JANUARY

17th
London, Town and Country Club II
An unusually busy period for the band at this time of the year. This secret concert was given under the name "Five Imaginary Boys" in a small venue. Robert Smith explained that they wanted to confront an audience before playing the Great British Week-end Festival.

The Cure played four new songs : The Big Hand, Away (an early title for Cut), A Letter To Elise and Wendy Time. Most of them being quite different from the latter versions from the Wish album. The show had quite a party atmosphere. A Forest included a very long intro and the four last lines on The Walk were sung by someone from the audience to whom Robert Smith gave the microphone.

19th
London, Wembley Arena
Great British Week End Festival with Ride, New Model Army, The Wedding Present, Jesus Jones. The Cure's set was short (an hour long) despite being the headliners and consisted in playing the pop singles with the exception of Three Imaginary Boys and Disintegration.

24th
London, Limehouse (MTV Unplugged show)
Setlist : Let's Go To Bed, Just Like Heaven (twice), If Only Tonight We Could Sleep (twice), The Caterpillar (twice), In Your House, The Walk, A Letter To Elise, Lullaby, The Blood, Time Has Told Me, M, Boys Don't Cry (twice)

Some songs were played twice to pick up the best versions. The audience mainly included the band's entourage and relatives plus MTV employees. Robert sang a lot of the songs in a slightly different way. The band took very seriously the concept of the show by replacing the keyboards with a xylophone, piano-toy, kazoos... and even castanets. Another funny moment had Robert announcing The Blood as being from The Top album ! "Time Has Told Me" was a cover from Nick Drake. Unfortunately, that song wasn't shown on TV and no complete recording surfaced from that performance.


FEBRUARY

10th
London, Dominion Theatre (BRITS Awards)
The Cure won the Best Band award (after passing the 12 million sales mark worldwide !) and played Never Enough live at the ceremony. Robert thanked all past members of the group and left Lol Tolhurst out of the list of those. Later, Robert would denounce the travesty of such events.


MARCH

A new edition of Entreat (a live album that was only available through a special offer in record shops the previous year) was finally released to the general public to satisfy to the demand and to break the collectors market. Part of the proceeds went to several charity organisations like MENCAP, Amnesty International...


JULY

A busy month with many releases but hardly anything really new. Assemblage, a box set including all the Cure albums from Three Imaginary Boys to Disintegration was released in France. A special box set of Mixed Up was also released there at the same time to complete the discography.

A Forest (remix) was out as a French-only single too, but it didn't get anywhere. In England, promotional copies of In Between Days (shiver mix) were distributed but the reactions to this radical remix were lukewarm.

To conclude this retrospective era, Picture Show, including all the Cure's videos from 1987 to 1990 was released. Originally this collection was called "When You Never Come Back" but the name got changed. The artwork was based on a photograph Robert Smith found in a book : "The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained". It depicts a girl with a planchette for automatic writing.


AUGUST

The musical press revealed Lol Tolhurst filed a lawsuit against Fiction Records and Robert Smith over royalties payments.


SEPTEMBER

01st
The Manor studio, Shipton on Cherwell, Oxfordshire
The group entered this residential studio owned by Richard Branson (Virgin Records) for the next six months. The walls got quickly covered with quotations from Wordsworth, Rilke or Emily Dickinson (to get inspired by words) and clippings from News of The World-like papers.

The original concept of the recording sessions was to produce two albums : a regular one (Wish album) and a "long and spacey" purely instrumental collection of songs. The instrumental album was finally shelved as the songs weren't finished. It would surface in 1994 as a limited EP cassette called "Lost Wishes".

About 25 songs were recorded in total. Quite a few of them were directly written in the studio : From The Edge of The Deep Green Sea, Friday I'm In Love, End. Recording these was a turning point for the group who re-recorded some of the other songs to fit with that wall of guitars sound.


NOVEMBER

Play Out video release.


GO TO 1992 PART 1