The Cure were already visible all over Tallinn several hours before the concert.

At around three in the afternoon, in the Old Town, the surrounding streets, and Telliskivi, I kept seeing people in T-shirts featuring The Cure, black clothes, and distinctive makeup. One guy even had a hairstyle clearly inspired by Robert Smith. There was no obvious “typical” age for the audience: teenagers, older people, parents with children. I heard English and Finnish around the city too, and some of the crowd had clearly travelled to Tallinn for the show.

It did not feel like a gathering of one small subculture. Instead, it was as if Tallinn’s alternative community had simply become much more visible for a day.

At around 4:30 p.m., I stopped at Põhja Konn and started talking to a bartender. There was nothing about his appearance that immediately suggested he was into The Cure. I casually asked if he was going to the concert that evening.

He told me he had to work. He had only remembered about the concert a few days earlier and had not been able to swap shifts. Then, completely seriously, he said that missing it was genuinely painful for him and asked me not to talk about it anymore.

I told him I was sorry.

The conversation lasted only a couple of minutes, but it confirmed an impression I was already getting from the city: for Tallinn, this was not just another concert by a visiting band. It felt more like a major night out for the city, bringing together people who would not normally belong to the same crowd.

I arrived at the venue at around 5:30 p.m. The gates opened shortly after six, and long, lively queues formed almost immediately. The merchandise stands attracted people especially quickly — for many, buying something seemed to be the first priority after getting inside.

The concert did not take place inside Unibet Arena, but on a large outdoor site next to it. In daylight, it looked more like an industrial area temporarily converted into an open-air venue. I was among the first people inside, so at first the crowd looked small compared with the size of the site, but the space filled up quickly.

I found a spot to the left of the stage near the barrier. From there, I could see both the distant stage and the large screens clearly, so I never felt much need to push closer. It was easy to walk around the site and then return to roughly the same area.

One person in the audience stood out immediately from all the black around him: a man wearing a jacket and trousers covered in large yellow, green, and red patches.

Duo Ruut and Antti Paalanen played before The Cure, although the anticipation was obviously reserved for the headliners.

The first songs by The Cure were still played under a fairly bright evening sky, and for me there was a slight disconnect between the surroundings and the music. Closer to ten, the sky finally darkened, people started putting on their jackets, and the stage lighting began to define the whole space. Darker, warmer tones took over, and visually the concert suddenly made much more sense.

The biggest surprise was Robert Smith.

If you closed your eyes, it was difficult to tell from his voice how much time had passed since many of these songs were recorded. He sounded young, energetic, and remarkably close to the records. Smith himself remained fairly detached, spoke little, and occasionally smiled with a slightly mischievous expression, almost as if he were observing the whole thing from a distance.

The band hardly had any obvious weaknesses in terms of sound.

The bass and drums were especially present. You did not just hear the low end — you could physically feel it. Yet the mix remained extremely clean: the instruments never collapsed into one loud mass, and Smith’s voice was never swallowed by the rhythm section.

Technically, it was close to perfect.

And strangely enough, that became a problem for me.

The band played so precisely, and Smith sounded so close to the familiar recordings, that at one point I found myself wondering: if the songs sound almost this flawless at home, why go and hear them live at all?

I wanted more risk. A mistake, an unexpected change, the feeling that a song might suddenly go somewhere different on this particular night. Something that could not simply be reproduced almost identically at the next show.

I also expected the set to feel darker than it did. Pornography is probably my favourite album by The Cure, and they played only one song from it that night, A Strange Day. I wasn’t expecting them to suddenly turn the whole concert into 1982, but I did hope for more of that heavy, claustrophobic side of the band.

The people around me didn’t necessarily seem to agree.

You could see that simply by watching the movement of the crowd.

During some of the less immediate and darker songs, new streams of people would head towards the bars. They would return a few minutes later, and then another wave would start moving. During the more recognisable and energetic songs, the opposite happened: people stayed where they were, focused on the stage, started moving, and raised their hands.

The bars were one of the weaker parts of the event: the selection was limited and the prices felt high for what was on offer.

But watching the people was much more interesting.

At the beginning of the concert, the audience still felt restrained. People watched, listened, and occasionally raised their hands, but there was relatively little collective movement.

At one point, I decided to walk through the crowd and deliberately make eye contact with strangers, simply to see how they would react.

Almost everyone I looked at smiled back.

For Tallinn, that was unusual. In everyday life, strangers here tend to keep their distance and avoid prolonged eye contact. For a few hours, that distance seemed to disappear.

The change became impossible to miss during the encore. Far more people were dancing, singing, and raising their hands. What had felt slightly tense earlier in the evening had become much more relaxed.

By Boys Don’t Cry, almost everyone I could see around me was dancing.

Hands went up across the crowd, including from people who had barely moved earlier. By the end of the song there were more of them above the audience than at almost any previous point that night. It was one of those moments when looking in every direction became at least as interesting as looking at the stage.

And the story did not end when the concert did.

I headed back into the city centre and quickly ran into people who had also just come from The Cure. Many were looking for somewhere to continue the night, asking about afterparties and simply meeting new people. Finding company turned out to be surprisingly easy.

I eventually ended up in a karaoke bar with people I had not known at all a few hours earlier.

Musically, The Cure had been almost too perfect. I wanted more risk, more variation, and more of a sense that this particular performance could only exist on this particular night.

But something unique had happened anyway.

Hours before the show, The Cure had already made an entire layer of the city more visible. A young bartender had seriously asked me not to remind him about the concert he was forced to miss. Later, strangers in Tallinn — usually rather cautious with one another — were smiling when their eyes met. And after the final song, people who had arrived separately were still looking for somewhere to continue the same night together.

You really can put on a record by The Cure at home.

You just won’t have the people around it.