One Disc Don't Stop The Cure's Show

In case you're distracted and/or confused by the title of this piece, which is intended to pay tribute to a Joe Tex song made famous by The Animals (“One Monkey Don't Stop No Show”), today marks the 22nd anniversary of The Cure's Show, a live album which was a double-disc release in most countries but only emerged as a single disc in the United States.

The success of The Cure's Wish album and its subsequent tour found the band in a position where it seemed viable to release not one but two live albums: one recorded in America and featuring the band's more up-tempo material (Show), and one recorded in Paris and offering some of their darkest and more dour stuff (Paris). It was a great plan as far as it went, but for some reason the band's US label, Elektra, decided that maybe it might be pushing things a bit to make Show into a two-disc set.

As such, they shrunk it to a single disc, instead releasing an additional live EP entitled Sideshow - hilarious, right? - containing the missing tracks: “Tape,” a pre-recorded bit used to open the band's shows on that tour, “Fascination Street,” “The Walk,” and “Let's Go to Bed.” Plus, just to make sure that the EP might be a viable purchase for someone who didn't want to buy Show itself, they also included a track from the album that even the most casual of American Cure fans would know: “Just Like Heaven.”

In the end, Show only hit #42 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart and Sideshow didn't chart at all, but put 'em both together and you've got a solid audio document of how The Cure sounded when they played The Palace of Auburn Hills, in Auburn Hills, Michigan in 1992…and if you're a Cure fan, that's really all you care about, anyway, right?