Show Review, Photos: The Cure Beautifully Kick Off Summer Concert Season in Mountain View
The Cure
w/ The Twilight Sad
Shoreline Amphitheatre
Mountain View, CA
May 27th, 2023
Review and Photos by Jared Stossel
The start of summer is always signified for me by one thing: the start of amphitheater shows throughout the Bay Area. Once the sunshine is out, some of the biggest acts in the world take to the stage at venues like Concord Pavilion and Toyota Amphitheatre in Sacramento. We haven’t even mentioned the more intimate locales like Saratoga’s Mountain Winery. There’s a feeling of calm that always falls over me when the sun is setting, the harsh sunlight finally disappears as it crests below the horizon, and the music continues into the cool night. Mountain View’s legendary Shoreline Amphitheatre has had quite the start to its concert season, playing host to Shania Twain last Friday, followed immediately by the first of two performances by one of the most fabled acts in all of goth rock, The Cure. For three hours yesterday evening, the Robert Smith-led sextet led the crowd through a rendition of their biggest and best post-punk anthems that defined a generation, while simultaneously introducing the crowd to a collection of brand-new songs.
The evening’s only opening act was The Twilight Sad, a five-piece post-punk act hailing from Scotland. The band’s animated and engaging vocalist James Graham led the crowd through a number of songs from their extensive discography, which perfectly set the tone for a band like The Cure. Their songs have a somberness to them, yet that feeling is coupled with indie-rock energy that keeps your eyes affixed to the stage as they tell you their story, song after song. With the sun beating down on them, the musical tone was quite a juxtaposition to the moody Scottish melodies.
A white noise track played as the stage sat empty, the sound of pouring rain accentuated by thunder and lightning adding a sense of atmosphere to the packed amphitheater. Other than last year’s Dead and Company performances, this may have been the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen at Shoreline Amphitheatre in nearly two decades of attending shows here. The storm gets louder, the excited crowd matching the decibel levels as strobe lights flicker on the stage to mimic the approaching lightning strike. The band takes the stage and the crowd loses their mind. Bassist Simon Gallup, keyboardist Roger O’Donnell, guitarists Perry Bamonte and Reeves Gabrels, and drummer Jason Cooper man their respective instruments as vocalist Robert Smith saunters out on stage, taking his time. The Cure hasn’t performed in the Bay Area since 2016, and it was very easy to see how much everyone was ready to welcome them back.
After opening with “Alone” and Disintegration’s “Pictures Of You”, the band dove headfirst into a massive catalog of songs and played without missing a step for nearly three hours. Their extensive setlist ranged from 1980’s Seventeen Seconds (“A Forest”, “At Night”) to 2000’s Bloodflowers (“The Last Day of Summer”). I struggled to find a moment in the show that I didn’t like. The Cure’s appeal all these years later is incredibly obvious: they know exactly how to put on a show and still maintain their freshness as an act. It’s no wonder they’re still selling out amphitheaters and headlining festivals the world over nearly four decades into their career, despite having not released an album since 2008.
After wrapping up with “Endsong”, the band returned to the stage for the first of two encores. The evening’s first encore included five songs (“I Can Never Say Goodbye”, “It Can Never Be The Same”, “Plainsong”, “Prayers For Rain”, and “Disintegration”) before kicking off a hit-filled second encore comprised of nine tracks. The biggest audience reactions came during essential entries like “Friday I’m In Love”, “Close To Me”, “Just Like Heaven”, and “Boys Don’t Cry”.
This was my first time getting a chance to see The Cure in person, and I was truly stunned by how good they were. Not that I expected anything less, but you never know these days. Some of the older acts that tour nowadays seem like they’d rather be anywhere else but the stage, yet I never got that feeling from the English six-piece. If there weren’t a curfew, they would have stayed on the stage for another hour, and the crowd would have stayed. It was a Saturday night, and there was no place else that anyone would rather have been than right there. Summer nights were meant for moments like this.
The Cure will perform a second show tomorrow night at Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheatre before continuing their tour in Portland, OR. For more information on showtime and tickets, click here.
The Cure Set List
Alone
Pictures of You
A Night Like This
Lovesong
And Nothing Is Forever
The Last Day of Summer
A Fragile Thing
Burn
At Night
Push
In Between Days
A Forest
Shake Dog Shake
From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea
Endsong
Encore:
I Can Never Say Goodbye
It Can Never Be The Same
Plainsong
Prayers For Rain
Disintegration
Encore 2:
Lullaby
Six Different Ways
Hot Hot Hot!!!!
The Walk
Friday I’m In Love
Doing The Unstuck
Close To Me
Just Like Heaven
Boys Don’t Cry
