Wish was The Cure’s 9th studio album, released on April 21, 1992. It became the band’s best-selling album, reaching #1 in the UK and #2 in the US, where it was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Alternative Music Album category. The album yielded three hit singles, “High” in March 1992 - which reached #8 in the UK - the evergreen “Friday I’m In Love” in May 1992 and “A Letter To Elise,” which was released in October 1992. That year’s Wish tour would be the Cure’s most extensive, with 111 shows in 21 countries.
The new deluxe 3CD 45-track edition of Wish--set for release on October 7, 2022--includes 24 previously unreleased tracks & four that are new to CD and digital. The double-LP vinyl version arrives on January 27, 2023.
CD1 contains the original Wish album, newly remastered by Robert Smith and Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. The second disc features 21 previously unreleased demos, including four studio vocal demos from 1990 and 17 instrumental demos from 1991, nine of which are previously unreleased songs. The third CD in the set features the four tracks from the mail-order-only cassette Lost Wishes released in 1993, which have never appeared on CD or digitally. “Uyea Sound” from that cassette can be heard as a digital single now.
Also included are the previously unreleased song “A Wendy Band” from the 1992 Manor Studio sessions, a previously unheard mix of the epic live favorite “From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea,” as well as five rare 12-inch mixes. Finally, closing the set is an unheard live version of “End” from Paris Bercy in October 1992.
The prolific period of recording Wish began with demo sessions at The Live House in Cornwall and continued at Farmyard Studios in the Cotswolds. "We got around forty songs put down during those two sessions,” recalls Robert Smith, “we were on fire!”
On arrival at The Manor, a residential studio in Oxfordshire, in September 1991, the band all bought bicycles. Robert Smith, "There was a pub down the nearby canal path, and most early evenings we’d cycle down there for a ‘livener’ or two. I was the only one ‘un-cool’ enough to have a bike with lights, so I was always at the back on the way there and always at the front on the way back… I still can’t believe we never ended up in the water.”
From the start of the recording, Smith had a clear vision of what Wish should be. "The overall sound was in my head from the start. We used a pretty small palette of sounds, as we did with Disintegration, but managed to create a lot of different kinds of songs with it. I think Kiss Me was more of a reference than Disintegration.”
Listening back to the album in 2022, Smith has said, "There’s a side to the album which I had kind of forgotten, a very gentle, yearning thing which is quite beautiful. Trust is one of the best things we’ve ever done, I think, it’s played with great feeling, and To Wish Impossible Things is another gorgeous, melancholic piece… in fact it could well be my favorite song on the record.”
When Wish was completed, Smith felt that they had achieved everything they had set out to do, but there was a glitch. "In the studio control room, it all sounded excellent, but I got too busy sorting out our upcoming concerts to properly oversee the mastering. It was too late to do anything about it; the album was out, and we were off around the world again. It has really bugged for me for a very long time.” Remastering the album earlier this year has finally given Smith the chance to address this “It has taken 30 years, but finally, finally, my Wish has come true."
