Live on the train

By 1986, the Cure had already moved beyond the dark cult status that had defined them in the early Eighties. "The Head On The Door", released the previous year, had massively broadened the English band's audience thanks to singles like "In Between Days" and "Close To Me", which charted in the UK and turned Robert Smith's group into a stable presence even outside the post-punk and darkwave scene they came from. It's no coincidence that, that same year, the Cure were chosen as headliners at Glastonbury Festival alongside Psychedelic Furs and Level 42, on a bill that also featured Pogues, Madness, Waterboys and Simply Red.

At the peak of their international rise, the lineup made up of Robert Smith, Porl Thompson, Simon Gallup, Lol Tolhurst and Boris Williams decided to tackle an Italian date scheduled for May 22, 1986 in a decidedly unusual way. The band was set to play in Verona, but instead of traveling by the usual tour bus, they chose a far more glamorous means of transport: the Orient Express. A trip that felt more like a short holiday than a stop on tour.

Accompanying the band was also Mark Ellen, former editor of "Smash Hits" and, at the time, a face of the BBC music show "Whistle Test", who documented the experience in a television segment that survives today as a curious piece of period footage (see below).

The footage shows the Cure in a setting far removed from the gothic imagery associated with the band: sitting in the Orient Express dining car, playing the American folk-country standard "Home On The Range" on an acoustic guitar, amid jokes and impromptu interviews.

Robert Smith comes across as unusually relaxed and light-hearted, far from the melancholy, tormented figure audiences had come to know. In one of the funniest moments in the footage, he even jokes about having a plate of smoked salmon taken away from him mid-interview, promising to make up for it with the profiteroles planned for dessert. A curious mood for a band that, until just a few years earlier, had been synonymous with dark, anguished atmospheres.

The trip, however, ended with a decidedly less pleasant surprise. Once they arrived in Verona, the Cure discovered that the concert had been cancelled. According to reports at the time, the decision was reportedly imposed by local authorities over safety concerns regarding the venue set to host the show. A farcical ending to the journey for Robert Smith and his bandmates, who nonetheless turned the mishap into a brief holiday, heading to Venice for a few days before resuming their tour commitments. For this reason too, that Orient Express trip remains one of the most curious and atypical episodes in the Cure's history during the Eighties.

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11/05/2026