We had disagreed about The Cure. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me but you were pretty militant about it. My position was that they had done so much poppier stuff in later years that you couldn’t credibly call them a goth band anymore and this was clearly a problem for you. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is not a goth record and that was 1987 so it’s not like it’s even a recent thing. It’s got trumpets. Surely the least goth instrument unless it’s in a Wagner symphony or something. I’m a bit sketchy on classical music. Would Bauhaus have been improved with a parping trumpet solo in the middle of Bela Lugosi’s Dead? Well, okay, maybe but that’s not my point. You countered that it wasn’t just about the music, it was about the aesthetic and the attitude. I think you said something about how it was like when you saw goths at the beach: they might be in their swimming gear, probably getting sunburnt, but they didn’t stop being goths just because they happened to be playing frisbee. Robert Smith didn’t look like a frisbee guy to me, I reckon he’d want to be buried in sand, just his mop of frizzed black hair left sticking out of the beach like a mass of gnarly seaweed.
If I’m honest the conversation hadn’t gone to plan. I’d spotted you pretty quickly after arriving at the bar and clocked the dark hair, dyed a deep (dare I say blood) red at the tips, framing slightly sharp features, high cheek bones, slightly pronounced, pointed nose. A cascading array of ear rings, a series of studs and loops around, seemingly, the entirety of the outside of your lobes. Looked pretty cool. You had large, hazel eyes. They made me think of the Well Of Souls but I decided that this would be a terrible first line, even my own inner monologue was telling me that it was dreadful, and figured that the Cure tee-shirt (Boys Don’t Cry) you were wearing was a safer place to start than a cave where the spirits of the dead await Judgement Day. How wrong I was.
I didn’t actually get to start with a line. You watched me walking towards the bar and, evidently, clocked that I was wearing a Nirvana tee-shirt and stole my conversational opener. Do you actually like them or is this a zeitgeist bandwagon thing? It wasn’t exactly that but you said something like that and the inference was very much that I was a zeitgeist bandwagon rider rather than a genuine fan. I didn’t mind. Other than the tee-shirt I wasn’t really looking like an archetypal grunge head at that point, just jeans and a pair of trainers. I’d had my hair cut a couple of weeks ago and had gone very respectable in anticipation of the end of term and trying to find some work over the summer. So I was looking less Kurt Cobain and more trainee-accountant-on-the- weekend. Your scepticism was justified I guess. I hated people that wore band tee-shirts for bands they didn’t even like or know so I actually thought this was a good sign that the conversation had started like this. How wrong I was.
I told you that I had liked them from the start, which, in my head, was Bleach, but you seemed to know some obscure stuff that pre-dated that and had, apparently, seen them on the tour they did with Tad and Mudhoney, I felt less sure of my fandom. Obviously I knew who Mudhoney were but who the hell were Tad? You seemed to sense my sudden hesitancy and declared that you’d lost interest in Nirvana after Nevermind came out; production was too polished and poppy, you couldn’t get on board with the whole poster boy for an alienated generation stuff. I wasn’t ready to completely give way on this point and suggested that maybe it was a good thing that more people would get into some great music. You started to sing the chorus to In Bloom by way of response. He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along. At this point perhaps I should have called it quits and slunk off to see if my friends had showed up yet but it was going so far off plan that I thought it probably couldn’t get any worse. How wrong I was.
I needed to get the conversation away from me and onto her and the obvious pivot was the one that I’d planned to start with. Talk about The Cure. You obviously like The Cure. This will be a failsafe route into a chat in which you hopefully discover that I am a good guy, not likely to hit you with a line about the deep abyss of sorrow in your eyes, and we exchange numbers, say that we’ll hook up in future. In retrospect it was a mistake to pivot to The Cure by suggesting that they were, just like Nirvana, equally as guilty of softening up their sound, playing to the pop crowd, and that, maybe, just maybe, they weren’t a goth band anymore. You watched me make my series of statements with a bemused, slightly detached air. I felt like a fly flitting around one of those plants that seems benign and then eats them, jaw like leaves sliding shut efficiently, smoothly, dispatching their prey. Something to do with Venus but I didn’t really pay much attention in biology. Or mythology. You stayed silent, waiting for me to finish and so I prattled on a bit longer about how Friday In Love could practically have been the Friends theme song such was its sunny peppiness. I don’t think I actually said sunny peppiness but I was babbling by this point so all bets are off. I finally stopped talking. You raised an eyebrow. Perhaps this was a considered reappraisal, an eyebrow that spoke of seeing something familiar from a fresh perspective, a perspective from someone that you were now thinking was pretty okay. How wrong I was.
I went to a lot of lectures that year. I was a good student and even stuck around for the optional stuff on tax law that was like listening to an atonal dirge of noise for an hour. Quite a lot like how I felt about The Cure before they went poppy if I was honest but I felt this wouldn’t help to say out loud. All of those lectures were as nothing compared to the exceptionally detailed dissection of The Cure’s career, songs, principles, importance, and place in alternative culture, that you gave me over the next ten minutes or so. It was impassioned, frequently sweary, oddly sexually charged when you talked about Robert Smith and men wearing make-up, and pretty unambiguous in whether I was right or wrong about the whole pop sell-out thing. It was magnificent. The only trouble now was that I had started out mildly curious, attracted by those well-of-souls eyes, and now I was in deep. You were glorious and I had blown it because I didn’t know who supported Nirvana in the UK in 1989 and I thought The Cure had some tunes that milkmen would cheerily whistle. Not even goth milkmen either. You were fierce and intelligent and absolutely gorgeous and I had no chance. How wrong I was.
We had disagreed about The Cure. You said later that you were just messing with me and wanted to see if I’d stick it out whilst you unloaded all that stuff about dark majesty and direct lineage from punk that was more legitimate than Nirvana’s Beatles meets Pixies marriage of convenience. I don’t think you were entirely messing with me. You do have an inordinate amount of Cure records and that enormous poster of Robert Smith over your bed still kinda freaks me out a bit when I wake up in the morning. I told you the eyes thing after a couple of weeks. You rolled them in response so at least my instinct to keep that one to myself early on was correct. You’d be a decent point of judgement for the dead though. As long as they liked The Cure they’d be fine. I grew my hair back out but you shaved yours off. It suited you. I said it made you look like Ripley in Aliens. Alien, you said back. Well, I think Aliens is the better film, I replied.
How wrong I was.
Almost at the end of July and almost at the end of my 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital (fundraising page here).
This one was just a bit of fun but has its roots in an incident, a very long time ago, when I argued the merits of Lenny Kravitz with a woman at University who had a large poster of him on her wall. I still think I was right but it was probably a situation where it was better to be wrong…