Tag Archives: The Cure

A disagreement about The Cure

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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…

Some Kandi talking

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“Who’s this again?” Cora was lying back on the sofa, watching the reflected sunlight from April’s Medlet dart across the ceiling. The music was a dark, droning dirge filling the room. It felt like sinking into the warm honeyed embrace of every one night stand she’d ever had; seductive, noisy, edgy, maybe not that healthy but the kind of mistake you knew you were going to make again anyway. After Rob she’d made a few mistakes.

“It’s The Jesus & Mary Chain,” said April. “Happy When It Rains.”

Cora turned her hands in front of her face, moving them in slow circles in a gentle nod to April’s default dance move. “Another one of those songs? And, happy when it rains, really? Is that, like, your theme song?”

April leant down over Cora, her face looming closer and closer until it blocked out the rest of the room. She stopped about an inch from Cora’s face. “Embrace the darkness, my friend, embrace the darkness.” They both smiled. “Is that my mascara by the way?”

“Well, you have so much I figured you wouldn’t notice…,” replied Cora.

When the others arrived home a couple of hours later they were still in the lounge, Cora now sitting up cross legged, April sat on the floor in front of her, head back in her lap. Cora had braided a few strands of her hair, interlacing them with purple ribbon. April’s eyes were closed and she was softly mouthing the words to a song none of the others knew. I’m not like them, I can pretend.

“Well look at you two,” said Leah.

“April’s been educating me on all the miserable music that we were lucky enough to miss in the late 80s. Now I know why our parents fucked us up so badly,” laughed Cora.

“It’s miserable music you can dance to,” protested April, opening her eyes. “Not this one so much but all the other stuff. And you’re more than capable of being a fuck up on your own without blaming your parents.” Cora poked her tongue out in response.

“Is this Nirvana?” said Aps. She’d come in behind Leah, laden with shopping bags. “That guy that shot himself. You know, the one on the tee-shirt.”

“I’m sure that’s just how he’d like to be remembered,” said April. “Yes, it’s Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is your man. Icon of alienation and isolation.” She flicked off the music streaming on her phone, thumbs flying as she searched for something. She held up a picture of him, blonde hair falling round his face framing blue eyes, a pensive frown.

“He sounds more like he’s your man to be honest,” said Cora. “I like ’em a little sunnier. He’s hot though, I’ll give you that.”

Aps snatched up the phone to look more closely at the picture before rummaging back through one of the bags she’d carried in. She fished out a flyer which she passed over to April as she handed back the phone. “I knew I’d seen him today. I picked this up for you, April, thought it looked like your sort of thing. They were giving them out in the Union.”

The flyer was postcard sized and filled with a picture montage of bands April recognised. Pixies, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr, Stone Roses, Sisters, Mudhoney, Violent Femmes, Cure, Cult, Pulp, Oasis, Blur, the Stones, the Beatles. Kurt’s face was lost in there somewhere, the same shot that had appeared first on her phone. She had seen him today. Emblazoned across the top it read: Kandi Klub presents Club George. Down the bottom were details of the venue: The Thekla, Saturday nights, room limit 100. She shook her hair loose from Cora’s fingers and stood up. “We have to go. Seriously, we have to go to this.”

Cora, curious, plucked the flyer from her and examined it. “You sure they stick to that room limit? Someone told me about The Thekla. It’s that club on a boat, down in the harbour.”

“They have to stick to it,” said Aps. “They’d be shut down within a week if they mess around with that. They’ll have checks going in as well.”

“Come on Cora, it’ll be fun,” said Leah. “I mean, we won’t know any of the music but you can just pretend we’re partying in April’s head for a few hours.”

“So there’ll be dry ice and a strobe?” said Cora looking at April.

“You better believe it,” she replied.

 

 

……

This one is part of the overall set of stories about April and crew but as they’re in Bristol, even in the near future, it seemed only right to send them to the Kandi Klub. I don’t think it exists any more but perhaps someone will pick it up again one day.

RIP DJ George and thanks for the memories.

Aps and Leah

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The night Leah arrived April and Cora still weren’t talking, they’d spent a couple of days avoiding each other either holed up in their rooms or ghosting out of the house early in the morning and slipping back in quietly after it got dark. I saw them both, separately, as they ocassionally surfaced for food or a drink and, with me, they were pleasant enough, if a little guarded. I didn’t push it. I hoped with some time that things would settle down and we could all start again. Otherwise it was going to be a very long term.

