190. The Cure

Hyde Park

7 July 2018

There is a certain irony, when you are The Cure, to headline a festival called British Summertime, a band synonymous with melancholy and mascara, playing to 65,000 goths in a heatwave made Hyde Park feel like Satan’s picnic. There were visible puddles of black clad, pale skinned disciples regretting their choice of shoe wear.

The line-up read like a carefully curated indie-rock fever dream: Slowdive shimmering through the haze like a mirage of shoegaze perfection; This Will Destroy You living up to their name with tectonic crescendos; The Twilight Sad tuning their guitars to existential dread; and Interpol, all sharp suits and impeccable gloom.

As the scorching heat beat down over us, my friend and I, armed with VIP tickets, found a couple of sun loungers with shade and an ice bucket of rosé, whilst Slowdive delivered an ethereal masterclass, their sound drifting over the grass like perfume. The Twilight Sad, Smith’s modern disciples, turned their pain into poetry, earning themselves the sort of applause usually reserved for headliners. And Interpol: angular, disciplined delivered a taut, shimmering set that nearly made us venture out of our shaded retreat. Almost.

By the time Robert Smith ambled onstage, the sun was beginning to dip and the sky had turned the same shade of pink as his lipstick. Forty years since the band’s birth, the sight of him, that tangle of hair, that shy smile, was still oddly moving.

They opened with “Plainsong”, the crowd hushed, and those shimmering chimes floated over Hyde Park like cathedral bells ringing for the damned. From there, it was a career-spanning sermon: “Pictures of You,” “High,” “A Night Like This,” “Just Like Heaven,” “Lovesong”. The sound, unusually for Hyde Park, was spectacular, crisp enough to catch every sigh, every tremor in Smith’s voice. The band played with the kind of ease that only comes from decades of obsession.

And then there was Smith himself: looking some of his years, like a council-estate nana but oddly sprightly, shuffling between songs with that modest “Oh, you’re still here?” grin. His voice remains extraordinary: cracked, tender, and somehow eternal. When he sang “Disintegration”, it was like the whole park exhaled at once; when he crooned “Friday I’m in Love”, even the goths at the back allowed themselves a cautious sway. Because when The Cure play, there’s no irony, no posturing, just thousands of people singing the songs and realising that this band is wholly misunderstood.

The Cure remain Britain’s most beautifully sad contradictions, a band who make despair feel like salvation, whose songs are labelled as gothic laments but for the most part are a masterclass of progressive pop with roots level rock ‘n roll in their bellies. A band who can turn a blazing summer evening into something achingly, perfectly bittersweet.