Almost 30 years since their debut album, The Cure remain the outsiders who have never quite fitted into the mainstream, despite almost 30 million album sales.

On Wednesday evening they received a Godlike Genius award from the NME and last night they almost filled the O2 Arena in the NME Awards Big Gig.

Most bands would celebrate a lifetime achievement award by cranking out the hits, but, for better and for worse, The Cure are not most bands.

Ever contrary, they unfurled much of last year’s 4:13 Dream; a track — and not always the track you might expect or want — from each of their other 12 studio albums and some crowd-pleasing early singles for an encore. For hardcore Cure fans and, judging by their unusually jaunty mood, The Cure themselves, this was a rare treat indeed.

For agnostics it proved to be more perplexing, but, as ever, almost everything was underpinned by leader Robert Smith’s yearning romanticism, while the invariably less heralded One Hundred Years, The Only One and The End Of The World proved hypnotic, surprisingly adept replacements for The Lovecats, Friday I’m In Love and Lullaby, their biggest hits, all pointedly unplayed.
Smith still cuts an incongruous figure. Now a sulky teenager of 49, he was a straggly haired lipsticked, eye-shadowed hoodie weighed down with bling, while his guitarist and brother-in-law Porl Thompson resembled Uncle Fester, albeit an Uncle Fester in gigantic platform shoes and splattered with tattoos.

Wisely, bassist Simon Gallup — so extravagantly quiffed Morrissey may one day hire him — and drummer Jason Cooper simply kept the engine running. Run it did, for almost two hours — brief by their standards — and if, with the exception of A Forest and In-Between Days, it wasn’t quite the anticipated lap of honour, this was a reminder that The Cure aren’t ready for their pipe and slippers just yet.

Earlier, Franz Ferdinand plumped for a mixture of hits and unfamiliar but almost identically paced new material. At one heroic moment during Outsiders, all of them were banging Paul Thomson’s drumkit. Yet, faced with a response from another band’s crowd that was more polite than rabid, they were cowed. They’ll have more crucial tests when they tour properly next month.