Eindhoven: The Room Where The Cure Turned Dark
On Wednesday 7 April 2027 we open our European run at the Effenaar in Eindhoven. It is a fine room, it is three hours from Calais, and it makes a sensible first night of a tour. None of that is why we said yes as fast as we did.
11 December 1979
The Cure played the Effenaar on a Tuesday night in December 1979. It was only their third trip across the Channel and the second show of their first proper tour. Three Imaginary Boys had been out about six months. The room sold out.
What makes that night worth marking is what had happened in the ten weeks before it.
The Banshees changed everything
That autumn The Cure went out on tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees. When the Banshees lost their guitarist mid-tour, Robert Smith stepped in and played both sets, night after night. He came back a different writer, pulled towards something colder and darker than the bright, spiky pop of the debut.
Not everyone wanted to follow him there. Michael Dempsey wanted a cleaner sound, the two of them could not settle it, and Dempsey left in the October. Simon Gallup and Matthieu Hartley joined in the middle of November.
Which means the band that walked onto the Effenaar stage a few weeks later was the very first line-up of the post-Banshees Cure. The band that would go on to make Seventeen Seconds. That version of The Cure was about three weeks old.
They played A Forest in Eindhoven that night, months before the single came out.
A striped jumper and an ordinary haircut
The detail we like best is what the people who were in the room remember: a polite young man in a striped jumper with perfectly normal hair. No backcombing. No lipstick. None of it yet. The Effenaar got The Cure in the last few weeks before the myth arrived.
Which is precisely our show
Siouxsie & The Budgies play sixty minutes of the Banshees. Then we play ninety minutes of The Cure. The whole evening is built on that crossover, the tour where one guitarist carried something home from one band to the other and changed both of them for good.
We get to do it in the room where it landed, forty-seven years on.
Effenaar, Eindhoven, Wednesday 7 April 2027. Dresden on the Friday, Mühlhausen on the Saturday.
Read the Effenaar’s own account of that 1979 night, with photographs by Peter Cox.