Saturday May 28th, 2016 (all photos were taken by me, but feel free to share them as much as you want) was an exciting night for me. It was the night I finally had a chance to go see one of my favorite bands--The Cure. Now, I have many favorite bands, but this is one of the first that I really fell in love with back in the early 80's.
When I was really little, my family didn't play much music. If I wanted to listen to something, I had to beg my grandpa to put something on, or, occasionally my mom listened to John Denver, or Barbara Streisand--at least those were the two that got any real airplay at my house. So when VH1 started showing up on the tele, my mind was pretty blown away. In fact, there are three main bands that changed the way I viewed music. Okay, so I am going to digress just a little bit, because the only band that really made my mouth drop and go "WHAT IS THIS!" back in the 70's was Queen, who was introduced to me by one of my distant cousins. Moving on ...
I had this awesome punk rock baby-sitter for awhile, who I will never forget, because she was the next one to blow my mind with something new, and forever cherished--Oingo Boingo. That was another aha moment for me in discovering my musical tastes.
Then, about one year later, I was at Seal Beach. Standing outside a pizza shop, waiting on my sister and probably some cousins, my eyes immediately alighted on a flyer across the street. Sprinting over to the paper in the window, I had another moment of "WHAT IS THIS?!"
Wild hair and eyes heavy with make-up glinted from the flyer. The band was called Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the band playing with them was The Cure. I don't know what it was that drew me in so fiercely to that flyer, but I had to know who these bands were!
Not long after, I made a friend who looked pretty much exactly like Robert Smith, and he was a huge fan and had a beat up old tape with all of The Cure's older songs. We listened to that tape constantly. I was sold. There may not have been much of a Goth scene yet, be we were it. I was wearing capes and hanging with my Robert Smith look-alike. Life in the 80's was like one long, innocent goth party that never ended.
If you want to read more about The Cure, and Robert Smith, you can go to these links on wiki, there is so much written about them, that I really don't feel like I need to re-hash who they are, most fans have followed The Cure for a very long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smith_(musician)
I've never given up my goth roots, and still attend whatever goth nights are happening in my area. The Cure is much loved. I feel very lucky to finally have seen them in concert, Robert Smith can still belt out a tune like non-other--music that rings from those tonsils like a dark, eldricht fay god of the void. Enjoy the photos.
