A thread for the Cure reissues

I’m pissed because they are leaving off, arguably, two of the better songs from Boys Don’t Cry. Killing An Arab and Plastic Passion have been omitted from this collection. Seventeen Seconds is next, so these songs won’t see the light of day on the re-issues. WTF? Can anyone explain this one to me?

As for "Killing an Arab," I have a strong suspicion there'll be some sort of double-disc singles comp at some point which will include that.

"Jumping" is on the 2nd disc, Geir...

Disc: The Cure - Greatest Hits
Feature: Three hidden videos

How To Get It:
In addition to the songs listed, there are three additional tracks on this disc. To access them enter the 'song select' menu from the main screen.

To view the following "hidden" videos:

* The Caterpillar: Highlight "The Walk", press down - right - right
* Close to me (remix): Highlight "Close to me", press up - up - up
* Pictures of you: Highlight "Friday I'm in love", press down - down - down

Alternatively, if you're not into the Easter Egg spirit, you can just select Title 4 - Track 1, Title 6 - Track 1 and Title 5 - Track 1 respectively.

Well, judging from the absence of "Killing An Arab", "Plastic Passion", "Pillbox Tales", "Do The Hansa" and (the studio / B-side of "Jumping Someone Else's Train" version of) "I'm Cold" (let alone, heaven forbid "I'm A Cult Hero" or "I Dig You"), it seems that Fat Bob / Fiction ae still happily playing the same games with fans of the band as they were 25 years ago; and what's sauce for the goose....

Oh yea, I'd forgotten just how B-L-A-N-K and late seventies the artwork is, like Barney Bubbles or the punk end of Hipgnosis.

Now roll on 17 Seconds, Faith & Pornography, I can't wait to hear the rare tracks from those feckers.

What's the story with that anyway, I have Boys Don't Cry on cassette which I bought when I was about 14 which has that song on it, later I bought the CD when Wish came out and they reduced the whole back catalogue to about £5.99 a CD and it had a different track listing, omitting World War.

Why did they do that?

Uh, Stewart, these are all on the Join the Dots box.

Aaah but that's my point in a nutshell you see Nedworth: just as with 3IB / Boys Don't Cry and "World War", you can't quite get absolutely everything without having to buy both!

Fwiw, since I still have all my original singles etc. (including a 12" promo of "Grinding Halt" / "Meat Hook", the Cult Hero single and a signed copy of "Jumping Someone Else's Train"!) the only things on Join The Dots that really interest me are "Pillbox Tales" and "Do The Hansa"!

Why couldn't they have included those on 3IB?

I would happily have bought that then - and probably not bothered with either the boxset or the deluxe versions of any of their other albums.

Bastards.

Otoh I see they're evidently not bothered about duplicating any of the rare-ish stuff I have already got on Curiosity (the second side of the initial cassette version of Concert) 'though!

Bastards.

I put it in my letter to Santa and I'm making do in the meantime with that RAM stream I mentioned on another Cure thread ( http://www.rhino.com/fun/listeningparties/78895_album.ram )

touché!

To just miss a couple of key tracks out of one of the reissues, when that reissue contains any number of duplications and must still have room to include those missing tracks, just strikes me as cynical and exploitative.

More than anything however, I think I'm just enjoying throwing my rattle out of my pram really.

No, just to include the relevant period's tracks from Join The Dots on each of the the relevant reissues.

It's really very simple.

xpost

But as has been noted, THEN you annoy the people who bought Join the Dots. Like me. ;-)

But as has been noted, you'd buy both anyway.

While I admire the Cure for being more thoughtful towards their fans (i.e that Greatest Hits album that came with a second CD of all the songs played acoustically), I hope 3IB has been remastered. In fact, SACD would be a huge gesture (even though I don't have an SACD player). In the case of remastering, it's a legit re-release since only, assumedly, the hard-core fans ("completists") are going to be interested in both remastering and demos or other extras.

As I've noted on other threads, it continues to astound me that, with the enormity of the bootleg market (as perpetuated by the Beatles' bootleggers), major labels continue to ignore the opportunity to fully exploit catalogs before they get thoroughly distributed by the likes of Bit Torrent and other P2P mechanisms. The Cure B-sides had been circulating in amateur format for at least 3 years before JTD came out, and trading B-sides by completists was one of the first things to be truly exploited by the advent of the home CDR. I assume, and hope, that the increase of electronic distribution will influence labels to get off their asses and get the filthy lucre while they can still charge for it.

