Ramblings: How Beautiful You Are
Let’s preface this one with the fact that I am so jealous of anyone seeing The Cure on this tour. Like I would be jealous of anyone seeing them on any tour that I could have missed over the past 20 years. So I keep reading reviews and pretending that it doesn’t matter because a lot of the show appears to be a bit of “greatest hits” (and pretending that I don’t know that the other half is a load of rarely, if ever, played live shows and two actual new songs). So when my sister and friends get in a car and drive down to San Jose today to see them I will pretend I don’t mind missing them while secretly muttering in my head “but I AM the greatest Cure fan!!!”. Yes, I am a 38 year old mother of two who will continue to proclaim myself the biggest Cure fan out of everyone until my deathbed (although I do know a few as-worthy-as me Cure fans who also have the right to that title). Of course any biggest-Cure-fan in their right mind would have gone out of their way to get a ticket/find a babysitter and pump a gallon of milk in advance, but I’m too lazy. And a little afraid to leave both munchkins for that long. So I shall be seething with jealousy for a few hours and making my kids dance to one of my Cure playlists (that’s not difficult, they have been brought up on the songs).
But everyone has THAT band, right? No matter how old you get, or how old they get, they will always be number 1. You know every song off by heart and have done since each album was released, or at least since the first time you heard it. Each and every song reminds you of one or more specific memories, and those will memories and moments will continue to accumulate while you walk/run/jump through life. Every time you get hurt, want to celebrate, feel down or overjoyed there is a song that you immediately play without thinking. Every time you need to relax and get away from everything for a while you know that you can play this band (or singer for that matter) and you will get exactly what you need from it. You can listen with your headphones on in the dark, or belt out the tunes so the world can hear then, either way this band will help you feel the warm sand between your toes again and the sunshine brush against your cheeks. Or any other feeling that helps you feel whole again. See, this is what The Cure is for me.
My sister asked me to make her a Cure playlist today, but how on earth could I do that in a few hours?! So I pointed her to a playlist I had made on Spotify quite a while back, with 90 of my favourite Cure songs on it. I’m sure that will be enough to get them through the road trip down to Mountain View tomorrow. And in the meantime I will listen to it with the girls and laugh as Aurora bops along to Lullaby and Luna hums to A Strange Day. Of course my kids love The Cure. They’ve never known a moment when I didn’t play The Cure to them! Love Song was Luna’s lullaby during all of those sleepless nights, just like How Beautiful You Are is Aurora’s. Maybe one day the band will become to them what Tim Buckley became to me – a legacy that lived on through parents to children, loved and respected and still listened to.
I could recount memories for days, images stuck inside my head forever… Rolling down a hill in Grenoble in the dark, listening to 10:15 Saturday Night on my walkman; hiding a camera in the lining of her floor length coat, hoisting myself on a railing to take a shot of Robert hovering over the crowd with a puzzled look on his face, only to find the developed photos to be so dark that there was nothing to see; listening to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me full blast in the basement of 200 Orchard with the other biggest Cure fan in the world; pushing ourselves up to the front of the Beacon Theater and seeing the first three albums played live, as if we were right there, back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Falling asleep to Wish on a loop and waking up to the same song I fell asleep to, penetrating my dreams and subconscious thoughts; and singing along to Catch with my best friend while she was driving fast down the freeway late at night towards the city lights in the distance. Listening to Push while cleaning the bar late at night (early in the morning); watching my firstborn dance to every Cure song I play and feeling terribly proud (and silly at the same time for feeling proud); still, after all these years, aiming straight for the used section in every used record store, looking for Cure singles just because different regions got different B sides; watching Cure videos before going to sleep night after night after night; seeing Lullaby for the first time when it was released and being both intrigued and frightened at the same time, wanting more not less, even if spiders scared the shit out of me (still do); demanding 100 Years every time I closed the night out at the Mark XIII all those years ago… I could seriously go on and on and on. There isn’t a moment of my life after the age of 10 that I can’t associate with a Cure song.
And I just realised that I can’t even remember how many times I have now seen them live… I suppose that’s a good thing as it probably means too many times to count. Someone had better bring me a t-shirt back because no one can have enough Cure shirts in their closet! One day I would love to interview Robert Smith… I was lucky enough to interview Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus/Tones on Tail/Love and Rockets fame, so I still see interviewing Robert Smith as a possibility one day… Right?!