The Cure – MTV Rocumentary
1989
Yesterday’s ‘That Was Then… This Is Now,’ Vintage Video post on the wonderful Slicing Up Eyeballs was inspiration for this post. I recorded this off of MTV around the time Disintegration was released. It’s a half hour (22 min. without commercials) documentary of Robert Smith, the band and Tim Pope talking about the history of The Cure during the filming of the video for the song Lullaby. There’s a lot of interesting commentary about Tim’s longstanding video making relationship with The Cure as well as stories about the recording of Disintegration.
Download: The Cure – MTV Rocumentary (Video)
Last week I posted a track from the Tindersticks show that is the odds favorite to be my best show of the year. On the other hand, I hopefully won’t find a show this year that is more disappointing than this recent one by Tricky. The show started auspiciously with this track where Tricky’s cracker-jack band and female back-up (ostensibly) vocalist lead this groovy take on this The Cure song, which features Tricky murmuring to decent effect in the background. What I didn’t realize at that point, however, is that the vocals in this track ended up being 1/4 of the vocal duties that Tricky would utter for the total rest of the set. I would go so far to say that if Tricky was paid $10 for each unique word sung that night he would have walked out of there with under $200. So, get this, for the remainder of the set while the rest of the band played “Karmacoma” and the like, with vocals taken on by an increasingly overworked ‘back-up’ singer, Tricky would thrash his head back and forth trance-like only to stop and pull off mary-ju-wana cigarette. This went on for an hour. I was pretty livid at that point that Tricky could phone it in for a whole set.
I caught the Radio City show of The Cure on their recent pass through NYC this June. The show was a marathon of old and new that lasted three (!!) hours.
My absolute favorite of all The Cure re-releases has been Blue Sunshine by The Glove. As much as I like the tracks as they are, my favorite songs off the original were the ones sung by Robert Smith. So when the re-released disc came out, I was thrilled that they included not only “new” old songs, but also the demos that Robert sang on. This song was originally sung by Budgie’s (drummer of Siouxsie and The Creatures) girlfriend and former dancer, Jeanette Landray.
About a year ago I posted Chisel doing a cover of The Cure’s “Six Different Ways.” Just last week I got an e-mail from someone who wanted me to post the Edsel cover from the same compilation. Both songs were released on the “Give Me The Cure” benefit cd on Radiopaque Records in 1995 and has been long out of print. The cd featured eighteen Washington D.C. bands doing The Cure covers, with varying degrees of success, in order to help AIDS research.
