On a European tour, with a stopover in Pas-de-Calais on November 27, the group of Robert Smith challenges years and musical modes.
by Bruno Lesprit ( Liévin (Pas-de-Calais), Special Envoy)
It rains on the mining country. Suffice to say that the conditions are ideal, on this Sunday, November 27, to attend a concert by The Cure. Among the eight French cities where the English group stops, Liévin (Pas-de-Calais) is the one that is closest to Crawley, the locality in the south of London where the singer and guitarist Robert Smith grew up. The weather provides the illusion of British insularity at the same time as it conveys this essential spleen to appreciate the work of the inventor of the existentialist new wave.
After forty-four years of activity, the rating of this institution that has become the cure is always at the highest: the speakers of its continental tour, with a last date at the Accor Arena in Paris on November 28 , display complete. Before the troop ch over the Channel for three evenings at the Wembley Arena in London.
It is not the rarity or the attraction of the novelty that explain this intact craze. The Cure was still playing at the Rock en Seine festival in the summer of 2019. And his discography has been stopped since the album 4:13 Dream, in 2008. Robert Smith had promised two for the fall, one ” Tragic “, entitled Songs of A Lost World, the other” optimistic “. We are without news from both. Except to the stage. It is indeed with an unpublished that the concert begins, after a first part entrusted to protégés, the Scottish of Twilight Sad, which make heard the funeral influence of the godfather like that of Joy Division.
Intact craze
“This is the end of Every Song that We Sing”, the first Morrisonian words of Alone, actually tragic ballad, announce nothing less than the apocalypse, stars in tears and hecatombs of birds. Fatally, the pandemic of Covid-19, the war and the economic crisis should not make Robert Smith Plus Guilleret. And even less the losses (his parents and his brother) who have mourn him these recent years.
The other four “new songs”, as Robert Smith announces it in French, are unfortunately not all as convincing, whether it is and Nothing is Forever, grandiloquent with his church organ, or Fragile Thing, almost autoparodic. Preceded by a long instrumental introduction, Endsong does not lack attraction by flirting with progressive rock, but I can never say goodbye, first reminder, struggles to support the comparison with the burst of classics that will follow. Generous, the master of ceremonies specifies that it is rather “second part”, then a “third” for this concert reaching two three -quarters.
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