I liked Leah immediately. She’d arrived at about nine having spent the whole day in transit. Some of it was the actual travel but most of it was the usual series of checks through health security at both borders. Apparently everyone on her flight had been held for an extra set of precautionary tests for a couple of hours after someone showed a slightly irregular temperature. I made a mental note not to bother sharing this detail with Cora. It was tense enough in the house already. Leah seemed to have registered that the atmosphere was a little strained, I guess she picked up my awkwardness when she asked where the others were, but she didn’t press it when I said that they were keeping themselves to themselves at the moment. I think that was why I liked her. She seemed to pick up a lot that was unsaid and had the grace to wait to understand more without being pushy. I guess I envied that in her because it was so unlike me.

She had short, dark, almost black, hair. Audrey Hepburn short. She didn’t look like Hepburn but her hair was kind of similar. I commented that I thought it suited her and made the comparison but she looked confused and said she didn’t know much about old movies. I found a picture online and showed her on my phone; she found it hilarious and just said: I wish. I thought she was being modest, she had high, narrow cheeks and beautiful, laughing eyes that I would’ve killed for. She caught me looking at her but didn’t seem bothered by it. She smiled and it was me that broke eye contact.

We opened the bottle of wine that I’d originally bought for all of us and talked. She teased me a little when I told her about my year travelling, pretended to be upset that I hadn’t visited Italy. I didn’t want to admit that I’d avoided the hotspots in Europe, too many people I’d known had been caught out in lockdown and lost any time they might have been travelling. Like earlier she seemed to silently clock that this was what had happened and let it pass. She told me about her home. I told her about mine. It wasn’t really a fair contest: after she’d played her sun-kissed-banks-of-Lake-Como card I was always holding a losing hand. It definitely trumped a commuter belt town in the Home Counties where the most controversial thing that had happened in my lifetime was when they gave Aldi planning permission to open on the old leisure centre site. Most controversial outside of the Viral Health Act provisions, obviously, but I tried to ignore all that stuff that I couldn’t control.

After we’d seen off two thirds of the bottle some music started playing, audible through the ceiling above. April’s room. It was the first time I’d heard anything like that since the incident with Cora but she’d almost always had a pair of headphones round her neck when I’d seen her. Maybe her bluetooth had dropped out or something. Maybe she wanted to hear something vibrating in the air instead of right there inside her ear. I always preferred music through speakers, I liked to feel it through my body. It didn’t matter what it was, I wasn’t a massive bass-head or anything, I just liked the physical sensation of it. My parents had shown me some old video of when they used to go to festivals, before the restrictions, and it looked like heaven. Looking at them, arm in arm, swaying in a crowd to some 90s band everyone had forgotten left me feeling, I don’t know, left me sad. It seemed strange to grieve for something that you’ve never had but that was how I felt.

Leah looked at me, tilted head, questioning. No sorrow tonight. It’s my first one here. That was all she said before she stood up and, slowly at first, began to move to the music filtering down from above. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back, and danced. After a moment she opened one eye, almost comically, fixed it on me and commanded me to join her. I got up a little unsteadily, it was a while since I’d drunk this much, and the pair of us shuffled in an uneven circle in the middle of the room. The song changed, it was one that I recognised. April must have liked it as she turned it up. I was pretty sure it was The Cure. Close To Me? Was that it? I was spinning now. Maybe the room was spinning.

Leah snatched up the wine and took a swig, passing it across to me. One of the last things I remember was how intimate that had felt, drinking from the same bottle. Intimate and trusting. I drank, tried to take a step back in time with the music, stumbled and fell over, upending the rest of the bottle on my face. Both of us started laughing, neither of us could stop and when Cora and April appeared in the room to see what all the noise was they found us lying on the floor, shaking, faces contorted in manic smiles. I think they were so surprised that neither of them realised they were standing right next to each other. There was something infectious about the laughter. They both cracked and all four of us were left helpless, howling and cackling with uncontrollable glee.

We’re housemates now, okay? Like I said, Leah seemed to know what to leave unsaid but she seemed to know when to find the right words too. That was the start of things being good. They didn’t go bad until much later.