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	THE CURE Misery loves company
	Related stories Strong medicine: Robert Smith's forceful return to the Cure. By Ted Drozdowski.

Robert Smith sat in a cramped, wood-paneled trailer backstage at the Tweeter Center last Saturday night, perusing a short list of favorite songs he’d picked to introduce on the radio. A few of them might’ve surprised his fans, such as the Beatles’ "If I Fell," a song Smith compared with the works of Gustav Mahler. Another would-not-have: David Bowie’s "Life on Mars." "Can’t go wrong with Bowie," said WFNX disc jockey Paul Driscoll. "No, you can go wrong with Bowie," Smith said, emphatically and without missing a beat.

Of course, you can go wrong with the Cure, too. When Driscoll mentioned that "Let’s Go to Bed" had been the first track ever aired on FNX, Smith dismissed it as "pure dumb pop music," a song that had served its purpose at the time, which was to disabuse the public of the notion that the Cure were a bunch of disconsolate depressives. Smith has been trying to convince people of this for 20 years, and his latest effort, the Curiosa tour, features 11 acts hand-picked by him. They range from gloomy and righteous (Muse) to gloomy and weird (Mogwai, the only band on the tour selling their own brand of earplugs), from gloomy and metal (former Hole bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur, whose thunderous bass playing drowned out her guitarists — all three of them!) to gloomy and chic (the Rapture and Interpol).

After nightfall erased a bruise-colored sky, Smith, raccoon eyes peering from beneath his trademark weeping-willow bouffant, clutched his collar and looked into the darkness. The audience — a few fortysomething men in Bob drag; scads of smartly accessorized, thin-hipped twentysomethings eyed warily by the thirtysomethings who used to be them; and fewer goth kids than you’d think — roared back. "I can’t find myself!", Smith yelped on the opening "Lost," the first song from their new Ross Robinson–produced The Cure. The evening’s theme thus delineated, the band elaborated on it wildly over two hours, from Disintegration’s "Fascination Street" and "Plainsong" (the latter shivering like an embalmed "Crimson and Clover") to the deliriously jangly pop of "Love Song" and "Just like Heaven." An old song about feeling old and alone ("In Between Days") meshed with a new song about feeling old and alone ("Anniversary"). And if anyone was still in a good mood, the last third of the concert was sure to douse it. Drenching downpours of drone and sorrowful, meandering squalls marked "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea," "Disintegration," and "One Hundred Years" — "It doesn’t matter if we all die," Smith sang, then drew both encores from one of their gloomiest albums, 1980’s Seventeen Seconds. Not for the first time, the Cure failed to convince the world that misery isn’t their first language.