The Cure’s Splendour in the Grass set to stretch for three hours

Robert Smith and his goth-pop band have lately been entertaining crowds with set lists encompassing the Cure’s career.

Robert Smith of the Cure, a band that wraps up its shows with four generous encores.

SD comes to you this week from what will be, hopefully, a rain-free Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay, where the longest and for many the most anticipated performance of the weekend comes from those goth-pop veterans the Cure. Robert Smith and his chums are to perform for three hours this evening a show that, on recent evidence overseas, touches on most parts of the band’s extensive career, stretching back to its fledgling days in the late 1970s. SD was fortunate enough to see the Cure back then, when the band’s single Killing an Arab turned heads, not least because of the title, but also because it was so strikingly different to anything else coming out of the post-punk period in London. The Cure has changed the title and lyric of the song a number of ways on the occasions it has played it in the past 10 years or so, but it has been absent from recent performances, including the group’s three-hour epic last weekend in Hawaii. The current show has four encores consisting of four songs each, approximately. It would be interesting to see what would happen if no one clapped after the first one, but such a scenario seems unlikely.

Thank you to those who responded to last week’s column about the substance and authenticity of tours by acts whose principal members are no longer part of the ensemble. I was talking in particular about From the Jam, which features the Jam’s bassist Bruce Foxton, and English veterans the Troggs, whose only remaining original member is guitarist Chris Britton. Both acts are about to appear in Australia. Opinion was divided between those who thought such tours are, and I’m quoting here, “deceiving the consumer”, to others who felt no harm is done by such enterprises. A popular suggestion was that musos such as Britton and Foxton should trade under their own name, while acknowledging their origins in the marketing of gigs. Sounds like a logical idea.

Former Go-Between Robert Forster (who performed at Splendour yesterday) is only a month away from publishing his memoir, Grant and I: Inside and Outside the Go-Betweens, which in great detail and no doubt exemplary prose details the long friendship and musical collaboration of that band’s two songwriters, the other being Grant McLennan, who died 10 years ago at the age of 48. It’s a much anticipated read from Forster, a musician who has also proved himself as a writer and critic in recent years in publications such as The Monthly and The Saturday Paper. Most interesting will be how he addresses the period around the break-up of the original Go-Betweens in 1989, an occasion described by Forster recently as “savage and abrupt” and the end of “a nasty treadmill”, one on which the group wasn’t earning any money. This will surely be of particular interest to the two other members of the band at the time, drummer Lindy Morrison, who had a long-term personal relationship with Forster, and multi-instrumentalist Amanda Brown, who was in a relationship with McLennan. At a recent music industry function Morrison was keen to share her thoughts on this and indeed the title of the book with yours truly. One will be seeking further comment from her once she has had a chance to read it, if indeed she has decided to go down that path. The book is published by Penguin on August 24.