DVD, Blu-ray and TV
40 Live: Curaetion-25 + Anniversary
The Cure, Do Not Adjust Your Set
(EAGLE ROCK ENTERTAINMENT) 8/10
The Led Zeppelin of dreampop goth mark four decades together with two epic concert films. By Stephen Dalton
In 2018, The Cure emerged from sporadic hibernation to celebrate their 40th anniversary with two distinct London shows. The first select gathering took place at Robert Smith’s personally curated Meltdown festival on the South Bank, the second came two weeks later in Hyde Park before 65,000 people. Released together as this awkwardly named boxset package, 40 Live: Curaetion-25 + Anniversary is a tale of two concerts: one an introspective, introverted deep dive into the band’s back catalogue, the other a hit-packed extrovert extravaganza performed at thunderous volume under a gorgeous golden sunset. Featuring almost five hours of music, there is rich material here for Cure fans of all ages and persuasions.
For hardcore connoisseurs, the Meltdown show should have the strongest appeal. The 28-song set features two tracks from every Cure studio album, plus two new compositions, a vast Noah’s Ark of music spanning two-and-a-half hours. Relishing a rare chance to perform in a relatively strippeddown and intimate setting, Smith revisits seldom played curios, including the synth-heavy percussive oddity “Like Cockatoos”, the dreamy sci-fi waltz “Jupiter Crash”, the fiery goth Zeppelin of “39” and a soaring, heart-tugging “Last Day Of Summer”.
With their usual widescreen dynamics trimmed to Royal Festival Hall dimensions, some of the band’s vintage classics benefit from unusually restrained arrangements. “Three Imaginary Boys” has an agreeably sinewy post-punk rawness and “Pictures Of You” a woozy, semi-unplugged feel. “A Forest” also becomes a lean campfire strum, Smith’s voice taking wild jazzy leaps as he plucks out lovely, luminous, finger-picking guitar motifs.
Played back to back mid-set, the two unreleased numbers are hardly game-changers but both sound like pretty decent late-period Cure confections. The chugging, churning, multi-guitar behemoth “It Can Never Be The Same” is a typically Smith-sized howl of fatalistic nostalgia for lost love and ruined beauty, while the more jaunty “Step Into The Light” ruminates on spiritual faith in a twirling fairground waltz arrangement.
The director of Curaetion-25 is Nick Wickham, whose extensive credits include concert films by Metallica, Madonna and Beyoncé. His shooting style is unshowy and deceptively artless, though he applies different visual treatments and colour filters for each song, building from monochrome minimalism to shaky-camera psych overload as the band’s video backdrop and arena-sized light show become steadily more prominent. These tweaks are fairly conventional, but they serve their purpose as unobtrusive enhancements.
Though it was recorded soon after the Meltdown show, at British Summer Time in Hyde Park,
Anniversary is a very different animal. The monster setlist is another all-you-can-eat banquet, 29 songs spilling well beyond the two-hour mark. But The Cure are back in their more familiar comfort zone here, confidently blasting a hit-heavy festival mixtape through planet-sized speakers with a humongous video wall blazing behind them. Smith’s energy levels are noticeably higher here too, fired up by rapturous crowd roars and a boomy, roomy, richer sound mix.
In contrast to its ruminative Royal Festival Hall iteration, “Pictures Of You” becomes an impassioned, Springsteen-huge anthem here, while “A Forest” sounds meaty, muscular and kinetic. Reeves Gabrels is also given more space for his avant-metal guitar pyrotchnics, to mostly positive effect. Where Gabrels sometimes seemed to cramp Bowie’s style, he functions much better within The Cure’s spacious collective dynamic, especially on full-blooded arena-rocking juggernauts like “Shake Dog Shake” and the majestic conjoined epics “Burn” and “Fascination Street”.
Earning huge cheers with his wistful observation that the Hyde Park show falls on the 40th anniversary of the first Easy Cure pub gig, Smith packs the massive 10-song encore with patented Cure classics and knowing throwbacks to the band’s scratchy post-punk roots. A deliciously wonky, herky-jerky version of “The Caterpillar” is a joyous reminder of Smith’s surreal, experimental dreampop side, while “Friday I’m In Love” detonates like a primary-coloured paint-bomb of gushing, jangly euphoria.
Anniversary is pure spectacle, a full-spectrum Cure show with clear appeal to casual, curious and even lapsed fans. Its sole disappointing aspect is the prosaic approach of director Tim Pope, the cinematic visionary behind so many of the band’s beloved early videos, who delivers handsome but conventional rockumentary optics here. Concert films are necessarily constrained by the live performance format, but even a hint of Pope’s inspired Mad Hatter mischief would have been welcome given this film’s careercrowning retrospective intentions. Extras: 8/10. Limited-edition deluxe boxset comes in a 2Blu-ray/2dvd + 4CD format, while the hardbook version offers a colour photo album and 2Blu-ray/2dvd set.