Back to one of Gerard's tapes again, and this time around it's a bootleg of a 1980 show in Germany by The Cure.
I didn't get into the Cure until well after it would have been cool. I'm pretty sure that he lent me 'Faith' at some point, but we'd have been in the 6th Form by then, definitely post 'Head In the Door' so it was hardly contemporary. I didn't actually start listening to them properly until a few years later when a frien dlent me "Staring At the Sea" and we went to see them play a huge show in Crystal Palace.
Obviously - this 1980 boot is on a different scale. It's an excellent recording (it says its from the Soundboard) and it hits all of the tracks at that point that you would expect. I wonder if it's from more than one show - there are 2versions of '10:15' and 'A Forest' and I know that duplicators would often add extra tracks onto the end of a show to add value and to fill up the blank space.
But yeah - they're precise, punky and personable. I should have fallen for them sooner.