June 1992 by Simon
Reynolds
Pulse
In a rare solo interview, Cure leader Robert
Smith dissects his cult, defines his own punk, and pursues his Wish
Robert Smith sits alone at the office of
Fiction, the U.K. label of the Cure, the band he formed at age 17 and has led
for a decade and a half since. It's a rare opportunity to meet one-on-one with
the group's vocalist, songwriter and sometimes-guitarist; determined to promote
the idea that "The Cure Is A Band," all of Smith 's recent encounters
have seen him flanked by his cohorts:drummer Boris Williams , guitarists Porl
Thompson and Perry Bamonte , and longest serving Cure member, bassist Simon
Gallup . Tonight the ageless Smith , who's wearing eyeliner but no trace of
lipstick, looks somewhat drained after a five hour session with his accountant,
doubtless administering the lucre generated by the Stateside success of the
Disintegration album and the "best of" compilation Standing on a
Beach/Staring at the Sea. After years as a cult icon, the Cure is now a big
band, but without the coarsening and adherence to formula that such mass
popularity usually requires.
The Cure began in 1976 as the Easy Cure, then a
trio, spurred into being by punk's do it yourself fervor. The groups 1979
debut, Three Imaginary Boys, lay somewhere between power pop and the edgy,
art-punk-minimalism of Wire and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the latter of whom
Chris Parry signed to Polydor before starting his Fiction label, with the Cure
as its flagship. (With a few early singles tagged on, the debut is titled Boys
Don't Cry in the US, where the groups albums are available on Elektra/Fiction,
unless otherwise noted.) With Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Faith (1981), the
Cure's tormented angst-rock garnered an intensely devout cult following. By
Pornography (1982), the group's music had reached a peak of morbid
introspection that many found impenetrable. After this high-point of alienation
Smith veered toward pop with the vaguely dance-oriented Lets Go To Bed and The
Walk singles. But it was only with 1983's Lovecats that the Cure really got a
handle on the joie de vivre of pure pop. A singles collection, Japanese
Whispers (Fiction/Sire in the US), marked the breakthrough.
Thereafter, the Cure's albums - The Top (1984),
The Head on the Door (1985) and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987) - explored both
life's dark side and its light-hearted aspects; stylistically, the group shed
the oppressively homogenous sound of its angst era for a kaleidoscope of
psychedelic, art-rock and mutant pop textures. Disintegration(1989) was a
slight return to the morose Cure of the early 80's, but that didn't prevent the
first single Love Song, from reaching number two on the US charts. By the end
of the decade the Cure had sold over eight million records worldwide without
ever having settled into a predictable career trajectory or losing its innate
combustibility. As Smith once put it, If I didn't feel the Cure could fall
apart any minute, it would be completely worthless.
Despite Smith and his group's contrary nature,
much of the new album Wish , is surprisingly in sync with the British
alternative state-of-art - not that Robert Smith 's ever been afraid to be
affected by the pop climate (remember the New Order tribute.pastiche of
Inbetween Days from Head On The Door ?). But on Wish it sounds like he's been
listening closely to the British movement of "shoegazers" or
"The Scene That Celebrates Itself", and in particular to Ride and My
Bloody Valentine (both bands for which he professed admiration). You can hear
it in the super saturated Husker Du meets Hendrix maelstrom of End, in the
oceanic iridescence of From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea, and in the gilded,
glazed guitar mosaics of High and To Wish Impossible Things, all of which
vaguely resemble shoegazers like Slowdive and Lush. The Cure has made these
kinds of noises before (indeed, a number of shoegazers have been influenced by
Smith 's group and Siouxsie and The Banshees). But it hasn't made them for a
while, and never in such a timely fashion.
I definitely think it would have been a totally
different record if we'd had the same songs but recorded them at the time of
Disintegration, Robert Smith agrees. But he says it was actually recording the
wah-wah tempest of Never Enough (the only new song on the group's 1990 remix
album, Mixed Up) that made the Cure want to be a guitar band again.
According to Smith , when keyboard player Roger
O'Donnell slipped out of the group after the Disintegration tour, the Cure
decided to replace him with another guitarist, Perry Bamonte . Porl Thompson 's
always been very guitar oriented, he's got loads of old guitars and amps and
he's always very worried about his sound. In the past he's probably been
restrained by the group and by the way I've always liked things to be very
minimal. But this times everyone's
played out a bit more. Because we didn't have a keyboard player, no one was
really bothered with working out keyboard parts. On Disintegration there were
all these lush synthesizer arrangements, but this time we tried to do it mostly
with guitars. We also had in mind the way it feels live, to play as a guitar
band; its so much more exciting.
