First, praise to The Cure for keeping concert costs reasonable, especially in the age of dynamic pricing, platinum seating, and nebulous service fees that often equal or exceed the cost of the ticket. Although night one was already sold out and the second night was close to sold out when I started looking for tickets, tickets were still selling and reselling for their original price due to a request by Robert Smith to keep them at face value (Our seats were in the lower level, 110 DD 3 and 4). Advance scouting also revealed that t-shirts would be $25 when bands routinely sell tour shirts for $40-$50 or more. Other items were similarly in line: hoodies were $50 and cloth bags with the tour dates were $15. I built in some extra time to get through the merch line since I was fulfilling multiple t-shirt requests. I found everything for everyone except the one thing I wanted, so we went through the line of another merchandise stand. The second pass gave me the shirt I wanted.
We missed some of opener The Twilight Sad’s set but at least we heard everything clearly from the line. Prior to our show, I didn’t know a thing about them but their name. Having heard them live, I am intrigued. I describe them as a cross between The Cure and The Smiths with pinches of noise thrown in here and there. Check out “There’s a Girl in the Corner” if you are unfamiliar with them.
The Cure opened with “Alone,” the first of five tracks from their upcoming studio release Songs of a Lost World. The last studio album by The Cure that I really enjoyed is Bloodflowers (2000). The Cure (2004) was uneven and 4:13 Dream (2008) has never done much for me beyond the immaculate “Underneath the Stars.” Looking at the tour stats, other than four plays of “The Hungry Ghost” from 4:13 Dream, neither record has received any attention on the tour. Given my feelings about those previous two albums, I had managed expectations for the new material. “Alone” raised my hopes. The first words Robert Smith sang were, ironically, “This is the end.” From there, he mused about the “hopes and dreams” that “are gone.” “Where did it go?” he sang repeatedly at the conclusion of the song. Although I peeked at previous setlists from the tour, I did not listen to any songs I was unfamiliar with. Instead of thinking I might politely listen to the new songs that we would surely hear, I found myself anticipating them and wondering what else I might discover.
Since this was new material, I couldn’t yet gauge how the band sounded tonight. “Pictures of You” came next. The band sounded great, just as good as the previous two times I saw them: The 2004 Curiosa Festival, also in Atlanta, and the 2007 Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Florida. “A Fragile Thing,” another new song, came next. A moody and mid-tempo track about relationships, it’s not quite as good as “Alone,” but it is solid. I’ve loved “A Night Like This” ever since I heard it on the live Show (1993). Dig that guitar solo. Their most well-known hit “Lovesong” was next. The third new track “And Nothing is Forever” followed. Like a lot of Cure songs, “Nothing is Forever” focuses on endings, passings, dreams gone or not quite realized, the time and opportunities that somehow slip away. “Nothing is Forever” offers companionship, relationships, the presence of the other as a possible solution. As Smith offers, “My world has grown old / but if doesn’t really matter / if you say we’ll be together.” “Three Imaginary Boys” from their 1979 debut and the blistering “Burn” from The Crow soundtrack finished off the first half of the main set.
The second half of the first set included “A Strange Day,” “Charlotte Sometimes,” and “Push.” The next songs, “Primary” and “39,” were only played five times each on this thirty-five-date leg of the tour. “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” followed and the main set ended appropriately enough with “Endsong,” an approximately ten-and-a-half-minute exploration of loss, enduring expired dreams, and living past what and who you love. At first, I wondered how in the world I could possibly not have heard this stunning song until now. Later, I discovered it’s another of the new songs, the fourth, from Songs of a Lost World. The vocals don’t appear until the final four minutes. Smith sings, “And I’m outside in the dark / wondering how I got so old,” and realizes, “No hopes, no dreams, no world / No, I don’t belong.” “It’s all gone, it’s all gone / I will lose myself in time / It won’t be long,” he concludes. Somewhere I read the quote “Time is a cruel motherfucker,” and it is. We all want something we love to last beyond us.
With that, the main set was over. Encore one kicked off with the fifth and final new song, “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” which Smith says is about the passing of family members. In fact, one of the lines is “Something wicked this way comes / to steal away my brother’s life.” As the song played, the backdrop showed an empty Ferris wheel spinning in the dark. Devastating. After that the Cure launched into “It Can Never Be the Same,” an unreleased song from the 4:13 Dream sessions. Excellent. Why this didn’t make the 4:13 record I have no idea. The first encore finished with “Shake Dog Shake,” “One Hundred Years,” and “A Forest.”
“Lullaby” started the second encore, which took a tour through the early and mid-career eras and albums from 1979’s UK single release of “Boys Don’t Cry” to 1992’s “Friday I’m in Love.” This is the complete list of songs from the second encore in the order they were played: “Lullaby,” “Six Different Ways,” “The Walk,” “Friday I’m in Love,” “Close to Me,” “Why Can’t I Be You?,” “In Between Days,” “Just Like Heaven,” and “Boys Don’t Cry.”
In a time in which headliners may play an hour and a half to two hours, The Cure played well over two and a half hours. At fifty-six drummer Jason Cooper is the youngest member of the band and the only member not in his sixties. With a twenty-nine-song set, The Cure packed in more songs that one would reasonably expect. Therefore, I am not going to fault the setlist. As much as I was hoping this would be one of the nights they played “Disintegration,” it did appear in the next night’s set. Someone I spoke to two days later at The Vortex in Little Five Points who went to both shows said that hearing “Plainsong” back-to-back with “Disintegration” was amazing, but he preferred the setlist of night one. Out of the three shows I’ve seen, this is my favorite setlist.
After Atlanta, two more shows would conclude the tour. The shortest set of the tour, twenty-seven songs, appeared in Tampa, and the final night in Miami yielded thirty songs. The idea has occurred to me that this could be the last tour. Lengthy sets and fan-friendly pricing feel like a thank you to the fans versus the cash grabs performers often try to create through supposed farewell tours that never end. Plus, The Cure are already playing multiple tracks from Songs of a Lost World. Perhaps we might see sporadic festival dates or an official last concert somewhere in England, but big touring might be coming to a close. However, there are more dates scheduled for 2023. For example, there is one more U.S. concert at Riot Fest in September, a short South American leg, and festival appearances outside of the U.S. through December. We’ll see what happens after that . . .
The end never seems to last. Maybe if we hope against all hope and dream the dreams inside our dreams, the future will still be possible or at least a past that is still yet to come.
Photography Ollie Nesbitt
