The Lure of The Cure
By Murray Engleheart

"WHEN the Led Zeppelin film (The Song Remains The Same) was made, I didn't like it," muses Robert Smith,
leader of UK goth rockers The Cure.

"I thought it was completely overblown because they were trying to be something, they were trying to transcend
the genre that they were in and it never worked. It was kind of like a half-arsed attempt to be mystical."

The Cure's new two DVD live set, Trilogy, suffers from no such shortcomings. The glorious ambience of the
now quarter-century old British post-punk outfit proves to be utterly perfect cinematic fodder.

Recorded live in the Tempodrom in Berlin over two nights in November 2002, Trilogy offers more than three
hours of music, during which the band tackle the Pornography (1982), Disintegration (1989) and Bloodflowers
(2000) albums in their entity.

"The notion of it being a trilogy is kind of a false one really," explains Smith. "It's a notional trilogy. But I think
with making the film I've linked them forever, so whether anyone likes it or not they're together now.

"They were important to me as albums because they happened at times in my life when I was kind of like
looking back and taking stock. I think there are things, lyrical and musical things, running through them that with
a casual kind of acquaintance with any of the three albums you wouldn't really be aware of. But I think watching
them through the film you begin to understand how the progressions worked through the years."

The concept of the epic performance came to Smith during the tour for the Bloodflowers album, which saw parts
of the band's early catalogue make grandiose appearances nightly.

"I didn't think then we should do the three albums but I thought it would be really nice to do a show that just has
all these big emotional songs because it felt really great on stage while we were doing them," Smith says.

"When the tour ended, I thought we'd kind of missed the chance and it was only the following year that I started
to think, 'Well, maybe we should just do something, just a one-off'.

"Everyone thought it was a stupid idea actually when I first suggested it," he continues, "mainly because you'd
have to rehearse and set up as if we were doing a world tour in order just to do two shows.

"On that kind of level it was a pretty foolish undertaking. But I thought at the end of it, if we didn't do it I would
regret it. In five years time, we'll still have the Trilogy film and the cost of it . . . will be long forgotten."

Well, most things anyway. The horrors of the warm-up performance in Brussels three nights before the Berlin
shows will probably take a little longer to fade, despite a wildly enthusiastic audience. The lights didn't work, the
PA system played up and guitar amps just upped and died. There was an unspoken sinking feeling that the entire
venture was a huge mistake.

The Berlin performances, however, were nothing short of triumphant and afforded Smith the unique opportunity
to recast some of the band's performing history.

The making of the Pornography album, for instance, marked a low in the then band's inner relations, a situation
which saw them only perform a dozen or so shows on the subsequent tour before imploding.

In a sense, Trilogy provides a second coming for that material, thus making the visual presentation of these
albums crucial.

"We tried to make the show itself look a certain way," says Smith. "We lit it so that Pornography was lit much
more starkly and put drapes up.

"When I was editing the film, there's a lot more dreamier kind of quality to the Disintegration stuff and
Pornography (got) a lot more savage editing. So I was trying to get three distinct things that would look and
sound different but they had to hang together, so it was a kind of balancing act."

While much of Smith's work in The Cure has drawn on classic literature and film, for the Trilogy event he was
more interested in framing a moment than artistically expanding on it.

"When it came down to it all, what I wanted to end up with was a film of a show. I was trying to get this line-up
playing what I think are the three best Cure albums," he says.

"It was a response . . . to the fact that it's 25 years for The Cure and we didn't re-sign with any of the labels
we've been on since we very first started.

"I was very conscious of kind of making a break with the past and I really wanted something to commemorate
what we've done up until that point because what we do next will be very different."

(Thanks to Jo Westacott for the transcription!)