This entry is a little different than the other albums [confusion.cc] I’ve posted because you can’t buy this album. At least not officially. It’s a bootleg of The Cure’s 1990 set at the Glastonbury Festival. I’m sure you can find it somewhere on the internet, but I actually bought this pre-Napster and still have the physical bootleg CDs.
In 1990 I was 12 and had never heard of The Cure. I think I first encountered The Cure a few years later when Friday, I’m in Love, from their 1992 release Wish [discogs.com], was in heavy rotation on MTV. I can remember sitting in K████’s living room every morning waiting on the school bus with K████ and M██████ and watching the music video. Good times, there are a lot of music videos from 1992/1993 burned into my memory from those mornings.
I didn’t catch The Cure bug for a few more years. In 1997, my girlfriend was big into The Cure. We listened to a lot of Cure in the car driving around. I actually bought the Glastonbury bootleg with her in a little shop on the downtown mall. It’s one of a number of bootlegs I got from the same guy. Mostly live stuff; Bush, The Chemical Brothers, Tori Amos, Jewel, Sarah McLachlan, others.
My love of The Cure long outlasted that relationship. I devoured their back catalog, and continued to follow them. It was their back catalog that really hooked me, Poronography [discogs.com], and The Walk [discogs.com] are awesome albums. But their masterpiece was Disintegration [discogs.com]; Fascination Street, Love Song, and Pictures of You, my three favorite Cure songs, all on the same album. Disintegration is Robert Smith’s masterpiece. As Tricky says in the liner notes to his 2003 entry in the Back to Mine [discogs.com] series: Robert Smith is the best love song writer in the world. All his lyrics and melodies are unbelievable
. For me that’s true. While Tricky picked Lullaby for his Back to Mine playlist, I would but Love Song and Pictures of You in my top few loves songs ever.
But the live performances at Glastonbury in 1990 is the one I’ve always come back to. It’s peak Cure. It was a year after Disintegration and includes a lot of songs from that album but also an amazing selection of songs from their earlier releases. And this era, 89, 90, 91, is the perfection of The Cure’s synth-goth-post-punk-shoegaze-alternative-rock sound. Even the older songs that might have been a little ‘meh’ on the original releases here have something extra, something amazing.
I wish I could post an Apple or Spotify link, but as a it’s a bootleg they don’t have it. The best I could do would be one of the official live releases from around this time; Show is the best option. But Show released on as single CDs you only get about 80 min while the 1990 set at Glastonbury was close to two full hours with the two encores (not including the helicopter landing to evacuate some lady who was getting crushed). But I can link to this YouTube video that seems to have the whole set. It’s an hour and forty-four minutes, enjoy: