Listening to Sideshow/Show now, it sounds perfectly fine. Would have been nice to get A Forest, but it's an okay official release. I still prefer Paris as it was the first time I had ever heard At Night, Apart, The Figurehead, and some others.
As I listen to Robert Smith shout his way through the "climax" of End on Show, I'm going to let loose on why I don't think a concert album CD like Show worked, Warning, flaming ahead!
Show was (according to Wiki) "released in 1993 and recorded live over two nights at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit) in 1992".
I would have rather had a more representative sample of tracks like A Forest. But Show is all about RS ramming his vision of The Cure down our throats. It didn't matter whether fans cared about the self-involved tracks of Wish or not, we were going to be forced to listen to them. Forever.
Wish was an exercise in arrogance, of RS telling us why he's tired of performing, tired of touring, tired of this and that. Well if you read the liner notes for the Deluxe editions of all the eighties albums, every one of those was made with this mindset. Wish really took it over the top, just a bunch of yelling and shouting about how tired RS is of it all. The album didn't sell, it was the end of the band and the sign that all subsequent albums were going to be even more self-indulgent nonsense that said nothing but "I'm Robert Smith and I'm tired of it all!".
So not a fan of Wish, not a fan of all the yelling, banging, noisy tone-less guitar thrashing. Not a fan of Show. Not a fan of all the Cure's output from Wish through their last release.
Some of Wish's material, such as From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea and Apart, improved in the live shows. But most of the album is dreary and needlessly depressing. Who feels cheered up or fulfilled after listening to Trust or End? Nobody! Like a freakin' funeral dirge. Pointless and arrogant.
So that's my rant. I'm sure that for some fans, Wish and Show were how they found The Cure, and became fans from that. That's fine. To me, this material represents why the band disappeared from the music charts, and disappeared from all creativity as well. As if to prove the fans wrong, RS then made sure we had to listen to every one of these dreary Wish tracks for the next 24 years, just to prove us wrong. When you're at war with your audience, something's wrong there, attitude wise. Maybe the rest of the band drifted away because they weren't filled with this resentment for the audience, maybe the other band members just wanted to be a greatest hits band, I don't know. But whatever the Cure became during Wish and after, it sucked. And we only show up to concerts now to hear our favorites. I listen to Wish and I hear spite, I hear snottiness, I hear disrespect for the Cure's fanbase. And rounding out Show again in 2018, I can't see how I am mistaken in that impression.
Why did Show leave out so much better material from those two Dearborn shows? Whatever the answer, I think it sums up Robert's attitude towards the fans in 1993 and today. Sorry.
It actually sold more copies worldwide than Disintegration or KMKMKM. To my knowledge it was their best selling album out of all 14 of them (JW is a studio album).
It actually sold more copies worldwide than Disintegration or KMKMKM. To my knowledge it was their best selling album out of all 14 of them (JW is a studio album).
Otherwise, nice rant
And that is without one of the greatest most emotional versions of A Forest. But then timing is everything. The Cure were at their peek in 1992 yes?
I will be less harsh than AForestFan but I kind of get his point of view. Commercially, Wish was a huge success and i know that many fans came to the Cure with this album. But then, I think the Wish era was kind of unsatisfying for the band and especially Robert Smith. I remember an interview where he was saying something like "We just made another album, we just made another tour with even bigger audiences, so what?". And I'm quite ok with this. The Wish album is very good in my opinion, but not as remarkable as Disintegration. The lengthly tour was exhausting in my opinion, some performances, while still very good, are not particularly memorable.
Thanks. I remember the Orlando music store's big cutout Wish promotion cardboard stand. It was a giant Wish starfish about five feet high. Probably lost now.
There was a huge promotion and obviously a good feeling from Cure fans after Kiss Me and Disintegration. Yes I'm wrong about the sales but I think those sales were because of good feelings from the above two albums. I think that many fans put Wish on the shelf after buying it and this started their strong dislike for all future Cure albums, which always had a steady downward curve on sales and hit singles.
