Glastonbury Festival headlining set 2011

Lore & Background

The Cure had a long, complicated relationship with Glastonbury before 2011. The band had played the festival in earlier decades, but always in support slots or on smaller stages, never the headline. That absence became a kind of running commentary in fan communities: here was the band that had given the world "Boys Don't Cry," "Lovesong," and "Just Like Heaven," yet they still hadn't closed the biggest show in the UK. By the time the 2011 booking was confirmed, the anticipation had built over months of speculation, and the setlist was expected to be a greatest-hits journey through every era.

Robert Smith's stage persona in 2011 carried the weight of that history. No longer the anguished young man of the *Pornography* era, he moved through the set with a kind of weathered grace, letting the band's chemistry—forged through years of continuous touring—carry the emotional peaks. The Pyramid Stage, with its vast tent interior and the sea of faces stretching into the night, gave the songs a physical scale they rarely achieved in clubs or arenas. "A Forest," the set's traditional closer, took on an almost liturgical quality as the crowd swayed in unison, a ritual the band had performed thousands of times but never before on this particular stage.

The performance also sat within a broader context: The Cure in 2011 were a band in their mid-career renaissance, having released *4:13 Dream* in 2008 and touring steadily. They were no longer the scrappy post-punk band of 1979, nor were they a museum piece. The Glastonbury set captured that middle ground perfectly—confident, melodic, occasionally dark, and deeply, achingly human in the way only Robert Smith's songwriting could be.

In Their Own Story

The rain had stopped just as the first chord of the opening track rolled out of the Pyramid Stage monitors, and the mist that clung to the Somerset fields caught the stage lights in long, slow ribbons. Robert Smith stood at the mic, his black hair catching the amber wash, and for a moment the only sound was the collective intake of breath from tens of thousands of people who had waited, some of them their whole adult lives, for this particular night. When "Lovesong" finally came, the crowd's voices rose like a tide, and Smith closed his eyes, letting the melody carry him. Somewhere in the back, a father held his daughter on his shoulders so she could see the silhouette against the tent's peak. The pyramid glowed. The night held still. And for the length of "A Forest," the whole field breathed as one.

Reader's Guide

The Cure's Glastonbury headline landed on the Friday night of the 2011 festival at Worthy Farm, Pilton, Somerset, on the iconic Pyramid Stage. It was the band's first time closing the festival, a slot that had eluded them through decades of playing smaller stages at the event. The set was a career-spanning journey, weaving early post-punk urgency through the melodic peaks of the *Disintegration* and *Wish* eras, and closing with the long, swelling "A Forest," a ritual closer the band has performed at the end of shows since the 1980s.

The Pyramid Stage itself is a vast tent with a pointed peak, and the Cure's production leaned into its scale: wide light rigs, a wall of monitors, and a visual palette of deep blues, ambers, and the occasional sharp white flash that cut through the evening mist. The audience for the headline slot numbered in the tens of thousands, part of a festival weekend drawing well over 200,000 attendees.

The memorable first was, simply, the headline slot itself. After years of playing Glastonbury in support or on secondary stages, the band finally owned the biggest night in British live music. The setlist evolved across the performance, building from quieter, more textured songs into the anthemic peaks, a structure that rewarded the live audience's patience and rewarded the crowd's collective singing at the climactic moments. No major incidents marred the night; the memory is of a seamless, emotionally complete performance that felt like the band finally arriving somewhere they had always been meant to stand.

Did You Know?

• The Cure had performed at Glastonbury in earlier years but never as the headline act until 2011, making this set a long-awaited milestone for fans who had followed the band since the late 1970s.
• "A Forest," the song that traditionally closes every Cure live set, was performed on the Pyramid Stage for the first time in 2011, giving the band's most iconic ritual a new and grander setting.
• The 2011 performance came during the touring cycle following the 2008 album *4:13 Dream*, a period in which the band was widely regarded as being in a strong creative and live form.
• Robert Smith's songwriting for The Cure spans from the angular post-punk of *Seventeen Seconds* (1980) to the lush, orchestral pop of the 1990s, and the Glastonbury set was structured to take the audience through that fu