that’s] the documentary film and various other things like that.”

“I’m 70 in 2029, and that’s the 50th anniversary of the first Cure album [Three Imaginary Boys],” Smith said. “If I make it that far, that’s it. In the intervening time, I’d like to include playing concerts as part of the overall plan of what we’re going to do. I’ve loved it; the last 10 years of playing shows have been the best 10 years of being in the band. It pisses all over the other 30-odd years! It’s been great.”

Smith added that the band has felt a sense of “freedom” while touring over the past several years without a new album because they were able to draw from their extensive catalog.

“We’ve turned into a live band that draws on the catalog,” he said. “We can go out and play shows, and we can play two hours of 30 songs and completely different songs each night.”

Brief interview with Simon

More about the new UltraCures

From Music Radar:

“Each instrument comes with a custom hardshell case, a signed COA from Robert Smith and directly supports life-saving cancer research”: Schecter and the Cure’s Robert Smith join forces for charity with the release of the Shellflower UltraCure

By Jonathan Horsley

This limited edition run comprises an UltraCure electric guitar and its 30" scale six-string bass sibling, and $500 from the sale of each instrument goes to the World Cancer Research Fund

The UltraCure and UltraCure VI are finished with a black-and-white “Shellflower” graphic, courtesy of Bunny Lake Designs, and each guitar sold will raise $500 for the cancer charity, with Smith and Schecter both donating $250 each.

Schecter’s shipping these super-collectible six-strings in a custom hardshell guitar case, inside which you will find a certificate of authenticity, signed by Smith, and one very rare electric guitar. They are not making many of these.

There will be just 50 of the UltraCure standard electric guitars, with 25 of the UltraCure VI for those wanting to take their sound down an octave. Through a clean amp, with a splash of reverb and some movement and depth from a chorus pedal, the UltraCure VI should give you one heady tone.

Like the Fender Electric VI, it’s technically a bass guitar but no one can really commit to calling it that – it feels more like a hybrid.

Smith’s UltraCure VI even draws some inspiration from the Jaguar, with a trio of slider switches to turn each pickup on and off, and the pickups themselves as Seymour Duncan Jaguar single-coils, with the middle pickup reverse-wound. Tone and volume controls are on-hand to dial in a sound.

The body is solid mahogany, the neck three-piece maple, reinforced with carbon fibre rods to deal with all that extra string tension. With a short 30” scale it will be noticeably more approachable for guitarists who otherwise might find a bass unwieldy.

More conventional, though with an offset shape and spec that is anything but, the UltraCure is a dual-humbucker electric with a Bigsby vibrato and some very cool details, sharing many specs as its longer-scaled sibling.

Again, we’ve got the mahogany body, the three-piece maple neck, the rosewood fingerboard with the MOP block inlays. The neck profile is a comfortable thin C shape. There are 24 jumbo frets.

But with a pair of Schecter’s PAF-alike USA Route-57 humbuckers it has a very different voice. These are selected by a three-way toggle switch, and controlled by individual pickup volume controls and a master tone knob mounted on the lower horn. Tone-wise, this is ballpark Gibson-with-a-Bigsby, and that is something to get excited about.

These special edition models are available now, are priced $1,500, and will raise money for a very good cause. For more details on the Robert Smith “Shellflower” UltraCure and and UltraCure VI, head over to Schecter.

Simon at Pride of Andover Awards

From Love Andover:

Pride of Andover Awards tonight. Ben chatted with legendary bassist Simon Gallup of the Cure who is hosting this evening. Listen to Andover Radio tomorrow for the exclusive interview. 

Thanks Andreas 

New UltraCures

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9/10 for Lost World from Clash

From Clash:

The Cure – Songs Of A Lost World

A grand, heart-breaking statement...

Sometimes, fans can wait so long for something that when it’s finally in their hands – or ears, in this case – they are filled with a sense of disbelief. After 16 years, British figureheads The Cure have finally delivered a follow-up to their last full-length, ‘4:13 Dream’. They’ve hardly been resting on their laurels during this time. The band has headlined the likes of Glastonbury, celebrated their 40th anniversary, and gone around the world over and over, playing mammoth sets. Simply put, followers of the gloomy outfit have not been starved of a chance to enjoy The Cure’s singular back catalogue in a live setting. Still, the thirst for fresh material has only grown and grown. There was an inkling in Cureheads’ hearts that frontman Robert Smith still had another grand, heart-breaking statement in him… and they weren’t wrong.

With much of the material being road-tested on the group’s 2022-2023 ‘Shows Of A Lost World’, it was clear that the group was leaning back into the grand, introspective sound that had cemented their critical legacy. While Smith has a genius knack for creating dizzying pop songs, it’s his moody epics and tear inducing lyrics that have helped create legions of eternally loyal fans over the decades. With the songwriter sadly losing both his parents and brother in the intervening years since ‘4:13 Dream,’ Smith’s fascination with loss, love, and time has now found new levels of potency.

