Ageing Goth lookalike contest

Mostly for old time’s sake — because although I haven’t listened to any of their CDs for a while, their music did accom­pany many long even­ings of teen­age gloom in the 1980s — and also because they don’t appear on TV very much in the UK any­more, I tuned in to the end of Fri­day Night with Jonathan Ross on BBC1 yes­ter­day even­ing spe­cific­ally to watch The Cure per­form­ing a couple of songs.

Now, I am the first to con­fess that there was a time when I wanted Robert Smith’s hair. In fact, I wanted it badly. Dur­ing my short-lived — and con­sequently, some would say, extremely half-hearted — Goth phase some fif­teen years ago, it was exactly that look I was going for. A back-combed, unkempt, lived-in (and slept-in) tangled mess of hair, assisted by enough extra firm hold hair­spray to punc­ture sev­eral large holes in the ozone layer. Sadly, my hair has a tend­ency to droop alarm­ingly almost imme­di­ately, no mat­ter how vig­or­ously it’s been attacked with a comb, so most of the time it prob­ably seemed as if I was wear­ing a pitch-black floor-mop on my head. Not a good look, frankly.

Last night, how­ever, I think I finally fell out of love with Robert’s unique approach to hair care. To be fair, I don’t think even he was hav­ing a par­tic­u­larly Good Hair Day, but on this 45-year-old man that trade­mark fright-wig was begin­ning to look, well, a bit fright­en­ing. And imprac­tical. And unhygienic. I’m sure that at one point I spot­ted a small fam­ily of mice nestled in there somewhere.

In an inter­view in The Guard­ian, Smith says that far from want­ing him to go out and get his hair cut, his wife actu­ally likes his dis­tressed tangles. Blimey. Ima­gine hav­ing that mass of split ends lying beside you on the pil­lows each night, par­tic­u­larly when all the insects come crawl­ing out for their noc­turnal stroll.

Or maybe we should all be say­ing, “Good on you, Bob!” Whereas I’m only 32 and already want my chosen hair­style to be prac­tical, user-friendly and reas­sur­ingly low main­ten­ance, he’s in his mid-forties and doesn’t give a damn. And it might even look quite cool once he starts going grey. Ein­stein as a rock star some­how springs to mind.

Watch­ing The Cure’s per­form­ance, I con­tin­ued to muse on Robert Smith’s appear­ance — pos­sibly to the det­ri­ment of actu­ally listen­ing to what they were play­ing, sadly. Some­thing was nag­ging at me, and I couldn’t quite put my fin­ger on it. He reminded me of someone … but who was it?

And then it came to me. Before my eyes, indie god Robert Smith had trans­formed him­self into the grand­est and most diamond-encrusted Hol­ly­wood has-been of them all — Eliza­beth Taylor.

     

Oh, but hang on a moment. It wasn’t Dame Liz and her seventy-three ex-husbands I was think­ing of. No, not at all. Appear­ing before me on the tele­vi­sion screen, singing Inbetween Days as a black-haired vis­ion of eeri­ness that would be the envy of any ded­ic­ated Goth, it was the one and only … Liza Minnelli.

     

That was the last straw. I had to turn off the TV before the band fin­ished their brief set. It was all get­ting far too scary, even for an ex-Goth. I think it’s time for all Cure fans past and present to club together and at least buy our dear Uncle Bob a few gift sets of sham­poo and con­di­tioner — even if he doesn’t want to entirely sell out his ‘indie cred’ by hav­ing his hair styled into some­thing more con­trolled and man­age­able. Mean­while, I think I’ll go back to appre­ci­at­ing The Cure as a purely audio exper­i­ence for the time being, until all these dis­turb­ing com­par­is­ons finally van­ish from my mind.