I’ve been in Montpellier for three weeks today, and until last night, I hadn’t done anything I’d really call fun.
The last few times I’ve gone to big name concerts, I’ve felt like a chump afterwards. Paying several hundred dollars for seats and another 30 for a beer so that I can stand next to someone blowing pot smoke in my face while I try to wax nostalgic over music I’ve been hearing on repeat since I was a teenager — well, it wasn’t my idea of a good time when I was 23, and it’s so much less so now that I’m 53.
On the other hand, I do enjoy live music, and I’m really not so particular about genres. So when I saw that a Cure cover band was having a concert at Rockstore, about a five-minute walk from our apartment, I decided to get a ticket. Kathryn and I saw posters for the same band, Inside the Cure, the last time we were here together, and Kathryn was disappointed we would be leaving Montpellier before the show. This was band’s second visit to Rockstore, and Kathryn missed out once again, but that didn’t mean I had to.
This was also my second visit to Rockstore. I had been there once before in 2022, when I came to Montpellier for a very short trip to sign the purchase agreement for our apartment. Since I’d come all this way to spend an hour in a legal office, I needed a diversion other than watching TV.
I arrived about 15 minutes before the opening band took the stage, which gave me time to get a pint — which cost 7.80 euros — and find some space to hang out along the wall. I was there early enough that I could have stood directly in front of the stage for the entire night, but I have enough respect for the artists to recognize that they need to be surrounded by high-energy enthusiasts and enough self-awareness to recognize that I’m not one of them.
Rockstore is a relatively intimate venue. It can hold 1,000, although there were at most a few hundred for this show. There were a handful of cocktail tables, but most of us spectators were standing. Even at my challenged height, I didn’t have trouble seeing the stage from pretty much anywhere. There were two times that someone considerably taller moved into my line of sight; taking a half-step in either direction solved the problem each time.
If you asked me five minutes before the show to name a single song by the Cure, I would have looked at you with a blank face. If you asked me again five minutes after the show, I still would have looked at you with a blank face. However, the tunes were a lot more familiar to me than I had expected.
Inside the Cure is based in Perpignan, which is not really far from Montpellier in the direction of Barcelona. Most of their shows seem to be within a relatively small radius of their base, so the prospects of Kathryn eventually having an opportunity to see them are not so slim. I enjoyed the show, and I’d be willing to see them again.
