August 2026

On Wednesday 7 April 2027 we open our European run at the Effenaar in Eindhoven. It is a fine room, it is three hours from Calais, and it makes a sensible first night of a tour. None of that is why we said yes as fast as we did.

11 December 1979

The Cure played the Effenaar on a Tuesday night in December 1979. It was only their third trip across the Channel and the second show of their first proper tour. Three Imaginary Boys had been out about six months. The room sold out.

What makes that night worth marking is what had happened in the ten weeks before it.

The Banshees changed everything

That autumn The Cure went out on tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees. When the Banshees lost their guitarist mid-tour, Robert Smith stepped in and played both sets, night after night. He came back a different writer, pulled towards something colder and darker than the bright, spiky pop of the debut.

Not everyone wanted to follow him there. Michael Dempsey wanted a cleaner sound, the two of them could not settle it, and Dempsey left in the October. Simon Gallup and Matthieu Hartley joined in the middle of November.

Which means the band that walked onto the Effenaar stage a few weeks later was the very first line-up of the post-Banshees Cure. The band that would go on to make Seventeen Seconds. That version of The Cure was about three weeks old.

They played A Forest in Eindhoven that night, months before the single came out.

A striped jumper and an ordinary haircut

The detail we like best is what the people who were in the room remember: a polite young man in a striped jumper with perfectly normal hair. No backcombing. No lipstick. None of it yet. The Effenaar got The Cure in the last few weeks before the myth arrived.

Which is precisely our show

Siouxsie & The Budgies play sixty minutes of the Banshees. Then we play ninety minutes of The Cure. The whole evening is built on that crossover, the tour where one guitarist carried something home from one band to the other and changed both of them for good.

We get to do it in the room where it landed, forty-seven years on.

Effenaar, Eindhoven, Wednesday 7 April 2027. Dresden on the Friday, Mühlhausen on the Saturday.

Read the Effenaar’s own account of that 1979 night, with photographs by Peter Cox.

Everyone knows what we do on a Friday night. Thirty-six years of it. But there is another side to this band, and it is sitting in the shop right now.

Imagine music written in the style of The Cure, with a bit of Bowie. That is the record.

Ten original songs. Written and played by the same people you see on stage, and first released under another name, The Hiram Key, before finding their way home to The Cureheads. Same voices, same hands, same record collection: The Cure, Bowie, Bauhaus, the Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division, Gary Numan.

What the press made of it

Terrorizer made these songs their Band of the Week, likened the line-up to a gothic Travelling Wilburys, and heard in the vocal “Ian McCulloch impersonating Bowie” over a backing somewhere between The Cure and the Sisters of Mercy. Hard to argue with any of that.

Reflections of Darkness scored the album 7 out of 10, marking the production up to an 8, and picked out the more expansive moments as the ones that showed where the band could go next.

BelleSong

One of these songs is for Belle Star, who played drums on them. You can hear it on the Audio page. It is the reason this record matters to us more than any set of covers ever could.

Where to get it

Digital and CD through the Shop page. Vinyl at live shows only, and we bring a limited number to each one, so do not leave it until the encore.

Thirty-six years of playing somebody else’s songs beautifully. Turns out we had a few of our own all along.

The diary is filling up nicely. Here is where you can find us between now and the end of 2027 — and there is news from across the Channel at the bottom.

2026

• Thu 10 Sep — Crawley, The High Street Open Air
• Fri 11 Sep — Southend, Chinnerys
• Sat 12 Sep — Corby, Our Lady’s Catholic Club
• Fri 25 Sep — Lewes, Con Club
• Sat 26 Sep — Worthing, Factory Live
• Fri 2 Oct — Oxford, O2 Academy
• Sat 3 Oct — Birmingham, The Crossing, Digbeth (Golden Years: Goth & Post-Punk All-Dayer)
• Fri 30 Oct — Hertford, Corn Exchange
• Fri 6 Nov — Berkhamsted, Civic Centre
• Sat 7 Nov — Bedford, Esquires
• Fri 27 Nov — Guildford, The Boileroom
• Sat 28 Nov — Royal Tunbridge Wells, The Forum
• Fri 11 Dec — Leicester, O2 Academy2
• Sat 12 Dec — Carlisle, The Brickyard
• Sun 13 Dec — Bilston, The Robin
• Thu 17 Dec — Southampton, Southampton 1865
• Fri 18 Dec — London, O2 Academy Islington

2027

• Sat 30 Jan — Reading, The Face Bar
• Fri 5 Feb — Liverpool, Camp & Furnace
• Sat 6 Feb — Derby, The Hairy Dog
• Fri 12 Feb — Whitby, Whitby Pavilion
• Sat 13 Feb — Milton Keynes, The Craufurd Arms
• Fri 19 Feb — Brighton, Concorde 2
• Sat 20 Feb — Northampton, Roadmender
• Fri 9 Apr — Dresden, Reithalle Strasse E (Germany)
• Sat 10 Apr — Mühlhausen, Alte Fleischerei (Germany)
• Fri 30 Apr — Bristol, The Fleece
• Sat 1 May — Exeter, Bomba
• Sun 2 May — Cardiff, The Globe
• Fri 21 May — Eastbourne, The Hippodrome
• Sat 22 May — St Albans, The Horn
• Fri 17 Sep — Worthing, Factory Live
• Sat 18 Sep — Lewes, The Con Club
• Sat 2 Oct — Tamworth, Assembly Rooms
• Sat 30 Oct — Bedford, Esquires

Europe, April 2027

We are currently putting together a European tour for April 2027, and the first two dates are confirmed: Dresden at Reithalle Strasse E on Friday 9 April, and Mühlhausen at the Alte Fleischerei on Saturday 10 April.

We are booking further shows around those two, with dates being held either side of that weekend in Germany and Belgium. Promoters, venues and festivals — if you would like us on the bill, please get in touch through the contact page.

Full listings, times and ticket links are on the Tour Dates page. More announcements to come.