Smith Occasionally Finds the Cure to Doom, Gloom

Like its other concerts over the years, the Cure’s show Saturday night at the Forum was about youth.

Though Robert Smith is 37 and has been leading the English band for about 18 years, he still focuses on the poetry of adolescence: mopey complaints about cultural artifice and arbitrariness, personal isolation and powerlessness.

Because his audience remains quite youthful, Smith found himself not singing to peers, but to people largely still in or just out of their teens.

Ironically, it wasn’t youth that gave the show its brightest spark. It was a trio of gray-haired women, brought on stage for the encore of the recent song “Gone” to pretend to be a horn section as cameras shot the number for a video.

Shaking their hips and bobbing their heads as they blew their prop trumpets, the women were obviously having a blast--and having an effect on Smith.

Whereas the singer-guitarist had stayed nearly immobile behind his microphone for the previous two hours, he now shimmied over to the women, danced around them and even playfully bumped hips with one. And then--the biggest surprise--the guru of glum smiled.

Even after the women left, Smith remained energized throughout the encore sets. He and his four bandmates gave rich renditions of such Cure classics as “Killing an Arab” (a gripping meditation on Camus’ “The Outsider”) and “Why Can’t I Be You?” while battling stage-climber fans who, too, got swept up in the spirit.

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So you have to wonder about the static moroseness earlier. Is Smith bored with being an idol to people so much younger than himself--many of whom still ignore his “be yourself” message and try to look like him with his rat’s-nest hair, black togs and vampire pallor?

As songs from the new “Wild Mood Swings” album showed, Smith has at least occasional up moments to counter the downs.

In the evening’s first song, “Want,” Smith sang that he’s “always wanting more.” Maybe it took those three older women to show him--and his fans--how to get it.

* The Cure plays Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine, 8 p.m. Tickets $25 and $17.50. Information: (714) 855-4515.