The rumors were true: Depeche Mode will join their contemporaries in The Cure as headliners at this October’s Austin City Limits Music Festival, according to the official lineup revealed tonight. The festival also will feature appearances by Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace, Muse and Wilco.
This year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival won’t officially announce its lineup until May 7, but the event’s organizers are cleverly planting clues around Austin in newspaper ads, plastic cups, T-shirts and even bottle caps. And it’s the latter that, by all appearances, confirms The Cure will play the Texas festival.
We’ve been marveling at the length of The Cure’s sets on the band’s just-completed Latin American tour, but last night’s concert in Mexico City took the (birthday) cake: Celebrating his 54th birthday, Robert Smith led the band through a 50-song set that lasted 4 hours and 16 minutes.
Tonight’s edition of “Dark Wave” — the Sunday night “darker side of alternative” show on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave — celebrated the birthday today of Robert Smith, with selections from The Cure, plus Smith solo tracks and associated music by The Glove, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Tim Pope and more.
Gary Biddles, a onetime roadie for The Cure who sang in Fools Dance and Presence in the ’80s and ’90s, each of which featured members of that band, has died, according to former Cure keyboardist Lol Tolhurst. The details surrounding Biddles’ death are not yet known.
Here’s a fun find by our friends at Chain of Flowers: Video footage of The Cure’s Robert Smith hamming it up for what presumably is a commercial of some sort by Chilean promoters to sell tickets to the band’s concert this weekend in Santiago. The Cure is slated to play Asunción, Paraguay, tonight.
The readers of Slicing Up Eyeballs named The Cure’s grim third album ‘Faith’ as the best record of 1981, an accolade that led then-drummer Lol Tolhurst to reflect this week on that “very emotional and intense period of my life,” and thank fans for the fact that the album “still resonates with people all these years later.”
Eight months after first announcing plans for a new album, The Mission have convened in England to begin recording with producer David M. Allen — who has worked with The Cure, Depeche Mode, Wire and The Sisters of Mercy — and this week announced a new record deal and plans to release the album in September.
As fully expected after last week’s big leak, the lineup for this summer’s Lollapalooza festival in Chicago was announced today, with headliners that include The Cure and Nine Inch Nails, as well as an appearance by New Order. Check out the full lineup; single day tickets on sale Wednesday.
We’ve already speculated as to why there’s a good chance we’ll see The Cure and New Order on the bill of August’s Lollapalooza, and now comes a photo of what’s purported to be a poster featuring the Chicago festival’s yet-to-be-announced lineup, headlined by Robert Smith and Co.
The Cure and New Order each will return to North America this summer, as both bands were announced this week as headliners at Montreal’s three-day Osheaga Festival Musique et Arts in early August — a billing that will put the two legendary acts just hours away from Chicago, which hosts Lollapalooza that same weekend.
Today we unveil the results of Part 1 of our year-long Best of the ’80s feature, an ambitious, year-by-year poll of Slicing Up Eyeballs’ readers to determine just what were the best albums of each year of the 1980s — and then, when that’s all said and done at the end of 2013, we’ll run a monster best-of-the-decade poll.
Not much of a surprise given Steven Severin’s recent hint, but the lone album by The Glove — 1983′s ‘Blue Sunshine’ — will be reissued as an individually numbered 2LP set on blue vinyl for Record Store Day next month, featuring not just the full album but the 16 demos originally included on the 2006 expanded CD reissue.
The Cure has been no stranger to special Record Store Day releases — last year saw an expanded Entreat, plus reissues of the band’s first six albums in the U.K. — and this year’s no different, with an individually numbered, red-vinyl reissue of 1987′s ‘Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’ due out next month.
Four years, 3,149 individual posts, 2 million unique visitors, 6.4 million total pageviews. But out of all that, what are the most popular headlines on Slicing Up Eyeballs since this site launched on Feb. 20, 2009? Well, as you can see from the list below, they involve news about Nirvana, The Cure, U2, R.E.M., The Smiths and Depeche Mode.
It’s been a few years since former Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist Steven Severin expressed hope that he could one day work with The Cure’s Robert Smith on new music together as The Glove, and while it’s unclear whether that ever happened, it appears there’s something on the horizon from the short-lived side project.
As Robert Smith first teased last summer, The Cure will return to South America for the first time in 17 years this April, mounting its first-ever large-scale tour of the continent, performing seven concerts in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Colombia — followed by a one-off show in Mexico City to end the trek.
The Glove is best remembered for bringing together Robert Smith of The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist Steven Severin. But the group, which released a single album, ‘Blue Sunshine,’ in 1983, also featured vocalist Jeanette Landray — who looks back on the experience after 30 years in this video.
We finish out the Slicing Up Eyeballs Readers Poll 2012 by counting down your picks for the Top 10 live acts of the year, a list that includes The Jesus and Mary Chain, Peter Murphy, Dead Can Dance, The Fixx, The Cure, Bob Mould, Adam Ant, Duran Duran, New Order and Swans.
