The Cure Tickets, 2008 North America 4Tour; to Goth or not to Goth?

English rock has been at the top of its game for decades, with the sounds, styles, and fury that drove us all wacky with glee. The unlikely-looking band from Crawley, Sussex, who formed in 1976, are one of the most charismatic of them all, and anyone attending college back in 1982 will remember that virtually every member of the Art department suddenly morphed into a disheveled-yet-somehow-smart-looking ghost-figure, one that was to multiply beyond those eclectic academic corridors and out into the streets. It was an epidemic, but was there a cure? Cure front-man, guitarist, songwriter, and all-round strange person Robert Smith has represented the one constant in the equation since the clever Crawley lads first emerged from whatever bizarre architecture you might fancy spawned them. Smith's appearance has always elicited images of moonlit cobbles, dripping black railings, macabre towers, and forbidding staircases threading between swooning medieval facades that almost meet overhead, and his music, somehow nothing like that at all, has been forever pigeonholed with that image, despite its often sunny, playful and experimental nature. When the people hunting The Cure tickets took on that unmistakable appearance, and it had Robert Smith written all over it, a collective misunderstanding was born. Never has the world of rock 'n' roll seen such a widespread identikit of a single musical icon; Smith clones sprouted up all over Christendom and beyond, to the distant glades of Asia. Dark thoughts, dark buildings, dark hair, and white faces were the order of the day. One can imagine Smith's utter horror and satisfaction, as he surveyed his subjects, like a pharaoh born into his realm, with only the style and effect of his bloodline to keep him company. People wanted to buy The Cure tickets, lots and lots of tickets to The Cure, and Smith stood paralyzed in the head-lamp beam of his own bizarre countenance. Behind the mask, something stirred, and then set off to take the media and legions of fans on a wild goose chase.

The white face and black lips came to say something to people which The Cure might not have really said, and the whole of the rock world was peculiarly put on notice as to the emergence of what was believed to be a new musical and lifestyle genre - but Smith wasn't happy, and he pressed on to dissociate himself from the impressions his art had wrought on the complexion of youth culture.

"Three Imaginary Boys", The Cure's debut album, and their early singles, saw the band placed neatly among the rest of New Wave/post Punk of the early 1980s in the UK, but the band's accelerated tendency towards dark and stormy skies, pale faces, windswept scenes of angst and frustration, caused them to feel mired in something other than and previous to their ever-changing style. 1982's Pornography, plus that year's single "Let's Go to Bed" saw a more lighthearted angle finding purchase amid The Cure's catalog, and the familiar laughing nightmare quality of Smith's jarring, youthful voice melted and honeycombed the outdated glacier of his personal Fortress of Solitude. This was a move toward Pop, which increased as the 80 swore on, and in the USA tracks such as "Friday I'm in Love" hit the Billboard Top 40 charts and kick-started a media love affair not unlike that created by their distant fascination with Ian Curtis years earlier. The Cure tickets were as desirable as virtually any rock band alive. Today, The Cure are among the toppermost alternative rock groups on this sometimes dark planet with 30 million albums sold during their illustrious career.

Rock stars since the late-50s have toyed with the notion of presenting a black and white (mostly black) image to the world, with hair, clothes, and even lipstick featuring heavily, but it was really Smith who put this style on a bullseye for media cliche-hawks. Smith and The Cure have been compared to Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bauhaus, and The Sisters of Mercy, all very well respected engineers of rock, but he somehow remains the one we all want to believe was the original - the primal soul who spawned that entire subculture. Whether it's Johnny Cash, Jim Morrison, Roy Orbison, Siouxsie Sioux, or Andrew Eldritch, it always feels like it's a relative of but not the real Robert Smith...Get your tickets to The Cure 2008 North America 4Tour, you know you've gotta, you know you wanna...