So, is ‘Songs of a Lost World’ worth the wait? That’s a resounding yes from us.

From the off, it’s clear The Cure’s 14th album is one of their most emotionally raw. At eight songs, albeit long ones, it’s their most cohesive set since 2000’s ‘Bloodflowers’ and their most moving since 1992’s ‘Wish’. By working with producer/Cure FOH sound man Paul Corkett, Smith has opted for a bruising live sound, Simon Gallup’s snarling bass tones, and drummer Jason Cooper’s snare hits jumping out the speakers. While some may prefer the more hazy production of earlier material, there’s a directness to the sonics that matches the gut-wrenching honesty of the material. This is a band (mostly) in their 60s dealing with all the emotional baggage they’ve accrued over the past decade and a half. It has a right to grab your attention.

Our first taster from the album was the opener, ‘Alone’, it still stands as a perfect vibe-setting number for the album. Reminiscent of the outfit’s ‘Disintegration’ era, the band builds a mood for over three minutes before Smith enters the picture, his voice unchanged since the 80s.  With imagery of birds falling from the sky and bitter dregs, it’s apparent that we’re not getting another ‘Friday I’m in Love’ on this album. That’s not to say there isn’t beauty to be found. The following ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ is gorgeously wistful, Roger O’Donnell’s sparkling keys adding sweetness to Smith’s tale of loss. It’s classic Cure and really captures what makes the band so unique. A command of shadow and light.

The icy ‘A Fragile Thing’ may be the closest the album gets to producing a ‘pop’ number. Matching the spirit of the group’s mid-90s b-sides, the track feels like an anti ‘Lovesong,’ Smith’s conversational vocal delivery dropping harsh truths about how love and commitment can be a blessing and curse. ‘Warsong’ sees The Cure at their most mighty in decades, guitarist Reeves Gabrels unleashing wailing guitars as Smith roars about the poisoning effect of hatred and pride. Especially poignant with the current geopolitical issues.

‘Drone: No Drone’ sees the welcome return of what this reviewer likes to call ‘Sassy Smith’ mode. During these moments – see also ‘Wendy Time,’ ‘Never Enough‘ – the messy-haired icon spits lyrics over a funky beat with a tangible level of irritability. It’s a fun reprieve from the emotional heft of its surrounding tracks and gets the head bopping. A good thing, too, as the following ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ deals directly with the loss of Smith’s older brother Richard. A stately affair, the track is bound to resonate with those who’ve felt the world-changing effect of grief, Smith delivering his best vocals on the record.

The previously unheard ‘All I Ever Am’ makes for a welcome surprise, Gallups’ zippy bassline leading the charge on SOALW’s most uptempo moment. Sure, it’s still focused on memories and regret, but it’s a bit of a banger at the same time, Smith’s baritone bass laying down some serious licks. Before we know it, we come to the aptly titled closer ‘Endsong,’ arguably the number that made the biggest impression when aired live a few years ago. With a length of 10:23, it’s clear listeners are in for something epic, and boy, the band delivers.

Sounding melancholic and majestic as only The Cure can, ‘Endsong’ is a behemoth of emotion. A thick wall of tribal drums and shrieking guitars creates an apocalyptic tone, only reinforced by Smith’s mention of ‘blood red moons’ and repeated refrain of “It’s all gone.” It quickly joins the ranks of other great Cure closers, such as ‘Sinking’ and ‘Bloodflowers.‘ It sounds enormous and best captures SOALW’s spirit. There is no escaping the passing of time. 

The old idiom ‘Be careful what you wish for’ is often applied to veteran groups dropping a new album but definitely not here. With ‘Songs Of A Lost World,’ The Cure has not only produced something worth the wait but added another classic to their already sterling catalogue. This is a late-career gem from one of the world’s most idiosyncratic acts.

With a sense of finality running through the LP, it was fair to assume that this may indeed be the end of The Cure’s story. However, as fans know, Robert Smith’s future plans are ever-shifting and a recent interview has revealed another album is almost complete. Onwards then! 

9/10

Words: Sam Walker-Smart

Spotify Fans First picture disc

Songs of a Lost World Spotify Fans First picture disc up in the Cure Shop.

Songs that match the mood of SoaLW

From Brooklyn Vegan:

Robert Smith picks 1 song from every Cure album that matches the mood of 'Songs of a Lost World'

Bill Pearis

Near the end of the 100-minute video interview with Robert Smith that was posted to The Cure‘s Songs of a Lost World website over the weekend, the BBC radio DJ (and former Menswear drummer) Matt Everitt asks “What are your 10 favorite Cure songs off the top of your head and why?” Robert Smith rolls his eyes, exasperated, and says “There’s no such thing as my 10 favorite Cure songs. If I answer now I’d change it halfway though.”

