Hyde Park
Hyde Park, central London
2019 · film
Anniversary: Hyde Park becomes a Cure film
Tim Pope’s film connects The Cure’s 7 July 2018 Hyde Park anniversary concert with later cinema-sound work at Abbey Road.
Anniversary preserves The Cure’s fortieth-anniversary performance in London’s Hyde Park on 7 July 2018. Director Tim Pope had to capture both the scale of the outdoor show and the musicians’ close interaction. The film’s later preparation at Abbey Road added another setting: a room where the concert could be considered as a cinema experience.
Explore the places
Markers identify buildings or documented location references. They do not mark an exact recording room, stage position or camera angle.
A concert looks back over forty years
The distributor’s synopsis describes the Hyde Park performance as a twenty-nine-song journey through the band’s history, filmed by longstanding collaborator Tim Pope. He had directed many of the band’s videos and the earlier In Orange concert film. For this anniversary, Pope recalled attending rehearsal the day before and deciding to balance the stage show’s large dimensions with the intimacy of musicians playing together. The park supplied the gathering; the camera choices would determine how another audience experienced it. [1]
Cinema possibilities, short preparation
In his original interview with Ned Raggett, Pope recalled Robert Smith asking him to film the show only weeks beforehand. The initial approach was to capture it and judge the result later. Pope nevertheless chose a framing ratio suitable for cinema projection. That decision gave the recording a possible life beyond the festival screens even before the band had settled on a theatrical release. It was a production choice, not evidence of a separate performance staged for the film. [3]
Camera positions held in memory
Pope described fitting his 4K cameras into the festival changeover shortly before The Cure went on. After walking the site and learning their positions, he returned to his truck with only one monitor working. For the opening songs he directed partly from his mental picture of those camera positions while their feeds came online. He needed to know the views before he could see them. [3]
The concert enters the Mix Stage
Abbey Road’s mastering account places Smith, Pope and Andy Dudman in its Mix Stage for the cinema version. Smith watched the concert on a large screen with surround sound. The account distinguishes the film, DVD and CD outputs: they shared audio stems, but each format required consideration. This is a later production connection, not a claim that the Hyde Park concert was recorded in a studio. [2]
One performance, several ways to hear it
The account says the resulting film mastering remained close to the DVD and CD versions. Hyde Park is the performance site; Abbey Road is where the captured material was reviewed and prepared for cinema sound. [2]
The story in real places
Abbey Road Studios
St John’s Wood, London
The cinema sound is prepared at Abbey Road
Film preparation for the 2019 release; exact session day not asserted
Abbey Road’s original account places Robert Smith, Tim Pope and Andy Dudman in its Mix Stage for the Anniversary film mix and mastering process. [2]
Reading the place today
The Hyde Park connection identifies the concert’s park setting, without an exact stage pin or a promise of surviving event structures. Abbey Road’s Mix Stage is a working production space; no studio entry is offered.
Sources
- Anniversary 1978–2018: original film synopsis — Trafalgar Releasing. Checked 2026-10-17.
- Anniversary: Abbey Road’s original film-mix account — Abbey Road Studios. Checked 2026-10-17.
- Ned Raggett’s original Tim Pope interview on Anniversary — The Quietus, 8 July 2019. Checked 2026-10-17.