If they had not been so clear about how the set wouldn't be duplicated on the reissues, I don't know about that.

But it's OK for them to have made you fork-out for a box-set as well as all the reissues, when there was more than enough empty space left on those reissues to have included all the tracks on the box-set?

We clearly see things differently!

speaking of his hair when are we going to see Cocteau Twins reissues with bonus treasures!?

"Wish" was never a favorite, except for FMTEOTDGS, but this remaster is giving me a new appreciation for most of the rest. The bonus stuff is pretty solid as well. Love the weird remix of High with the sequenced harpsichord.

xp They've already reissued the CT albums, remastered by Robin "cocaine ears" Guthrie to add brickwall compression to their galaxy of sonic disasters.

The Cure have today shared an upgraded, extended HD version of Play Out, their 1991 behind-the-scenes their documentary.

Directed by Peter Fowler, Play Out follows The Cure across a handful of vastly different, yet equally important performances. From debuting future hits at small-scale English clubs to a headlining set at Wembley Arena and a coveted spot on MTV Unplugged, the expanded version of the documentary offers an even closer look at how one of history’s most influential goth-rock bands came to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9A7BG7omKY

Someone on YouTube was nice enough to break it all down:

Tracklisting and time codes:

T&C II Club London - 17th January 1991
Behind The Scenes 0:14
Wendy Time 1:25
The Big Hand 7:13
Away (Cut) 11:58
Let's Go To Bed 16:51
A Strange Day 20:15
10.15 Saturday Night 24:17
Killing An Arab 28:28

Wembley Arena - London - The Great British Music Weekend - 19th January 1991
Behind The Scenes 32:09
Pictures Of You 39:41
Fascination Street 47:19
Lullaby 52:24
A Forest 56:40
Backstage At The Wembley Arena 1:06:49

Jonathan Ross Show - 23rd January 1991
Rehearsals ("Hello I Love You", "Just Like Heaven", "The Walk", "Bland with an Edge") 1:10:17
Harold And Joe 1:13:28

E - Zee Hire Rehearsal Studio - London - 22nd January 1991
The Blood 1:17:35
The Walk 1:22:50

MTV - "Unplugged" - 24th January 1991
Backstage At The MTV Studios 1:26:27
Just Like Heaven 1:39:12
A Letter To Elise 1:43:40
If Only Tonight We Could Sleep 1:48:23
Boys Don't Cry 1:51:56

Dominion Theatre - London - 9th February 1991
Rehearsals For "The Brit Awards" 1:55:07

London - 10th February 1991
At The Fiction Office 2:00:13
Backstage At The Dominion Theatre 2:03:57
Never Enough 2:06:18
"The Brit Awards" Presentation By Roger Daltrey 2:10:40

Ah, so great. Will be downloading that for sure.

feels great to be a cure fan rn

put out the new record before i die robert!

it's raining cure videos this week

Oh man I watched that soooo many times back in 91-92. It aired on ppv in the States under a different name and somehow my parents let me buy it.

Great to see Play Out again, I was at that ‘91 Wembley show that’s featured, having travelled down by coach from the North. Johnathan King arranged the shows which were to be filmed and shown as part of that years’ Brits awards TV programme. Billy Bragg was one of the support acts and did a furious speech in between songs about the Iraq War. King had told him he could say anything he liked, so long as he played Levi Stubbs’ Tears. He did! Ride and The Wedding Present also played and they showed videos in between the bands on a big screen. I recall The Cult’s Eddie (Ciao Baby) going down a storm.

*Edie!

awesome to see the cure play out available again! that's -easily- the best video release they've done.

ok finally getting around to the wish remaster and wow it sounds so good it made me like the album more

It's fun to dump on the Hoffman board but all of these Cure remasters really do sound like toilet compared to previous versions, unless you love compression of course. You only need to A/B the first 20 seconds of Pornography to get the gist. Bonus stuff is always a goldmine, of course

i think disintegration is the only remaster that sounds obnoxiously brickwalled

and if i’m not looking at a waveform in audacity or whatever, i’d say the wish remaster goes in the opposite direction…. there’s a lot of clarity and dimension to the instrumentals that i didn’t get with the previous cd

I'd like some Cure downmixes

https://www.reddit.com/r/talkingheads/comments/38u89x/talking_heads_discography_51_downmix/

I thought the first four deluxe Cure reissues sounded pretty good and they amped up the compression after that, but I never A/B'd any of them. Pornography always sounded kind of "close," though, didn't it?

