The PAP DX Blog: August 2020

The Cure were one of the bands I has seen at the Rock In Athens festival back in 1985. I hadn't seen them again since that. I remember a summer night in the 90's when a friend and neighbour of mine came back from the city center declaring "I have just seen the Cure" and me thinking how nice it would have been if I had gone as well, to see them again. Well, that moment didn't come until last year, 2019 when I finally set a new record for the longest time gap between gigs of the same band. With Depeche Mode (who had also appeared at Rock In Athens) it was 21 years when I saw them in 2006, the same with AC/DC three years later (1988 and 2009), then it went up to 26 years with Eric Clapton (1984 and 2010) - and let's not forget 22 years for the Pet Shop Boys (1991 and 2013), 23 years for Bon Jovi (1988 and 2011) - while finally it went up to 30 years with Erasure and a few months later Iron Maiden last year (both 1988 and 2018). But The Cure set a new record with 34 years (1985 and 2019).

I wanted to be there in time to catch Ride (I remember those differently coloured EP's from the beginning of the 90's) but my biggest discovery of the day was the band I just managed to catch when I arrived : Khruangbin. With their mostly instrumental tracks based on guitar (they inserted snippets of "Misirlou" and other popular songs in there).

Then it was the turn of Ride and a return to that wonderful, baggy, brilliant, indie-rave summer of 1990.

After that it was time to return to the present though with Michael Kiwanuka, a rare example of an artist playing a Greek festival in his prime.

It was, however, time for The Cure now. They kicked off with "Plainsong" and from the beginning it was clear that they were going to play a lot of "Disintegration". 2019 was actually the 40th anniversary of that particular album. They did in fact play 7 out of its 12 songs, however their set was structured in a similar way to their 2018 concert at Hyde Park in London which was celebrating their 40th anniversary as a band.

Indeed at around the middle of their main set, the older favourites started to appear and there were even more of them during the encore.

It was a pleasure to listen to songs we had already heard back in 1985. And from the look on his face, Robert seemed to enjoy it...

Unfortunately, this was the last summer festival that took place in Athens. Most of the 2020 ones are rescheduled for 2021, but we'll see what happens...