Back to the eighties: an evening with The Cult

I went to see The Cult yesterday evening. They reunited after five years for a brief one-month, 19-show tour, and this was the last night. It was an excellent show - bring back memories of earlier times I'd seen them in the eighties and nineties. Ah, my goth days...

The show started with the theme music from a Clockwork Orange, and then they started playing at full blast: Lil' Devil, Sweet Soul Sister, The Witch. Ian Astbury was a little hoarse and had to shout some of the lyrics instead of singing them, but he loosened up as the night progressed. Billy Duffy was in great form throughout - the guitar drove the sound, and boy he can play.

I forget the order of the songs that followed, but they included relatively unknown songs like Libertine (the "Rise" single B-side); Brother Wolf, Sister Moon (from the Love album); Peace Dog; and old favorites such as Fire Woman, Rise, Wonderland, Revolution, Rain and Fire. The only albums that got neglected were the early "Dreamtime" (little known in the US) and "The Cult", one of the later albums that was more Duffy's than Astbury's.

There were three encores: Edie (Ciao Baby) was played acoustically, followed by the required crowd pleasers of She Sells Sanctuary and Love Removal Machine.


The audience was quite different from the last time I saw them (at Roseland in 2001): fewer heavies with leather jackets and tattoos; more people in their 30s and 40s - yes, we all get older. Time Out may describe The Cult as a nineties hair band similar to Poison, but a thousand-odd people clearly disagreed.

All in all, a great show. Let's see what the live recording from Instant Live sounds like.

Shut up already! A pet peeve

As I was waiting for The Cult concert to start, I was pretty much forced to listen to two inane women in the seats behind me. Buy, they were annoying... two sisters from Lawn Guyland, with shrieking voices shouting to their male friend, both trying to talk/shout at the same time, much of the time.

In the half hour of wait time before the concert started, they discussed their previous coke and heroin addiction ("I quit in 1997. That's 10 years ago this year"), the birth weight of their children, the number of ceasarean operations they'd had, and how much they could drink in college compared to now.

What is it that people need to shout this out? It's the same on the subway once it becomes the El - out come the cellphones, and people start discussing intimate things at high volume. No girl, I did *not* want to overhear how many times you had a**l sex with your boyfriend of three weeks, and how much it hurt at first. Please keep that to yourself. And no man, I don't need to hear you boats how you slapped "your woman" around - if I were (a) less of a woos and (b) sure you weren's actually boasting, I might to do the same to you.


I'll have to buy a cellphone jammer when they start allowing those darn things on airplanes...