The Cure released their third album, 'Faith' nearly three months before this performance. Only the title track and Doubt were not performed at this festival.
A show infamous for the somewhat fallible memory of Robert Smith who was quoted as saying.
We'd only been on for about half an hour and everything was running late, so Robert Palmer's road crew started motioning to us to stop. This bloke ran on and said "If you don't stop playing, we're gonna pull the plug". Simon immediately walked to the mike and shouted 'Fuck Robert Palmer! Fuck rock 'n' roll!' and we started playing a really slow version of 'A Forest' which lasted about 15 minutes. It was fucking brilliant. Unfortunately, when we finished, they threw all our stuff off the back of the stage."
The actual turn of events can be heard on this excellent hour long FM broadcast. A recording and performance that is the best from the 'Seventeen Seconds' and 'Faith' era.
The Cure
Rock Werchter Festival
Festival Park
Werchter, Belgium
July 5, 1981
FM master (2 broadcasts)>CDR>CDR>EAC>Flac>SF8>FLAC (see notes)
Broadcasts:
Hilversum 3 broadcast / a Forest is cut
Hilversum 3 broadcast / only a Forest
01. intro
02. The Holy Hour
03. In Your House
04. The Drowning Man
05. 10:15 Saturday Night
06. Accuracy
07. The Funeral Party
08. M
09. Primary
10. Other Voices
11. All Cats Are Grey
12. Fire In Cairo
13. Play For Today
14. A Forest
Thank you to lepep, who sent the source flac files to me.
I've removed the incomplete A Forest and edited in the complete song to form a complete show. The source and mix were the same, so this edit is not detectable. Recording volume of show raised slightly.
Seeded to PPTC/forever drowning in torrent 2005-01-19
All editing by terrapinstation 2005-01-19
Another Porky Prime Cut From Terrapin Station!!
LINK
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much
ReplyDeleteCheers, love The Cure.
ReplyDeleteGot back into them again recently (revisiting old faves of the past)... The last time I went to watch them live was in the late 1980's. (saw them a few times during that decade)
Cheers for posting this, you must have read my mind!
I was all set to see them in 1982, they were playing the day before the Clash, Joe Strummer disappeared and the Casbah Club tour was cancelled and I never made the long trip from home. In those days you could buy a ticket on the door and walk in to see the Cure.
ReplyDeleteIt never ceases to amaze me how popular they are today, it just seemed so unlikely in the early 80's
I saw them in 1985 on Head on the Door tour in Detroit at Pine Knob when they played Faith again for the first time in a long time (according to R. Smith). I had a bet with my girlfriend they'd play it. I won. It was an amazing night. HOTD was the last good Cure album.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a brilliant night.
ReplyDeleteDisintegration from 89 and the boots from 90 are pretty good. I hadn't listened to Bloodflowers for a long time until just after posting this so it was quite a surprise that it was much better than I thought when I first heard it.
Yeah, I'll give you that. Disintegration was much better than the album before it (KMKMKM? can't even remember the name), but nowhere near as good as the 70s-mid 80s stuff. I saw them in Ann Arbor in 1984, too. That was a strange night and I was having a really horrible week, so I couldn't enjoy the show. I was only 15, and I had to lie to my parents about where I was going, and even before the show I knew they had found out. So, the 1986 show (although at a huge venue with 20K seats) was so much nicer for me.
Delete