Our pasts do not determine us. We become who we are according to how we orientate ourselves towards the future. How we each imagine the future, and how the promise of the future is affected by our understanding, our experience, conscious and unconscious, of our pasts.
There’s only one band that I can listen to over and over again. I love The Cure. I find a lot of what I listen to disappoints me, and that the things I like listening to don’t often match with what Robert Smith says he likes most. But what I like I like I love.
I’m not particularly fond of listening to them live unless it’s in a small space.Starting seeing bands at places like The Greyhound in Croydon, or even the Brixton Academy, set me against ever seeing a band in a stadium, or a field. I need walls, a bit of claustrophobia, no rain, less of a sense of a way out, and I need to be able to see into the eyes of whoever’s singing.
Maybe they could see me, if I could do that. Listening to a band means watching a band, and needs to be more sex (not like it, but it) than entertainment. They can’t be interchangeable. There needs to be nothing else like them.
Nothing else. The nothing else of the Cure is my big nothing else: the thing I’m referring to when I think ‘it’s like nothing else’. The Cure were an event that happened to me mostly around 1980, before Youtube, or even MTV, when a band, like many other things, needed to be kept alive in my imagination with help from things I barely noticed: posters, album covers, ticket stubs, t-shirts, conversations, picking out bass lines on a guitar.
And as I imagine something else might have in another time, Chopin, Bach or someone, The Cure helped me hold together the world I was living in. They were music for a South London suburb. Victorian graves, churches that Pissarro painted, The Bethlem Royal Hospital,
I have no