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last update: 14. Feb 2024

1980-04-20 Boston - The Underground (USA/MA)
 

setlist unknown

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Mainset:
Seventeen Seconds
Play For Today
Three Imaginary Boys
Fire In Cairo
Grinding Halt
In Your House
Subway Song
M
10.15 Saturday Night
Accuracy
At Night
Boys Don't Cry
Jumping Someone Else's Train
Another Journey By Train
A Forest
Encore 1:
Plastic Passion
Killing An Arab
Encore 2:
Secrets
Seventeen Seconds
Robert Smith
Simon Gallup
Laurence Tolhurst
Matthieu Hartley
Songs played: 19  (15 | 2 | 2)

Day of the week: Sunday

Attendance: ~300 ??
Capacity: 103

Mainset:
[unknown]
Seventeen Seconds
-
Play For Today
hello we're the cure. [...] but it's a bit hot
Three Imaginary Boys
-
Fire In Cairo
-
Grinding Halt
-
In Your House
-
Subway Song
thank you
M
-
10.15 Saturday Night
-
Accuracy
thank you. this next one's called 'at night'
At Night
now this one's our pop song
Boys Don't Cry
-
Jumping Someone Else's Train
 
Another Journey By Train
thank you. this is the final song supposely. and is the new single in england. is called 'a forest'
A Forest
that's supposed to be good night
Encore 1:
[unknown]
Plastic Passion
ah, this is gonna be the final song. and is dedicated to [...] 'object', cause we don't know objects. but it is an object. is this
Killing An Arab
thank you, good night
Encore 2:
yeah allright this is for you. this is the first few bits, right
Secrets
right this is gonna be the final one. it's dedicated to 'mission of burma'
Seventeen Seconds
thank you, good night. and happy birthday
stage banter segments may be wrong or incomplete
[...] marks unknown banter segments
media type: Concert
hosted by:
recording date:
broadcast date:
performance:
13 Songs
A Forest
Soundboard
from Dymphna (who attended this concert) :
[when asked if the show was played in Boston or Allston.]
... yes, I did get a chance to check it out it was the 21st of April....the show was on Robert's Birthday....
it is Alston, which is a tiny suburb of Boston....
It was on April 20th 1980 ..... here is a link that backs that up: missionofburma.com
Plus the date on the tapes I have from recording them also say April 20th 1980.
direct link: missionofburma.com/shows_body_80.html
.....Alston is a part of Boston it's a Boston neighborhood....like the Bronx is a neighborhood of New York City. The Underground was located in the basement of a building owned by Boston University. A tiny corridor of a place. No stage just a small space to set up for live music. It was packed wall to wall the Cure's music was very popular with the locals back then.
from kinodv.net
[me asking: was the concert filmed in black/white and later colorized?]
no not exactly.....there were four black and white cameras and they were looped into a special effects generator. This allowed the director, in this case, me to switch from one camera to another during the performance. However the SEG went on the blink before the show and the engineer I was working with....smart guy from MIT said: "You can't switch the cameras but I can turn three of the four cameras into primary colors of a video signal....red, green, and blue...the fourth camera could remain black and white and the image would be layered."
So I said let's take a look...so what you see is what you got from having decided to go with the bw and colored layered look.....we filmed Mission of Burma who opened up for the Cure liked what we saw and decided to go with it....there was no other choice but to use one black and white camera at that point and that didn't feel right...so I went with the look you see.....you have to understand this was 1980 before camcorders, vhs decks, mtv, and video in clubs....that all came a couple of years later. I filmed many bands with the equipment used by the film department at MIT because I helped teach a documentary performance class......I went to your site and read the accounts of the evening and they are close but not exact.......most of the band and road crew came to MIT with me after the show to view the video...........they stayed most of the night.....don't remember showing any homemovies we just watched the Underground stuff over and over...I made they dubs of the tapes and showed them the door at dawn.......the stuff with Robert pulverizing his thumb might have happened after they left MIT.....who knows..... that was the last I heard from them.....
from book 'Ten Imaginary Years'
On 10 April, The Cure went to America for the first time.
Robert: "We'd obtained cult status out there but we only played New York, Philly, Washington and Boston. We played three nights - 15, 16 and 17th - at Hurrah in New York and it was packed."
Simon: "It was done on a shoe-string budget but it was lots of fun. Instead of having cans of beer backstage, we'd have shots of Southern Comfort!"
Robert: "It was like a holiday. Even at this point, everything we did, we didn't think we'd be doing again so we used to go to bed at about five in the morning and get up again at eight just to go out and see New York."
On his return, Robert told Record Mirror how America meant "being bombarded by people who all ask the same questions and all want to shake your hand . . . you just find yourself getting sucked into the whole rock 'n' roll trip which we're trying so hard to get away from" while Sounds' Phil Sutcliffe, who'd accompanied the band to New York. told, in an article "Somebody Get Me A Doctor", how Robert had done his utmost to avoid having his picture taken with Debby Harry.
Robert: "My 21st birthday happened in Boston and, after the gig, Bill and the four of us got taken to some art media event by this guy who was making a video of us. We had some drugs. I remember a TV and a set of homemade videos and we got bored and insisted this bloke drove us back to our hotel so he took us in his Beetle - the five of us and his girlfriend!"
"It was a little cramped so I got out and sat on the bonnet - it was about five in the morning so we thought we'd take the risk. Bill then decided to drive and went the wrong way round a roundabout without thinking. When he realised it, of course, he just kept on going round, laughing insanely and then he got hysterical, got a flat, slewed across the road and I fell off the bonnet."
"I tried to change the wheel - I don't know why I was doing it - but I couldn't understand why the hub-cap wouldn't go back on so I started kicking it, and it was only a few seconds later, when the pain suddenly reached my brain, that I realised the reason the hub cap wouldn't go back on was because my thumb was trapped underneath it. I'd just reduced it to pulp!"
"After that we drove to New York overnight but ended up in Cape Cod because Bill had taken a wrong turn! We eventually arrived at the airport just in time to catch the plane to get back to London for Top Of The Pops."
from book 'A Visual Documentary'
21 APRIL 1980
The Underground Club, Boston. It is Robert's 21st birthday, and to celebrate, the band come on stage almost an hour and a half late. Robert then breaks his thumb changing the wheel on the van on the way to the airport.
"So we got all these bands that really had no business playing a room with a capacity of 103 people." Whittaker says.
Three hundred people showed up for the Cure show, the same week they would release sophomore album Seventeen Seconds. They were paid $800. "There was no space to move" Whittaker says.
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8 songs
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Plastic Passion = cut
list of recordings may be incomplete and could contain wrong informations
The Cure
Mission of Burma
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    The Cure appearances at this venue:
    1. 1980-04-20 The Underground
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    Please send tickets and adverts, stories, photos, recordings and other relevant information.
    Thanks very much to everyone sending mails with contributions for the website.
    Please be patient,
    I'll include it all ASAP.