The Cure Primavera Sound 2026: A Night Like This
Thursday belonged to the storm. Massive Attack cancelled, several stages silenced, the Fòrum left as a damp reminder of what might have been. By Friday, with the ground barely dry, The Cure arrived. There is something almost too convenient about that sequence — the storm first, the cure after. Robert Smith has spent more than forty years inhabiting that role, and at Primavera Sound 2026 he played it with the quiet authority of someone who no longer needs to prove anything, yet somehow still does.
Earlier in the evening, Ethel Cain had delivered one of those sets that roots you to the spot without asking permission. Brutal in the most precise sense. From our position, the screen showed what Addison Rae was offering on the adjacent stage. The contrast was instructive. We stayed where we were.
Sound anxiety and what Slowdive’s set taught us about festival crowds
There had been legitimate concern in the hours before. Slowdive’s earlier performance had suffered from the kind inconsistency that plagues large-scale festival production — sound arriving and disappearing in waves, nothing quite settling. And then there is the other variable: the festival crowd, that diffuse organism that sometimes turns up to listen and sometimes simply turns up, talking through the set, existing in the vicinity without much investment in what is actually happening on stage. You know the type.
The first notes of The Cure’s set made that concern irrelevant.
Alone, Eden Gallup, and what the Fòrum became
Alone opened with the kind of deliberate slowness that very few bands can carry without it feeling like self-indulgence. The line-up on stage included Eden Gallup — Simon’s son — who had previously stepped in for his father on earlier tour dates and who now occupied the position left by Perry Bamonte following his passing (RIP). It could have felt awkward. It didn’t. The band absorbed it with the ease of a unit that knows exactly what it is doing.
Smith moved from one end of the stage to the other, greeting the crowd filling the area known at Primavera as Mordor — that dense, dark rear section where the committed plant themselves early and don’t move. The first significant response came with Pictures of You, with Mary — his wife — stationed near the monitor desk, watching every detail.
The central stretch: Simon Gallup, Burn, and the backbone of the set
What followed was a sequence delivered without fault. High, A Night Like This and Lovesong formed a block that the crowd received with the particular gratitude of people recognising songs that have accompanied them through experiences they don’t discuss in public. Simon Gallup’s bass playing throughout was exemplary — one of the most distinctive low-end voices in alternative rock history operating at full capacity.
Then came something fewer people had anticipated: Smith, flute in hand, performing Burn — the track The Cure composed for The Crow soundtrack in 1994. A song that introduced an entire generation to a certain kind of darkness through cinema rather than through record shops.
Fascination Street confirmed the band’s level. The Walk followed with its more dancefloor-ready energy — that side of The Cure that tends to be overlooked by those who prefer the more convenient gothic image. Mint Car did its job without catching fire, at least not for this particular listener.
Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, and the moment Primavera conceded
Inbetween Days had something slightly off — a small irregularity that could be attributed to any number of things, but noticeable. Just Like Heaven, on the other hand, was the kind of performance that reminds you precisely why you are standing in a field at midnight with tired feet and the memory of last night’s rain still somewhere in your bones. Primavera Sound conceded entirely.
Play For Today brought the crowd’s familiar vocal participation — that lololo that audiences have been delivering unprompted for thirty-odd years. A Forest arrived next, and here the crowd’s engagement added something genuine to the performance: there are songs that need an audience to fully assemble themselves in a live setting, and this is one of them. The interpretation was extended, unhurried, and all the better for it.
From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea and Endsong followed, then a brief pause before the closing stretch.
The finale: broken Spanish, affection, and Boys Don’t Cry
Smith offered a sentence in Spanish — acknowledging, with some self-deprecating humour, that he had regrettably not yet managed to learn the language. Given how many times he has filled venues in this country, the observation carries a certain irony. The moment was small and genuine, much like his way of greeting the crowd from the edge of the stage: slightly awkward, entirely sincere, no performance involved.
The closing run covered ten songs and served as a precise demonstration of how to end a festival set without leaving anyone behind. Lullaby, Hot Hot Hot and Wrong Number — the latter failing, again, to make much of an impression on this listener — gave way to six consecutive tracks that brought the festival to life in the most literal sense: Let’s Go to Bed, The Lovecats, Friday I’m in Love — the one that most of the more casual attendees had been waiting for, and there is nothing wrong with that — Close to Me, Why Can’t I Be You with Smith moving back and forth across the stage in that quietly endearing manner of his, and Boys Don’t Cry as the full stop.
Forty years of catalogue and the undiminished ability to make a song written in 1979 feel like it matters right now. This is The Cure.
The sound held throughout. The setlist was festival-minded in the best possible sense: broad, without any pretension to being a definitive statement, constructed so that every section of the audience could find its moment. One of the strongest The Cure performances I have witnessed. And I have witnessed a fair number.
The Cure Primavera Sound 2026 full concert.