The
new album is a stylistic mixed bag, whereas Disintegration was a more uniform,
emotionally and musically: a steady wash of somber sound and mood. Wish spans a
spectrum of feelings from giddy euphoria to deep melancholy, from bewilderment
to idyllic nonchalance.
Disintegration
was less obviously varied as this album," says Smith , "but there
were songs like Lullaby, Love Song, Fascination Street, that were nothing to do
with the rest of the album. But overall there was a mood slightly...downered.
Even on Lullaby there was a somber side to it. Whereas on this album there are
some out-and-out jump in the air type songs.
Some
of Wish's songs are fairly legible, like the poignant Apart, which deals with
the desolation that comes when a gulf inexplicably opens up between lovers.
Others are harder to fathom. End beseeches,please stop loving me, I am none of
these things, but it's not clear if the plea's addressed to the Cure fans, Smith
's wife, to a friend...
It's
kind of a mixture, says Smith . In one sense, its me addressing myself. It's
about the persona I sometimes fall into. On another level, it's addressed to
people who expect me to know things and have answers - fans, and on a personal
level, certain individuals. And it has a broader idea, to do with the way you
fall into a way of acting that isn't really true, but because it's the easy
path, it just becomes habitual even though it's not really the way you want to
be. Sometimes whole relationships are based on these habits. It goes beyond my
circumstances as a star, because I think a lot of people put on an act. I think
I had it at the back of my mind when I wrote the song that when it came to
performing it live, it would remind me that I'm not reducible to what I am
doing. I do need reminding, because it's got to the scale where I could quite
happily fall into the rock star trip. It might seem like its quite late in the
day for it to all go to my head, since we've been going so long, but the
success has reached the magnitude where it's insistent and insidious.
On
End, Smith also bemoans the fact that all my wishes have come true. It must be
something that he's felt at several points in his career: been there, done
that..so what now? .
Any
desires I have left unfulfilled, says Smith , are so extreme that there's no
chance of them ever happening. I would really love to go into space, I always
have since I was little, but as I get older, it's less and less likely that I'd
pass the medical! The only things that I wish for are the unattainable things.
Apart from that, I don't really have strong desires, except on behalf of other
people. Generally, peace and plenty. My wishes are more on a global level. To
Wish Impossible Things Is specifically about realationships. The notion of
Three Wishes, all though history, has this aspect where if you wish for selfish
things, it backfires on the third wish. But wishes never seem to take in the
notion of wishing for other people, general wishes, or wishes about interacting
with other people. In all relationships, there's always aching holes, and
that's where the impossible wishes come into it
Doing
the Unstuck seems to be about disconnecting from the hectic schedules from
productive life, and drifting in innocent blissful indolence. It's something
Smith wishes he could do more often.
I
was going to say that my biggest wish was not to have to get up in the morning,
and that's not strictly true, but there are days when I feel like that. It's like
watching models saying that they've got a glamorous life, and then you find out
that they can't eat what they want, they can't drink, they have to get up at
five in the morning and get to bed by nine at night, and the truth is that they
don't do anything glamorous at all except walk up and down the catwalk and
wander about in front of cameras. It's one of those myths that modeling is
glamorous, because it looks like glamour. And sometimes I think to myself,'I'm
free, I don't have to get up', but that's not the case cos I'm always doing
something. Sometimes there are days where I refuse to do my duties. And I think
there should be moments in everyone's lives where they take that risk and say
'Oh fuck it, I'm not prepared to carry on functioning'. I suppose that's a
feeling you would associate with being in the Cure. Unstuck is about throwing
your hands in the air and saying, 'I'm off'. But then again there is a thread
running through the Cure that's all about escapism.
In
fact, a lot of what the Cure is about is a refusal, or at least a reluctance,
to grow up, to desire to avoid all the things (responsibility, compromise,
sobriety) that come with adulthood. Despite being a very big business, at the
heart of the Cure is a spirit of play.
I
met some people recently, says Smith , and I guessed really wildly and
innacurately about their age. I thought they were in their forties, but they
were only two years older than me, in their mid-30's. They'd passed across the
great divide. Some of it's to do with having children. I don't see why they
can't continue being like a kid. Obviously you change as you grow old, you
become more cynical, but there are people that manage to avoid that. I know a
couple people that are still quite a bit older than me, but are still genuinely
excited by things; they do things and really get caught up in them. Children
can do that, get caught up in non-productive activity, but its harder and
harder to do that as you get older. At least, not unless you take mind-
altering substances, of course!