Repeated listenings to Wish tracks in concerts have made me a fan of Open and A Letter to Elise. But some of this stuff is just so dreary, End, ye-uck!
1992 was the peak of their imperial period, that run from HOTD through to Wish where they cemented their reputation as an arena band. There were a lot interviews beforehand about how they couldn't wait to take it on the road and it's not really the fault of the 1992 band that the 21st century Cure continue to feature Wish songs so heavily in their setlists.
Downsides of the tour: Static setlists (like all of their tours in those days), Perry Bamonte bringing nothing to the table, Simon getting ill, so much good Wish stuff to play that a lot of their back catalogue didn't get played.
Positive: They were mega tight, the end of tour shows were crazy good, the warm up shows, Porl and Boris going out on top, the QE2 documentary and German au pair girls.
Thanks. I remember the Orlando music store's big cutout Wish promotion cardboard stand. It was a giant Wish starfish about five feet high. Probably lost now.
There was a huge promotion and obviously a good feeling from Cure fans after Kiss Me and Disintegration. Yes I'm wrong about the sales but I think those sales were because of good feelings from the above two albums. I think that many fans put Wish on the shelf after buying it and this started their strong dislike for all future Cure albums, which always had a steady downward curve on sales and hit singles.
Repeated listenings to Wish tracks in concerts have made me a fan of Open and A Letter to Elise. But some of this stuff is just so dreary, End, ye-uck!
Haha, I love End, it's in my top 10 of Cure tracks, always has been, always will be, and I feel uplifted and euphoric and all those other things after hearing it, every time. We're all different
Thanks. I remember the Orlando music store's big cutout Wish promotion cardboard stand. It was a giant Wish starfish about five feet high. Probably lost now.
There was a huge promotion and obviously a good feeling from Cure fans after Kiss Me and Disintegration. Yes I'm wrong about the sales but I think those sales were because of good feelings from the above two albums. I think that many fans put Wish on the shelf after buying it and this started their strong dislike for all future Cure albums, which always had a steady downward curve on sales and hit singles.
Repeated listenings to Wish tracks in concerts have made me a fan of Open and A Letter to Elise. But some of this stuff is just so dreary, End, ye-uck!
Just playing devil's advocate, but in terms of sales being because of "good feelings" from fans of the band after KMx3 and Disintegration, weren't virtually all record sales because of that then, especially if there weren't tons of radio singles? Back in the dinosaur ages before file sharing, streaming, etc. it's not really like people could preview the albums in any way other than hearing a friend's copy... Save
My last post was a bit of a rant, sorry for that. For me, Disintegration, Kiss Me, and Mixed Up represent the peak for The Cure as an album band. That's not going to change, as the years go by.
But let's resume what I love about The Cure as a live performing band, a very different animal!
After quickly playing through a few tracks from the 1993 festival show, it's on to the wonders of 1995 and a new beginning for The Cure as an amazing live band. Sure, albums will pop up now and then over the remaining decades, but it's the live show where the band really excels. Let's start in no particular order, July...
-------------
Really like the 14.07.1995 Bern - Gurten Park Festival (Switzerland). You can hear the keyboard pop up on Fascination Street in a way I didn't hear on the 1992 tour.
Enjoying 'Jupiter Crash' from this show. Did I just say that everything from RS from Wish was self-obsessed bitterness? Okay, maybe not, this is still fun to listen to and an astronomy lesson to boot!
Really beautiful rendition of Dressing Up with "Zamfir wind flute" keyboarding. This sort of sound is why I consider the 1995-1998 touring group a magical time.
Loving A Strange Day and Push. This Bern show is about a 1000 times better than the official Show release (or Trilogy or Festival or Bestival, for that matter). I guess when they plan official live releases, it's not as good as the unplanned magic that can happen such as at Bern, Switzerland.
Really beautiful rendition of Dressing Up with "Zamfir wind flute" keyboarding. This sort of sound is why I consider the 1995-1998 touring group a magical time.
This is too funny. Thanks a lot, now every time I hear Dressing Up, this guy will be seared into my mind.