The year was 1980 and my sister (a minor at the time) wanted to go see the Cure in Concert but needed an escort and my parents refused to let her go without either me or my older brother going along. I obviously declined as in those days being a male and a fan of the Cure or ANYTHING resembling the Cure meant that you forgo sports and lived a life of darkness, sadness, smoking cigarettes in a back ally surrounded by the infamous “nerine” (young women wearing dark makeup and anything black. My sister got clever and got 8 of her friends to pitch in 2,000 lire each and so with 16,000 lire (later discounted down to 15,000) and a free concert ticket I reluctantly became the escort of 8 fourteen-year-old “Nerine”.
The sadness and squalor of the outside of the concert did nothing else but confirm my darkest fears, I was in for 2 hours of hell. We descended on the main floor and waited, waited… and out of the darkness the Cure appeared and kicked me in the balls like few groups ever did!
Amazing…
I was instantly hooked but being the jock that I was I could not proclaim my new found love of the dark wave and so I began at least 5 years of being a closet dark wave fan, hiding my stash of records, going incognito to concerts, and playing Seventeen Seconds only under the cover of darkness.
I put “Seventeen Seconds” in my Top 100 List of albums to listen any day, any time simply because it has quite possibly the most devastating and perfect Side A “Scaletta”
- Reflection
- Play for Today
- Secrets
- In Your House
- Three
Delivering blow after blow of musical awesomeness and impossible to hear in any other order. Side 2 is a little weaker, but great, nonetheless.
The real struggle for me was to choose only ONE record of the Cure to put on my list and while the temptation was to also add “Disintegration Street: 1989 and “The Head on the Door: 1985” I forced myself to pick on, and as such I stayed with the original one, the one that opened the door for me and allowed to descend into a genre that up to that point was forbidden for the likes of me.
Impossible to NOT have in your vinyl collection.