No Quick Fix

Alt-rock Icons Bring the House Down With Epic London Show.

- Niall Doherty

THE CURE

WEMBLEY ARENA, LONDON 

FRIDAY, 2 DECEMBER, 2016

It’s cold, it’s raining and it’s Friday. It’s as if events have conspired to welcome The Cure back to Wembley tonight. Until I Crawley’s The Rocket gets its spec up to scratch, it’s about as close to a perfect homecoming for alternative rock’s men in black as you can get. After a few years spent mixing festival sets with sporadic one-off shows, tonight is the penultimate show of their first European tour in eight years and feels like a celebration of one of the UK’s most influential bands.

It is just over 31 years since The Cure first played here. That was just as their star was rising, when Robert Smith’s creative peak wasn’t ruffled by tumultuous intra-band relations and The Cure released brilliant album after brilliant album, all with some of the best pop songs of the decade on their mantelpiece. They started the ’80s as post-punk goths giving the world a death stare and ended it as twisted-pop superstars. There have only been three new albums since the turn of the millennium and Smith has spent the past eight years teasing their (finished) 14th album without ever seeing the need to actually release it. “I’m very bad at planning long-term,” he told Radio X’s John Kennedy in 2014. “I’m at an age where I’m enjoying what I’m doing. I don’t feel such a strong urge to beat people over the head with new stuff.”