Finally.
March 29, 2019. Trent Reznor offers an amazing introduction.
The Cure have been around for what, 30 years? For many of us X-Geners this band has been the soundtrack of our lives.
Oh hell yeah. This thread is for The Cure, and they deserve it.
Three Imaginary Boys:
Forever (curiosity version):
I saw them during their Disintegration tour in Berkeley. Great concert.
One of my favorite bands. Saw them for the first time in 1993 in St. Louis. Got to see them a few more times here in Portland
43 years. I stand corrected. Wow, about time for hall of fame recognition. I loved Trent’s speech. He basically said fuck this venue because The Cure wasn’t in it for so long.
Robert Smith playing guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees.
So many great, important bands that aren’t in it, it’s a little hard to take it seriously.
Good for them! I saw them two years ago (?) in Charlotte. It was sweltering hot and I have no idea how they played for such a long time in very Cure-ish all black, long sleeved everything. They also sounded fantastic.
I took a class in undergrad that was led by two Rock Hall employees (and was held in the bowels of that building a few sessions). They obviously had to be diplomatic about it, but were… displeased with the bureaucracy involved in the process, to put it nicely.
Kind of seems like that’s part of the package when you have a Hall of Fame with nebulous requirements though. Every year the articles about MLB Hall of Fame voters snubbing a deserving candidate come out like clockwork.
As long as artists like The Guess Who, Jethro Tull, The Doobie Brothers, Bad Company, T Rex, Pat Benatar and Ozzy Osbourne are left out why fucking bother with a Rock Hall of Fame? I do believe that The Cure is worthy but until those others get recognized, screw the Hall and their political nomination process bullshit.
Lol, wut? I had no idea it was that absurd.
The Cure are fantastic, and Trent Reznor is quite possibly my biggest pop-music hero. Well deserved.
Pure irony.
When I was a teenager, the Cure represented the antithesis of the norm in music. It helped define my expression of individuality through adolescence, doubly justified as I really like their music.
In the early 80s you would never see a Cure video on MTV. Never on the radio. The Cure were the embodiment of alternative, way more hard core than the rest in the New Wave movement sweeping top 40 radio.
This was the type of band your parents didn’t want you to pay attention to. It was underground and B-Sides and clove cigarettes. Smart and different. Keyed into a higher level than the rest. Cure fans were special, and unloved by the mainstream.
No doubt exactly the same as my parents listening to Simon and Garfunkel or Jimmie Hendrix.
To have them inducted into the hall of fame, the most political, popularity driven, corruptly mainstream, worst than the Grammy’s cabal is an eye-opener.
Were we right the whole time and it only took 43 fucking years for society to own to it?
Or is this just the cycle of life. Boring in its predictability.
It’s funny, I remember thinking, some day people like me will be running this planet and smoking a joint won’t land you in jail.
So sure of our rightness… and the stupidity of the mainstream. But then this is probably how every generation feels.
I’ve become my parents then, and this is a symbolic mark of that moment. I still think that the Cure helped steer it all. What a fucking trip that the politicians running things might know every song on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, or the Top. I wonder how that changes things.
By 1985, the Cure were selling a metric shitton of records…
No. These guys were pretty mainstream in their days. More like listening to Captain Beefheart, I guess. Somebody freaky and underground and on the radio nowhere.
I, myself, was listening to The Dead Milkmen and You’ll Dance to Anything, which wasn’t on AOR radio, either :)
And that’s freaking remarkable. How many albums had they released by that time? All underground shit. Word of mouth, going to a record store and getting recommendations from the… guy… who was back behind the counter.
It was like mainstream didn’t want them to make it. Part of the point. They did / do their own thing and accept that as you will.
Robert Smith is actually an amazingly down to earth and humorous guy. His musical persona is definitely at odds with his personality in interviews.
Edit: this is purely from a US perspective. I imagine it was different in the UK.
Their second album hit the UK Top 20. Five years later, Head On the Door went Gold in the US. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me came after that and went platinum. Disintegration went double platinum.
Second album, what?
What are we looking at here…
I think you meant their first record. And really only in the UK.
Edit: NM, I was thinking single. 17 seconds didn’t have much there, but may have reached top 20 as a record in UK. Strangely.
Yes, it “strangely” hit number 20 in the UK, because it sold a lot of records there and got played on the radio.
I can promise you that circa 1984-85 in the US, you could not go into many dance clubs and not hear “Let’s Go To Bed”.
Lol Seventeen Seconds on UK radio? Really? Have you heard that record…
talk about morose.
Edit: Sorry. I shouldn’t have been skeptical. Are you living in UK?
Edit Edit: I see. A forest. Great fucking song deserved to sell that record.
A Forest:
It’s funny. One of the most popular clubs in San Franciso at the time (at least as I’m aware of, I was too young in 1981) was called “The Underground”. Kinda supports my point.
Uh, they were playing fucking Joy Division and PiL on the radio in the UK at that point in time… They could handle “A Forest”. :)
And the band did their first session on John Peel’s radio show on BBC1 in December, 1978.
No disrespect Triggercut. I was too young for dance clubs in 1981 and grew up in the US. US actively suppressed cure music on the radio. There was no internet. The only way to discover this music was word of mouth.
BTW, and I should say, I have a soft spot in my heart for The Cure. The Head On The Door is one of my favorite records of the '80s, and an underrated artistic achievement, notwithstanding selling a lot of copies. And the Cure’s singles collection on CD is a treasure.
But…at our college radio station in Columbia, MO in the late 1980s, the music staff decreed that The Cure were probably too mainstream (they were getting a lot of airplay on local FM rock radio by then) so they weren’t even added to the rotation, but could be spun once or twice per day if a DJ wanted to.
So did the Cure sell out to society, or did society sell out to the Cure. I vote the latter. They’ve always done their own thing. Disintegration came after Head on the Door as the too many Kiss Me record. Those are also both masterpieces.