Truth, Goodness and Beauty...and What Really Happened When The Cure Sang About Tiananmen

Matt Welch | June 19, 2009

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary, riffing from a bootlegged tape my wife has somewhere in storage of a concert The Cure gave 20 years ago in which lead singer Robert Smith improvised a bunch of weird, emotional lyrics during the song "A Forest," culminating with the repeated line "We will never forget!" Which is a good enough story, except for how the song wasn't "A Forest," and Smith never said "We will never forget," and in fact ended on the more existentially ambiguous "This means nothing! Means nothing! There's nothing left but faith."

Perhaps demonstrating what Michael C. Moynihan noted earlier this evening about the Internet enabling ever-faster corrections of gross factual errors, my dear friends in Cure-freak nation have not only fact-checked my ass, they've provided a handy link that gives us the correct concert date (June 4, the actual day of the massacre), city (Rome), and even the full text of the still-haunting ad lib. Give 'er a read, and I swear some day I'll find the cassette and convert it into an audio file.

On a distantly related note, for those interested in totalitarianism and shoddy memory, I can heartily recommend Timothy Garton Ash's great book, The File.

Apologies for the error, and thanks to Emily Schuna for pointing it out.

UPDATE: Well, that was quick. Here's the audio link. He does say "And don't forget!" at the end, turns out.