Robert Smith does make a counter offer, though. “If I was to answer the question honestly, and I picked a song from each album, it would reflect the songs that I would’ve liked to have written for this album.” Here’s that list, one song from all 13 Cure albums that Robert Smith thinks fits the mood of Songs of a Lost World:

“Three Imaginary Boys” (from Three Imaginary Boys): “It’s a song I’d be happy with now. It still resonates with me.”

“At Night” (from Seventeen Seconds): “We play that a lot live. It has the same kind of mood as this album, it would fit quite happily on this album.

“Faith” (from Faith): “When I wrote that I remember thinking ‘Ahhh, I can write songs!’ It was actually the first song I was really, really proud of. There’s not much to it but there’s something about it. It was everything I wanted it to be. I could’ve given up after I wrote ‘Faith,’ I proved to myself that I can do it.”

“Cold” (from Pornography): “We’ve been playing that one a lot live. It would fit on this album, mood and musically.”

“The Top” (from The Top): “Finding a song on The Top is difficult…’The Top’ would work, that’s a weird song.”

“Sinking” (from The Head on the Door): “Again, a bit of doom and gloom…but the whole album’s a bit more bright and breezy.”

“If Only Tonight We Could Sleep” (from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me): “That’s another one we’ve played a lot recently. There’s a lovely mood to it when it’s played well.”

“Untitled” (Disintegration): “That is one of my favorite Cure songs. I like that I didn’t title it! (Laughs) I had the courage to not bother to think of a title.”

“To Wish Impossible Things” (from Wish): “That’s another one of my favorite Cure songs. We never play it, I don’t know why [last play was Coachella 2009] but that would fit happily — or unhappily — on this album.”

“Treasure” (from Wild Mood Swings): “Oh god this is difficult,” Robert Smith said, initially picking “One” before changing his mind. “No, ‘Treasure,’ actually. That was inspired by loss, by [English poet) Christina Rossetti, by someone else’s words.”

“Last Day of Summer” (from Bloodflowers): “That’s become a favorite. I was never quite sure about it as a song but I like it now.”

“Before Three” (from The Cure): “Now it gets tricky. [The Cure] is my least favorite album that we’ve made. The only album that I really don’t think works.”

“The Hungry Ghost” (from 4:13 Dream): “It wouldn’t fit on this album, but I do like it. It’s about how people are consumed by wanting more and more and more, including me.”

With that Robert says, laughing, “That’s it, my entire life flashing before my eyes. I’m going to keel over.” 

Songs of a Lost World is out November 1.

Robert and Matt Everitt

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£16,683 raised for heart research

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Video interview with Robert

The 1 hour and 42 minutes video interview with Robert has been posted to the Lost World website.

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Sunday Times article

From The Sunday Times:

The Cure’s Robert Smith: ‘Ticket pricing is a scam. It’s driven by greed’

The singer is back with the band’s first album in 16 years. In a rare interview, he holds forth on touring, grief and why he’s going to call it a day at 70

Jonathan Dean

The first thing you notice about Robert Smith is that uniform of his — wild hair, black clobber, lipstick. It is a look he has worn since the 1980s when the Cure became a cult and also achieved chart success. That is what you expect from him, but spend any time with Smith and what you will remember most is the man’s smile. It is generous, one that rather flies in the face of his band’s well-trodden image as being about as fun as a funeral, of their frontman being the gothic prince of all darkness.

“Well, I don’t read by candlelight,” he says with a grin, well aware of the image people have. “Yet I do spend a lot of time walking outside in the dark, which is in character. But it cannot all be doom and gloom — you need some light and dark.”

Smith, 65, is glorious company — the personification of that light and dark. I met him a few years ago and was struck by his warmth and wit. Back then he was writing the Cure’s new album, their first in 16 years, and I was aghast by his candour about depression and inadequacy. Now that record, Songs of a Lost World, is here and it is clear he was simply processing a lot.

Songs of a Lost World begins with Alone, which tackles planetary demise, features at least two songs about the deaths of people close to the singer and one called Warsong that, according to Smith, is “the most dismal song on the album — but it’s got a great guitar solo”. 

Forget The Lovecats or the 1990s school-disco staple Friday I’m in Love. Think, instead, of the sprawling melancholia of the albums Disintegration or Pornography for the back-catalogue benchmark of how this marvel sounds. It is eight tracks of lushly orchestral despair, written by a man struggling to figure out his place in a changed world. One song details how upset he was when someone flew a drone over his garden. “I was in my pants.”

Smith has been teasing a new record for years. “It’s drifted in and out of my life,” he says in a video interview he recorded for the label at Abbey Road a few weeks ago, admitting entire alternative albums have been binned. Still, the Cure are arguably more popular than ever, with a tour — 90 dates to more than 1.3 million fans— that peaked at Glastonbury in 2019. Smith planned to make a record for the 40th anniversary of the band in 2018, but that tour got in the way. And then there was the pandemic.

