Robert Smith pauses only once. The Cure’s two-hour-plus set is laden with hits, but it’s after “Just Like Heaven” that he chooses to have a rare word with the crowd. “I like hearing people sing the words back. Makes me think I could get away with stopping, if I wanted.”
But there’s no suggestion that he might follow through on that in front of 30,000 people in suburban south Manchester – his band’s biggest-ever show in the city by a distance. This is only The Cure’s fourth UK gig since they released Songs of a Lost World in 2024 – their first new album in sixteen years, and one of their best, if the raft of five-star reviews are anything to go by.
On stage is where the band really come to life, though, playing sets like Friday night’s, epic affairs that please everybody, finding room for everything from the obscure (“Secrets”, the heartbreaking nineties deep cut “Treasure”) to indie classics (“Friday I’m in Love”, “The Lovecats”). This has been their modus operandi for years, but only recently has it made them consumer champions, with Smith railing against Ticketmaster on their last US tour and succeeding in stripping away dynamic pricing, banning marked-up resales, and ensuring that the cheapest tickets were available at an inflation-busting rate of $20.
Similar measures were in place tonight; tickets sold at more than face value were cancelled, the most expensive t-shirt at the merch stand cost £25. The £77.50 price of admission earned you not only two hours of The Cure, but also an opening hour of Slowdive, the once-forgotten Reading shoegazers who remain on the upward curve of one of the great indie rock comeback stories, having released two albums since reforming in 2016 that arguably surpass anything they released in their nineties heyday. Of their new cuts, “kisses” and “Sugar for the Pill” are particularly well-suited to a hazy late summer’s evening in the park.
Similarly, The Cure themselves are more peak-of-their-powers than part of the furniture. A typically lengthy set provides a platform for experimentation; in amongst more pointed hits like “Fascination Street”, which still swirls with portent, and the ever-atmospheric “A Forest”, there’s room for the forgotten likes of “alt.end”, a nimble, hook-driven slice of pop-rock, and the breezy uptempo “Mint Car”, which somehow didn’t become one of the band’s staple classics on release in 1996.
That track forms part of an encore that would be worth the price of admission on its own, a 45-minute salvo of indie disco classics like “Lullaby”, “Close to Me”, a fitting “Friday I’m in Love” and to close, the evergreen “Boys Don’t Cry”, a song that was one of the band’s earliest singles and that remains, in its complex deconstruction of fragile masculinity, genuinely timeless.
The Cure are a long way removed from Oasis and yet there is something they have in common with them: you can’t not notice how genuinely multi-generational the crowd is tonight, as the Oasis gigs were last summer. It stretches from an old guard who probably caught the group playing across town at the Apollo in the eighties to a sizeable new cohort of teenagers who might have found their way to the group through any number of routes, whether it be the goth-pop revival that Phoebe Bridgers is spearheading or the fact that the band are such an indelible influence on Gen Z’s biggest star.
Olivia Rodrigo has collaborated with them both onstage, with Smith joining her during her Glastonbury headline set last year, and in the studio: he duetted with her on “What’s Wrong with Me” from last year’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love and the band is cheekily name-checked throughout the record.
The title of that track sums up the band’s enduring appeal: they speak to emotional tumult and agonised introspection as well as any band ever has, and Smith, with his shock of dyed-black hair, his eyeliner and smeared lipstick, remains the perfect icon for it. They bookend the main set with the opening and closing tracks from Songs from a Lost World, “Alone” and “Endsong”, tracks on which the 67-year-old Smith poignantly reckons with his advancing years.
It’s that kind of relatability that confirms The Cure as the people’s band every bit as much as how accessible they make themselves, fighting for fair pricing in a market where so many of the peers look the other way. Few bands feel this vital, both on and off the stage.