This enormous and weighty concert film set – the first official live Cure visual document since 2005, and the first live release to capture the current lineup – captures two very different nights in the life of the band marking their 40th birthday.

The package is divided into two very different sets : The first “Curætion-25” is a stealthy, indoor, moody thematic set of material, one from each album, first going forward through history from “Three Imaginary Boys” to “4:13 Dream”, alongside two unreleased songs, before winding backwards to the start, ending on “Boy’s Don’t Cry”. At the time it was never clear exactly what kind of show it would be, merely advertised as Robert Smith And Guests, and, with the possibility of ex-Cures and former collaborators, was swiftly dispensed with when the Cure themselves arrived. It’s a curiously bleak setlist, but also, thankfully a unique evening in the bands life captured forever on film : directed by Nick Wickham, it’s occasionally claustrophobic, sometimes bizarre, mixing film stocks, editing styles, aspect ratios and similar, as well as presenting for the first time ever official filmed live performances of many rarely performed songs such as “Other Voices”, “Bananafishbones”, “Like Cockatoos”, “Jupiter Crash”, “It’s Over” and others (discounting long deleted Japanese only VHS concert tapes). The sound is well presented on the Blu Ray – though the audio CD’s are mastered loud.

Naturally, on the night, I was stuck behind a nincompoop who was busy looking up his next Italian holiday because he was bored during “Disintegration” and was moaning by text that they hadn’t played “Lullaby” or “Just Like Heaven”. But the trick The Cure can always pull is to simultaneously make you feel alone in a crowd and surrounded by likeminded souls whilst you’re alone.

The first part of the set also featured two unreleased songs – “It Can Never Be The Same” and “Step Into The Light”. They’re more introspective, doomier and gloomier, than most Cure songs but a good way of getting new songs out there in public in the absence of a new studio album. The Cure only ever do things on their own terms and their own way ; sometimes this means people think the band difficult, but it just means that The Cure aren’t going to do what you want, but what they want ; and normally the two overlap.

Pack your bag of deep cuts. It’s been a long time since the band represented their enormous body of work this fairly or this equally : even 1996’s career-killing “Wild Mood Swings” gets two songs.

Like any band, The Cure have to balance themselves between the accomplished peddlers of wonderful misery and the beautiful pop machine they are, and unlike most shows, where more than half the set is nothing but hits, tonight the world’s best Cure tribute band are beautifully miserable. It’s been a long time, if ever, since they have performed many of these songs – and even songs from 2004’s “The Cure” sell the darker reaches of the bands work as worthy of reappraisal. Certainly “alt.end” and “Us And Them” feel better now than they were at the time of release.

We have to be wary of nostalgia in this respect. Some people want other lineups of the band, but like any relationship, you wouldn’t stay with the same people you knew when you were 14, would you? Generally not, anyway. I understand the need to want the band to keep the same lineup as the day you first heard them, because that was your version of the band, and the band meant something to you then, but surely part of the joy of this is.. growing older with the band through time? On the face of tonight, given a unique setlist and a powerful, uncompromising performance that rewarded the faithful with a trainspotter setlist, The Cure have a future in front of them as well as a glorious past. The Cure are undoubtedly Roberts lifework. But if you have to pour your life into your work, there’s few better things than that band.

At the heart of it, it was also one of the handful of shows the band where staples such as “Lullaby”, “Lovesong”, “Friday I’m In Love”, “Just Like Heaven” are not played : that hit of hands in the air ecstasy is two weeks from now at Hyde Park . The Cure have always walked a tightrope between the miserable stadium band and joyous pop, and, at the same time, been both constantly and equally. Curætion-25 isn’t, nor was it ever, presented as a Cure show, but an evening of oddities. The hits weren’t missed by people familiar with their work ; it showed just how good, and adept The Cure are, and were, at encompassing almost all emotions, and how they would still be one of the most important and reliable artists of their time without the pop hits.

There’s also little repetition between this and the second feature “Anniversary”. Filmed live at Hyde Park two weeks later by Tim Pope, these two concerts can only be viewed as complete when seen together as both sides of the coin : the former, the darker, more intense and smaller ; the latter a lighter, happier, more celebratory set, largely made of their best known and most loved songs. Tim Pope’s direction brings us full circle as the bands long time visual collaborator, it’s a joyous present of 40 years of pop hits and heartbreak. It acts as both a glorious finale and a summation of the bands many different styles and identities over the years, as well as a definitive document that captures who they are here and now at this point in their history. The bands performance is visually represented in a way that shows many times the cohesive unit the band now are, complete with subtle glances, smiles, and cuddles that show the bands unity through music.

As this was the bands 40th Anniversary Birthday Show, marking 40 years (is it really that long?) since their first appearance as The Cure at the Crawley Rocket in 1978, yet also serving as an effective, in-front-of-your-eyes greatest hits reprise of the finest moments of their lives. Whilst the past ten years have seen the band retreat from new releases thanks to a combination of inertia caused by a significant and painful lineup change in 2010, the end of their record contract, and a desire to focus on music and not marketing, The Cure still don’t feel like a touring museum of music. The lineup has remained basically solid for a quarter century with only Reeves Gabrels as a ‘new’ addition at a mere seven years in the band. As such, it’s a definitive Cure show ; though, frustratingly, lacking in anything post 1993, apart from the singular “The End Of The World”.

In technical terms, the band play a show as good as any I have seen. The songs are also dispatched with the deftness of touch, and precision you expect from The Cure. I’ve never seen a bad Cure gig but few have been as much fun. Some Cure gigs are really very very long indeed, and some feel even longer than that. The Cure rarely, if ever, leave you wanting more, and often play two shows in one, with a range of emotions, moving between one and the other fluidly. Tonight, thankfully, its pure, undiluted Cure, with little in the way of the moments where you can obviously feel the audience and band drifting apart. A celebration of everything this band has done and how far they have come and what we have won by having them.

Perhaps the biggest issue in this celebration is the sheer size of the night : it’s nearly the biggest crowd they have played to, and Robert Smith will never be Bono. If The Cure are playing to 800 or 80,000 people you get the same experience.

The band are solid, delivering almost all of their major songs in a ruthlessly efficient, passionate way, exchanging the sly glances and injokes that only a long established group can make. This band have grown up in public, and with each other, and part of the glory of this is seeing The Cure become old and still retaining the same qualities they had when much, much younger. By the time of the encore, the band play 10 hit singles in a row. Just when you think you’ve had enough, BAM!, comes another, and another, and another, and you get to the end and you still wonder why they didn’t play “Mint Car” or “Lets Go To Bed”, or “Lovecats”, or “Primary”. And then, as the band are playing “10.15 Saturday Night” – seven minutes late at 10.22, clockwatchers – it’s fairly clear to me that when I was younger, I made the right choices. I fell in love with the right bands. I bought the right records. I’m in a field, with loads of my friends, happily playing air guitar and singing out of tune, and knowing that these, these are the moments. I’ll never get to my death bed, and think, I saw too many gigs. I’ll get to my death bed and know that This was a life I was blessed to live.

And somehow, it’s been captured on film.