The only bonus disc I found thoroughly worthwhile was for the debut -- the Curiosity compilation had made it seem like there must be loads of really interesting unreleased stuff, but that really seemed to be the cream of the cassette collection. So many of these demos just sound so staid; I'm not sure what enthusiasts hear in them.

Anyway, re:Wish, can I just say the Higher Mix of "High" is maybe a top 10 Cure track for me. Outdoes the album/single version completely, which to make room for the jangle has the keyboard arpeggios mixed far too low :(

― you can see me from westbury white horse, Saturday, July 30, 2022 9:43 AM (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

just got to the higher mix on the third disc and holy shit otm

Those of us who bought the CD single have been enjoying that mix for the past 30 years ^_^

Indeed! :-D

"High" is easily my favorite Cure single and the Higher mix is sunlight glinting on an icicle.

mis-use of compression is such a waste of technology

Those of us who bought the CD single have been enjoying that mix for the past 30 years ^_^

― castanuts (DJP), Friday, 2 December 2022 8:35 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yup!

Yep. High single with those B sides was crazy value for money

Anyway, re:Wish, can I just say the Higher Mix of "High" is maybe a top 10 Cure track for me. Outdoes the album/single version completely, which to make room for the jangle has the keyboard arpeggios mixed far too low :(

I was listening to it this morning and thought the same thing! I hadn't heard it probably for 25 years. Can't say that about the remixes for "FTEOTDGS", "Doing The Unstuck" and "A Letter To Elise" though. They kind of suck the life out of the originals. The remix for "Friday" is ok.

Drums/perc and the bassline on Higher Mix are straight "A Japanese Dream".

I still think it's a crime that "Doing The Unstuck" wasn't released as a single after "Friday I'm in Love". I"m sure it would've gotten more airplay than "Elise" and it would've sounded so good on the radio! They were at their commercial peak and the record company only released 3 singles. Both albums before that had four. Makes no sense to me.

I find "A Letter to Elise" rote, so otm

"A Letter to Elise" is single quality, one of the best songs on this album and I think it was the right move. A fourth single should have been released like others have said.

The reissue cemented my back-in-the-day opinion that “Apart” is a beast of a song and it made me happy to read Robert rediscovering it during the remastering process

Love the instrumental demo from of To Wish Impossible Things - never really one of my faves. Has all these extra guitar parts which they would ultimately replace with vocals and that somewhat cheesy viola

I still think it's a crime that "Doing The Unstuck" wasn't released as a single

Robert is still mad (per the tweetalong the other day) that the record company went for Elise when he wanted Unstuck

I WANTED ‘DOING THE UNSTUCK’ AS THE THIRD SINGLE FROM THE ALBUM, BUT WAS IGNORED BY THE GREAT POWERS… BAH! #TIMSTWITTERLISTENINGPARTY #WISHLISTENINGPARTY

— The Cure (@thecure) November 25, 2022

it's def the more crankable jam

He’s right to be mad!

DOO DOO DOO DOODOOOOO

— The Cure (@thecure) November 26, 2022

Wow didn't even know that! Sucks Robert couldn't put his foot down, when he was making them so much money. "Elise" could've been a great fourth final single, à la "Pictures Of You".

Elise *was* the single

Elise was not the fourth final single

The reissue cemented my back-in-the-day opinion that “Apart” is a beast of a song and it made me happy to read Robert rediscovering it during the remastering process

The reissue cemented my back-in-the-day opinion that “Apart” is a beast of a song and it made me happy to read Robert rediscovering it during the remastering process

I completely agree. I've been rediscovering it myself these past few days and I like it better than back in the day. Very moving.

Ha x-post

I just got this bad boy in the mail.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Still haven't received the vinyl or the cassette / cd bundle I had to order from two separate vendors. Hope they show up soon.

Wish 3CD set is currently $4 on Amazon at the moment. Mistake?

Don't see it. Gone?

Yeah, it's gone, now back up to $21. I knew it was a mistake.

Mystified why AMG has never bumped Wish from a 2.5 to something even slightly higher. The next three are all 3s.

― you can see me from westbury white horse, Thursday, 4 August 2022 22:32 (ten months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Aha, only just now realised they changed it to 4 in November (with new review).

Forgot to bump this thread instead -- following Show last year, Paris is coming back:

https://store.rhino.com/en/rhino-store/artists/the-cure/paris-cd/603497825103.html

(Presumably WMS next up, so the question is whether that or the new album actually comes out first.)