Cure

If, after two and a half hours of a concert, the first thought that crosses your mind is: "Wait, is it over already?", then saying that the show you've just witnessed was a total emotional and sensory experience becomes pretty much redundant.

On the stage set up in the Italsider area in Bagnoli stands a flag of England's national football team, waved by a die-hard fan (as Robert Smith is known to be). Persistent rumours claimed that, before the Cure took that stage, none other than Mogwai would open for them; well, aside from the amusing contrast it would have made to see the very Scottish Mogwai performing with that flag behind them, it's genuinely a shame those rumours turned out to be unfounded. So instead of the superb Scottish band, the Cure's show was opened by two Italian acts: Marla Singer, and before them a band whose name, I confess, escapes me entirely. No great loss, since their musical output verged on absolute zero, a mix of blatant Offspring and Green Day rip-offs and nu-metal pretensions, complete with a meathead in a white tank top bouncing around the stage striking Fred Durst-style poses. Telling were the hands of most of the crowd, who after three or four songs started making unmistakable gestures urging the band to get off the stage.

No great loss, guys — you'll find a friendlier crowd when you open for Linkin Park. Things improve slightly, but only slightly, with Marla Singer, at least in terms of stage presence, far less cocky and irritating than their predecessors. Their performance, however, was all too forgettable.

Right, with the formality of the two opening acts out of the way, the long wait begins to see Robert Smith and co. take the stage. The wait is longer than expected, and our heroes finally come on around 10:30pm. No greetings, no small talk, no words at all. They open with "Lost", the track that also opens the new album: built on fairly harsh sonic textures, in this live guise the song almost brought to mind Nine Inch Nails. The tracks from the forthcoming new record (titled simply "The Cure") hold up well, apart from the single "The End Of The World", which perhaps gains something live but still remains, quite simply, a bland and unremarkable song. Meanwhile there's room for old songs and welcome surprises: chief among them the extraordinary "The Drowning Man" (from "Faith", 1981) and a splendid rendition of the equally splendid "Charlotte Sometimes". Breathtaking, too, is an anthology-worthy performance of "One Hundred Years", one of the band's most unforgettable anthems (taken from "Pornography", 1982), and a riveting "From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea" (from "Wish", 1992).

In stunning vocal form, Robert Smith then offers other tracks from the past such as "A Strange Day" and "Closedown", along with other interesting new pieces like "The Promise", a sprawling track, a devastating ride that more than makes up for the weakness of other songs from the new album like the already mentioned "The End Of The World" or "Us Or Them".

That brings the first part of the concert to a close: if one wanted to be picky, it could be said that the splendid "The Kiss", or "Bloodflowers", or even "Pornography" itself would have fit perfectly into this generally "harder" set. But no matter, the performance was still top-notch, and the best is yet to come.

After the break, the five of them (besides Smith and the other "veteran" member Simon Gallup on bass, there's the ever-excellent, unassuming Roger O'Donnell on keyboards, Perry Bamonte on guitar and Jason Cooper on drums) return to the stage, and Smith warns us that what's coming next are "just simple pop songs".

So begins a triptych that sends the nearly 20,000 people present into raptures, with "In Between Days", "Just Like Heaven" and, of course, "Boys Don't Cry", a song the band apparently will never tire of playing, and one the crowd will naturally never tire of hearing, singing along to, and dancing to.

Another pause precedes the second encore, this time dedicated to the first album of the early-Eighties "dark" trilogy, the splendid "Seventeen Seconds" (1980): naturally there's no missing the perennial crowd-pleaser "A Forest", but what really hits home is the performance of two of that record's brightest gems — and among the least common in the band's live repertoire — namely "M" (in a version that's vaguely slowed down and "meaner", surprising and thoroughly successful) and "Play For Today".

The third and final encore is instead dedicated to two of the finest tracks from their most famous record, the masterpiece "Disintegration" (1989). The unforgettable opening song of that album, which often also served as the live opening number, "Plainsong", is performed by the band — and by Smith in particular — in a way that heightens its splendid, inconsolable romanticism even further. And finally it's left to the long title track, "Disintegration", to provide an impeccable close to the concert. A premature close too, perhaps, as we said at the start: the desire to hear so many other indispensable, immortal songs — "Pictures Of You", "Siamese Twins", "3 Imaginary Boys", "The Figurehead", the wonderful "Prayers For Rain", "A Letter To Elise"... the list could go on for quite a while, just as the concert itself could have gone on much longer and no one would have complained — quite the opposite. But at Smith's farewell, a "see you soon" we hope will prove true, that's when we finally accept that it's all over. We leave behind a thrilling show and the certainty that the band, at least on stage, is still in rude health. After all, the Cure have only been around for 28 years...

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