“He is perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England, he is a Glastonbury legend and a personal hero of mine”: Olivia Rodrigo surprises fans during her headline Glastonbury set by duetting with The Cure’s Robert Smith

Olivia Rodrigo kicked off her weekend by inviting Ed Sheeran to duet with her on his hit song The A Team in Hyde Park, so when she announced during her Sunday night headline Glastonbury set that she was about to bring out a guest, you suspected that we might be in for a repeat performance.

Not so, though: instead - and rather delightfully - we got The Cure’s Robert Smith.

“I’m so wildly excited about this next guest, I can’t even contain it,” began Rodrigo. “He is perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England, he is a Glastonbury legend and a personal hero of mine. Would you please welcome… Robert Smith!”

Now, given that some of Rodrigo’s fans’ parents probably weren’t born when The Cure were formed, the slightly muted crowd response that followed was probably to be expected. However, they soon warmed up when Smith appeared - complete with acoustic guitar - and joined Rodrigo and her band for a faithful cover of his band’s 1992 hit, Friday I’m In Love, with the two stars trading verses and harmonising in the choruses.

This wasn’t the end of the matter, though: Smith stuck around long enough to perform a second Cure song, Just Like Heaven, from 1987, with a slightly starstruck Rodrigo singing along and keeping pace with the chord changes on her own acoustic.

By the end of that, you sense that the crowd would happily have taken a bit more of this jangly cross-generational double-act, but that was that. You can certainly hear The Cure’s influence in some of Rodrigo’s own material, though - Pretty isn’t Pretty, for example, from her second album, Guts.

Olivia Rodrigo - pretty isn't pretty (Official Live Performance) | Vevo - YouTube

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Rodrigo has previously spoken about being introduced to The Cure by her dad. In a 2023 interview with Vogue, she revealed that he was in the process of taking her to see “all the bands he went to see when he was my age,” including Smith’s band and Depeche Mode.

Earlier this month she was joined on stage by another legend - Talking Heads’ David Byrne - at the Governor’s Ball festival in New York.