The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst: ‘Goth is about being in love with the melancholy beauty of existence’

The band’s co-founder – whose new book examines the emergence of post-punk in Thatcher’s Britain – on reconciling with Robert Smith and the real meaning of the dark music subculture

It’s a long time since Lol Tolhurst last played drums or keyboards for the Cure, the band he co-founded in the late 1970s with his schoolfriend Robert Smith. But occasionally he still finds himself striving to explain what the songs of those early years were all about. In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, early Cure classics such as Seventeen Seconds and A Strange Day sounded a note of existential angst in teenage bedrooms across the land. The lyrics to A Forest, released in 1979, communicate the general vibe: “The girl was never there/ It’s always the same/ I’m running towards nothing/ Again and again and again and again…” Sadly, the cathartic power of such virtuoso melancholy has not always been obvious to everyone.

“In conversations I’ve had all around the world,” Tolhurst says, “the thing that’s irked me is when people say: ‘Oh but the music is so depressing and you’re so depressed, and people listening must end up becoming more and more unhappy and even harming themselves.’

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/ExdiWaF

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tadej Pogacar completes emphatic debut victory at the Giro d’Italia

Dominant Pogacar wins by biggest margin since 1965 Tim Merlier outsprints Jonathan Milan to take final stage Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar emphatically won the Giro d’Italia on his debut when he retained his unassailable overall lead after the 21st and final stage in Rome on Sunday, winning by the biggest overall margin since 1965. The 25-year-old UAE Team Emirates rider had been in the leader’s pink jersey since winning stage two, the first of his six stage successes, and finished the ceremonial 125km flat run on Sunday safely in the bunch as Tim Merlier won the stage. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/fYFnoe3
Read more

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more