Yesterday night The Cure ended their recent Dutch tour with a gig in the Muziekcentrum.
It was the third time The Cure was playing there. Since the first gig here is due to the succes of their second LP Seventeen seconds, who became gold in the Netherlands, lots of things changed of their image.
This record was followed up by two other qualitative and succesful less LP's. Pornography is the next album.
The first thing what we noticed was that they did big investments in their apparature and especially in visual entourage.
There was for example an impressive lightsealing and they worked with lots of lights and spots around the group and the drums were on a higher place located with build-in lights.
As intro there was a nothing interesting movie that lasts 10 minutes.
From time to time it is neccesary for a popgroup to change your image so the bandmembers had longer hair comparing with the past and they weared lots of red make-up.
Especially the bass guitarist Simon Gallup was looking weird like a intersection of a charming Siouxsie Sioux and a military blitz-punk with for example a heavy bulletholder around his waist.
Drummer Laurence Tolhurst was surrounded with a rosary.
What did this all express or add to the earlier Cure? Unfortunately nothing.
The magic of the first hour was gone. The fans from The Cure how they were in the past were mostly gone, replaced by new and most younger people (sometimes just 12 year old ).
The sound of The Cure is known, monotonous, summery and depressed sound serve like food for the complaining melancholic voice sound of Robert Smith.
Monotonous works adverse to the group in the end , especially the newer songs look too much on eachother so it gets boring.
Remarkable enough, also for the audience, were the older songs like Three imaginary boys and Killing an Arab the better ones.
The concert was good sometimes, mostly enjoying but sometimes boring too.
It seems it goes with this group like with many other groups : what first was a succesformule with capacity is now turned into emptyness and fashionable.
More interesting was the group Mekanik Kommando from Nijmegen who played before The Cure this evening.
They played light experimental slow dark romantic music on two bassguitars, synthesizers, a rythmbox , electric viol and real additional percussion.