“I read War and Peace,” he says, beaming, about lockdown. “Everyone always says they’re going to read it, so I did.” Did he enjoy it? “I didn’t really.” He actually liked moments of lockdown; there were no planes and birds flew in the sky. But there was also, of course, loss. Smith’s parents had already died but “all my aunts and uncles died in care homes …” He sighs. In the time he has taken to make a new album, most of the people close to him have gone. No wonder Songs of a Lost World is a torrent of tumult — deeply personal, deeply moving.

“Our songs always had a fear of mortality,” he says. “I don’t feel my age at all but I’m aware of it and when you get older that fear becomes more real. Death becomes more everyday. When you are younger you romanticise death, but then it happens to your family and friends. I am a different person to the last record and I wanted to put that across. It can be trite. People could say, ‘Oh, we’re all going to die — surprise me!’ But I try to find some emotional connection to that idea.”

He more than succeeds. The album standout And Nothing Is Forever has the lyrics: “Promise you’ll be with me in the end/ say we’ll be together/ that you won’t forget.” It is about a promise that Smith made to someone who was very ill that he would be at their side when they died, but he was not. “It upset me,” he says. “So I thought that, by memorialising it, it would make things easier. And, yes, the person who it’s about would be happy with the song, I think.”

Then there is I Could Never Say Goodbye — about his beloved elder brother, Richard, who died suddenly some years ago. “He taught me everything when I was younger,” Smith says. “There was an enormous outpouring of emotion when he died, of words, music, painting. And this is a simple narrative of what happened the night he died. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It helped me enormously.”

Smith was born in 1959 — the third of four children. He mostly grew up in Crawley in Sussex. When he was seven Richard taught him his first guitar chords and Smith played in bands from his early teens. The Cure were formed in 1978. He loved Nick Drake, wanted to be Jimi Hendrix and was swept up by punk.

When Smith was 19 he went to see David Bowie play Earls Court. The men would later become friends, but what happened that night informed who Smith became. Bowie played for only 42 minutes and Smith was furious — he told himself that if he ever found himself in Bowie’s position, he would always do more for his fans and, as such, the Cure’s gigs run for hours. “I’d hate not to be able to justify myself to that 19-year-old,” Smith says.

This desire to do the right thing extends to the hot topic of tickets and how much firms like Ticketmaster and bands like Oasis charge fans. Last year, in an unusual move for an artist, Smith set prices for a US tour and then took Ticketmaster to task over the fees they had added, making the company refund punters.

“I was shocked by how much profit is made,” Smith says of modern ticketing. “I thought, ‘We don’t need to make all this money.’ My fights with the label have all been about how we can price things lower. The only reason you’d charge more for a gig is if you were worried that it was the last time you would be able to sell a T-shirt.

“But if you had the self-belief that you’re still going to be here in a year’s time, you’d want the show to be great so people come back. You don’t want to charge as much as the market will let you. If people save on the tickets, they buy beer or merch. There is goodwill, they will come back next time. It is a self-fulfilling good vibe and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it.

“It was easy to set ticket prices, but you need to be pig-headed. We didn’t allow dynamic pricing because it’s a scam that would disappear if every artist said, ‘I don’t want that!’ But most artists hide behind management. ‘Oh, we didn’t know,’ they say. They all know. If they say they do not, they’re either f***ing stupid or lying. It’s just driven by greed.”

He pauses and comes back to Songs of a Lost World and its inherent, questioning gloom. “The world is falling apart,” he says of its themes. “It’s insane. It’s greed, inequality, monetisation. I’ve realised some of my reactions to the modern world are a bit extreme, that I’m becoming an old grouch and that it’s easy to tip over to talking about the fond memories of a world that’s disappeared … but there are moments I just want to leave the front door shut.”

He’s even fallen out of love with his beloved football (he supports Queen’s Park Rangers). “It’s become about branding, sponsorship and betting — it’s just hair, tattoos and selling stuff.” He smiles and admits, “This is really curmudgeonly,” doing an impression of Victor Meldrew.

Smith plans to take the Cure on tour towards the end of next year and keep playing shows until 2028 — which will be the 50th anniversary of the band. “I’m 70 in 2029,” he says. “And that’s it, that really is it. If I make it that far, that’s it.”

“I’ve led a very privileged life,” he continues, sweetly, softly startled. “I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been. I’m still doing what I always wanted but the fact I’m still upright is probably the best thing about being me because there have been points where I didn’t think I would hit 30, 40, 50. My mind doesn’t function with the same acuity it once had, but I’m much more relaxed and easier to get on with.”

How does he know? He grins. “Because people smile at me more than they used to."

Songs of a Lost World is out on November 1