THE CURE: 28 SONGS AND A 34-YEAR WAIT FOR EDINBURGH

LIVE REVIEW | THE CURE w/ Just Mustard, Slowdive, Mogwai | EDINBURGH SUMMER SESSIONS | 23rd August 2026 by Bryden Churchmichael

My dad worked at Ingliston when he was fourteen. Not gigs, the markets, driving tractors about the showground before any of this was a place you went to see bands. The gig work came later, security around Edinburgh for whoever was passing through, and somewhere in the middle of that he saw The Cure play the Playhouse in November 1992. On Sunday I stood in the same field he used to work in and watched them come back for their first Edinburgh show since, nearly 34 years on.

It’s twenty minutes from my house, which still feels like a con. Doors at half three, sun out the whole way through, and the four sets timed so you never stood about waiting for something to start. Eighty quid for the day. People were doing the sums as they walked in, twenty a band, which is what the money’s supposed to buy you. Rachel Brown wrote here that artists could stop dynamic pricing at any time they liked, and her proof was Robert Smith, who already had.

Just Mustard were on at quarter past four, and I was on my own, five rows back and dead centre. I’d never heard a note of them before Sunday. The vocals sat low, and there was feedback I couldn’t place, and I spent the set not sure whether I was hearing a bad mix or the band. Turns out it’s the band. I went home and put Heart Under on, and it’s buried there too, on purpose, and that’s the point of them rather than a fault. Katie Ball‘s Irish accent came through the murk, and I liked that. One song was sung by the guitarist instead, ginger curly hair, dark shirt, who I’ve since worked out was David Noonan, and it sat right in the shoegazey noise-rock the afternoon was warming up on.

Slowdive came on at quarter past five with ‘Deep Blue Day’ over the PA before they walked out, and finished on ‘When the Sun Hits’. I’d seen them do ‘Souvlaki Space Station’ at the QMU in Glasgow in October 2023, and I know full well part of what I was doing on Sunday was trying to get back to being eighteen at that gig, an unfair thing to ask of a band while they’re working. Goswell‘s vocals didn’t carry the way it does in a room, though they never disappeared either, and outdoors that’s a fair trade. It isn’t music I dance to, and the sun was still fully up. One of them was playing Perry Bamonte‘s guitar. Bamonte was the former Cure guitarist who died last December, the space Eden Gallup stepped into, and his widow Donna had loaned it to Slowdive for these shows.

The best sound of the day was Mogwai and The Cure. I’d forgotten my loops, and my ears were cooked well before The Cure came on.

Mogwai were on at twenty-five to seven, light still up, sun just starting to go, and by then the field was full. Long tracks, no vocals, and I’ve been told for years they were my sort of thing. I turned to my friend partway through and said this isn’t what I expected, and she asked if that meant good or bad. I said both and then corrected myself: no, good, it’s good. Scottish Pink Floyd is what I called them at the time.

Then there was the silence. One of the tracks slowed and got quieter and quieter until there was nothing coming off that stage at all, and I looked around and found other people already looking around, everybody checking the same thing at once and grinning about it. That’s the bit I keep coming back to. Everyone talks about a band getting a crowd going, lifting them, hyping them up. Nobody ever talks about a band getting several thousand people in a field completely still and completely quiet at half past seven on a Sunday evening, which is far harder to do. Then the last pluck of guitar died out, and they came straight back in at full volume, full band, and that was it.

There was a Palestine flag on the stage, and two stickers on Braithwaite‘s guitar, a Yes sticker and a saltire.

The Cure came on at quarter past eight and played twenty-eight songs, off on the curfew at twenty-five past ten. Smith, Simon Gallup on bass, Jason Cooper on drums, Roger O’Donnell on keys, Reeves Gabrels on guitar, and Gallup’s son Eden filling in beside him. They opened on ‘Plainsong’; second was ‘Pictures of You’, and I cried in a field where my dad drove tractors when he was fourteen, dancing while I did it. I’m not going to pretend it was the songs on their own doing that to me.

‘Charlotte Sometimes’ got maybe thirty seconds in, except it wasn’t just ‘Charlotte Sometimes’. Smith had started one song while the rest of the band, Gabriel Cooper already out for the sax, went into ‘A Night Like This’. They stopped. Tried again. Still didn’t line up. In the end they landed on a slower ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ than the one on record, and once it finished, Smith explained he’d been on the wrong setlist. He laughed it off, said something about how they all have different setlists, and he’d know, because he used to be the one doing them. Later he told us he’d forgotten how hard some of those songs are to play, and that he didn’t just mean physically, which I’ve been turning over since. Then he said it was light entertainment from here on in, one way of telling a field the encore is coming, and ‘A Night Like This’ came round properly, the sax landing where it was meant to. Cooper’s seventeen, and he’s Jason’s son.

He’d walked the full width of the stage at the start, saying hello to folk, and at the end he thanked everyone and got emotional doing it. I didn’t want any other version of them than the one we got.

Which brings me to where I part company with some of the coverage. The Scotsman gave it three stars, the argument being that the main set tailed off before the encore rescued it. I don’t think that’s right. A main set that’s run out of road does not finish on ‘Disintegration’. That’s not a band losing a crowd. That’s them putting you down in the deepest thing they own and keeping you there because they want to. The encore doesn’t save the night; it lets it out. And it only hits that hard because of the twenty songs before it. Take those away and ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ is just a song at the end of a long night. Leave them in, and the roof comes off.

By then the sun was long gone, and the moon was up. On the way out, still on site, there was a big lit display screen at the exit that read THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT. Not the stage screen, the venue’s own sign, doing the same job it does for every show that finishes out there, agricultural fair or otherwise. The moon was sitting right underneath it.

They closed the night on Boys Don’t Cry. The 86 Mix is out now on CD, 7″ and 12″. Order it here.

Edinburgh Summer Sessions will continue this week before returning to the Royal Highland Showgrounds in 2027. Details here.