As many of you know, The Cure is my favorite band. Always has been and always will be. Their music is a huge part of my life, and a huge influence on my own music.
Robert Smith is 57 now (and to be honest, until I wrote this sentence I thought he was older than that, so I’m glad to know that he should still be around a while haha). From 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys (the year before I was born) right up until 2008’s 4:13 Dream, The Cure’s sound has evolved in ways that somehow manage to be exactly what my brain was formed wanting to hear. While my favorite album of all time is their Disintegration, everything they’ve done has had a meaningful effect on me and some of my favorite songs come from each of the albums in their long discography.
I had seen them 4 times up until this point. The first time wasn’t until 2000 because the opportunity never arose when I lived back in Pennsylvania, but the first time they came to Las Vegas after I moved here, I was there. I saw them again at Coachella in 2004. After their most recent album, 4:13 Dream came out, I saw them twice – once in LA in 2008 and then back in Las Vegas in 2009. It’s been 7 long years since then, but this past week I got to add two more amazing shows to my list.
Their 2006 World Tour predictably was selling out in seconds in each city that it went on sale in, so when I got shut out of Las Vegas tickets, I decided to be at my computer right at 10am when they went on sale to try to score Los Angeles tickets to see them at the Hollywood Bowl. Sure enough, I got LA tickets, but not Las Vegas. But then when the week of The Cure’s Las Vegas show at the Chelsea inside the Cosmopolitan Hotel came up (there’s a lot of C-words in that sentence), I couldn’t help myself and bought an overpriced scalped ticket. I’m glad I did, because at the Las Vegas show, I was able to get right up close in a way I hadn’t been since the first time I saw them back in 2000. Don’t get me wrong, the Hollywood Bowl show was awesome too, but even with buying the tickets the second they went on sale, we were back what seemed like 100s of rows from the stage. Whatever, it was still amazing.
What makes this tour especially awesome, and the reason really that I’m writing this blog, is the deep history of songs they’re going back and playing. Aside from a couple of new cuts (both of which are excellent and I can’t wait for the new album to come… hopefully this decade), The Cure isn’t really promoting an album currently, so they took this tour as an opportunity to just dig into their long song list, pulling out tracks they hadn’t played in decades… some that they hadn’t played EVER. Of course they played the hits and crowd-favorites too, but this tour is really something special for fans like me who have trouble making even a 30 song playlist of favorites.
The Cure at The Chelsea inside The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas on Thursday, May 19th, 2016
And that all brings me to the real point of this blog… To show off a list I made of ALL the songs they played between the two shows I saw. This list isn’t necessarily in order, and it doesn’t include songs they played at both shows. This way it’s just a full list of all the songs they played… All 43 of them… That’s right… FORTY THREE songs between two, two and a half hour shows. Here’s the list:
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Open
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High
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Pictures of You
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This Twilight Garden
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A Night Like This
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Lovesong
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A Letter to Elise
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Last Dance
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Fascination Street
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The Hungry Ghost
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Screw
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Lullaby
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The Caterpillar
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Exploding Boy
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In Between Days
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Just Like Heaven
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If Only Tonight We Could Sleep
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Want
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End
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It Can Never Be The Same
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The Snakepit
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Shake Dog Shake
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From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea
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A Forest
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Step Into the Light
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Never Enough
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Burn
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Wrong Number
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Hot Hot Hot
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Let’s Go to Bed
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Close to Me
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Why Can’t I Be You?
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Boys Don’t Cry
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Plainsong
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Closedown
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Sleep When I’m Dead
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The Walk
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Push
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2 Late
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Disintegration
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Give Me It
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The Lovecats
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Freakshow
Wow. Just looking back at it, it’s really amazing. I’m so lucky to have gotten to go to these shows and hear these songs live.
So now that that’s over, it’s time for me to get back to work on my own music and Album #3.
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David Rosen is an award-winning music composer. He composes original music for films, commercials, jingles, video-games and all other kinds of media projects. He has a vast music library of original tracks available for licensing and is also available for custom compositions. Contact him on the ABOUT page for pricing and availability for your next project.