Features Tear Out The Pages With All The Bad News: The Cure At Reading & Leeds

I’m going to be honest with you from the outset; my grasp of economics is hazy, to say the least. I’m the type of person who will justify purchasing expensive shoes on the basis that the true cost can be calculated by dividing the price by the number of times you’re likely to wear them, and assuming that you wear those shoes about a million times, which of course I will, because they go with everything (honest), they’re basically free. When, in these times of austerity, economics sneaks into my social life even more than usual, courtesy of a few bands deciding that a pair of tickets to their gigs should cost roughly the same amount as heating a small house for a year, I get properly angry.

Obviously I’m referring in part to Radiohead’s little foray into ‘tout busting arena tours’, because that was easy economics, even for me: no way in hell’s earth am I paying £75 for one ticket when in 1993, that same ticket set you back £6 and you were guaranteed they’d play ‘Creep’. So that’s an easy equation:

If N = (£6 x inflation) + soulless enormodome + (a TKOL heavy noodly electronica set x infinity), the value of N = No thanks.

But a slightly harder equation occurred last year, when The Cure played their first three albums at the Royal Albert Hall and decided to charge £125 a ticket. And £125 = a lot of cheap shoes. But but but … it’s The Cure.

Whilst common sense prevailed and I did not spend ridiculous amounts of money on those tickets despite my dubious mathematic skills, I could completely understand why people did. After all, my teenage bedroom resembled a shrine to Robert Smith; the pastel pink walls, a colour so carefully picked out by my sister and I (aged seven and ten), became completely covered over by pictures of a man suffering with an inability to apply lipstick and allergic reaction to his hairbrush by the time I hit 15. The Cure were my first, proper, musical obsession, before then I’d obsessed about certain albums, but never really felt the need to spend every penny of my birthday money on a band’s entire back catalogue. But the year that my brother gave me a tape of ‘Disintegration’ for my birthday, well, that set me on a downward spiral of musical complete-ism that left me unable to resist the temptation to explore a band’s entire catalogue, single-handedly keeping my local record shop afloat for many, many, years.

No surprise then that the news of The Cure celebrating the 20th anniversary of ‘Wish’ with a few festival dates this summer was gratefully received by these ears. After almost breaking my self imposed ‘No Festivals With Fancy Dress’ rule and heading to Bestival last summer, and having missed out on those RAH dates due to stupid old common sense, the fifteen year old me has lodged an official complaint that she never gets to do anything anymore, and I’m left with virtually no option but to head to their only nearby festival date at Reading for a day. You might question my sudden turnaround from ‘seriously sensible with equations and everything’, to ‘pin number disclosing insanity’, but the answer is found buried in the album whose birthday we’re celebrating.

‘Wish’ was the first Cure album that I was able to properly anticipate on it’s release, I might not have been counting down the days on a calendar, but I wasn’t far off. ‘Disintegration’ had been out a while before that birthday gift and whilst I’d thoroughly explored the band’s back catalogue, in terms of new releases there had only been a couple of compilations, nothing new. And when ‘Wish’ arrived, it introduced me to a skill that only a select few musicians have ever managed to replicate since: the power of music to reduce me to tears within a few opening bars of a track. Now, it may well be emotional memory as it brings a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat when it graces my iPod these days, but back then, I’d just broken up with a boy I’d decided was my one and only true love (purely because he’d owned a ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ t-shirt). ‘Apart’ appeared to have been written as the soundtrack for my angst ridden, gut wrenching, heart-break as I spent night after night (yes, both of them) sobbing fat tears into my pillow. Whether I was more heartbroken because I listened to that song, or gravitated toward that song because I was heartbroken, well, that’s another question entirely.

Within a few weeks (days), when my heart had miraculously repaired itself, I found I loved the rest of the album too - from the chart bothering ‘Friday I’m In Love’ that made it finally ‘okay’ amongst my peers for me to love that band so much, to the glorious ‘High’, and the beautiful resignation of ‘Letter To Elise’. Sure, there are better Cure albums, but those belonged to a different generation. ‘Wish’ was mine.

And so we’re back to justifying the economics of spending £95 on a ticket for anything, and my utterly illogical logic that allows me to convince myself that actually, buying a day ticket for Reading just to see fat Bob is actually a bit of a bargain. I’ve worked out an equation to justify my stupidity that goes a little something like this:

(Reading Day Ticket < Royal Albert Hall Ticket) + (‘Wish’ + possibility of ‘Just Like Heaven’ as an encore) = (Here’s my £95 + sobbing in public).

Obviously, it’s maths for the insane. But when it comes to one particular Reading headliner, it’s a genuine case of heart over head; it’s Friday, I’m in love.