Robert
Smith grew up in Crawley, a quintessentially English suburb. And the Cures
following has always consisted of that handful of lost dreamers in every
suburban small town, that together make up a vast legion of the unaffiliated
and disillusioned, who dream of a vague "something more" from life
but secretly deep down inside know they will probably never get it. The Cure
has always had an escapist, magical mystery side to their music, but the other
half of its repertoire has been mope rock, forlorn and mournful for the lost
innocence of childhood, and the prematurely foregone possibilities of
adolescence.
Smith
himself, however, is not so sure that the Cure represents lost dreams for lost
dreamers; he's reluctant to reduce Cure fans to a type. I think our audience
has now got so diverse where it seems weird to talk in general terms about what
we represent to them. The Cure is liked by some people that I don't even like!
There's people who like us just because we do good pop singles like High. There's
other people who'd die for the group. When it gets to that level, people who
are really caught up in the band,it's frightening to be a part of it, because I
know that we don't understand anything better than those people. We represent
different things to different things to different people, even from country to
country. Even to different sexes and to different age groups. Polygram
commissioned a survey of Cure fans, because I've had this long running argument
with record companies about what constitutes our audience. The companies
believe the media representations of the Cure audience as all dressed in black,
sitting alone in their bedrooms, being miserable. And they were shocked at the
actual breadth of the Cure audience. I don't know what we represent to them. I
don't even know what the Cure represents to me! If we hadn't had the good songs
throughout our history, to back up our attitude, we wouldn't have gotten this
far. All that stuff about what we mean to our fans is too muddled to unravel
really. We are a very selfish group. We don't worry about what we represent.
But
perhaps its this very self-indulgence that is part of the Cure's appeal. Most
people are obliged to forego following their whims and fancies, are forced to
be responsible and regular. Perhaps the Cure represents a life based on
exploring your own thoughts, exploring sounds, being playful. Smith thinks this
might be true of its hardcore audience, the people who like us past a certain
age. But at heart, he's wary of dissecting the what is exactly it is that the
Cure's following get out of the group, or why they're so devoutly loyal.
Maybe
too much emphasis is placed on our hardcore fans. I feel sometimes like I'm
crusading on behalf of something, and that this is going to pin me down to something
that I'd ultimately resent. I've been through that with Faith and Pornography,
people wanting me and the Cure to stand for something. Smith 's referring to
his early-80's status as Messiah for the overcoat-clad tribe of gloom and
doomers. All that nearly drove me round the bend and I don't need any
encouragement.
Part
of Robert Smith 's appeal, at least to the female half of the Cure following,
has always been his little lost boy aura. Bright girls dream of a boy who does
cry, who's vulnerable, sensitive, even though few find one. Even now he still
seems more like a "boy" than a "man". (Smith has just
turned 33, Wish was released on his birthday, April 21)
I
was faced by this dilemma with the lyrics of Wendy Time on the album. It's the
first time I've used the word 'man' in relationship to myself in a song. So it
is seeping through into music. Five years ago, the line in question would have
been 'the last boy on earth.' I've always been worried about doing music past
the age of 30, about how to retain a certain dignity. The vulnerable, lost
little boy side of my image is gradually disappearing, if it isn't gone
already. But the emotional side of the group will never disappear, I'm in the
unusual position of having four very close male friends around me in this
group; I don't feel the slightest bit of inhibition around them. I've got more
intimate as I've got older."
Around
the time of Disintegration, Robert Smith declared, I think we're still a punk
band. It's an attitude more than anything. The history of the last 15 years of
British rock has been a series of disagreements about what exactly that
attitude was. Groups have gone on wildly different trajectories-from ABC to the
Style Council to the Pogues to the KLF- in pursuit of their cherished version
of what punk was all about.
Living
in Crawley, travelling up to London to see punk gigs in 1977, reminisces Smith
, what inspired me was the notion that you could do it yourself. The bands were
so awful I really didn't think, 'if they're doin it, I can do it'. It was loud
and fast and noisy, and I was at the right age for that. Because of not living
in London or other big punk centers, it wasn't a stylistic thing for me. If you
walked around Crawley with safety pins, you'd get beaten up. The risked involved
didn't seem to make sense. So luckily there aren't any photos of me in bondage
trousers. I thought punk was more a mental state.
The
very first time we played at our school hall, we bluffed our way in by saying
we were gonna play jazz-fusion, then stared playin loud fast music. And that
made us a punk band, so everyone hated us and walked out, but we didn't care
cuz we were doin what we wanted. I suppose that all punk means to me is: not
compromising and not doing things that you don't want to do. And anyone who
follows that is a punk, I guess. But then, that could make Phil Collins punk,
if he's genuinely into what he does!
The
Cure was never a threat; its particular effect was more on the level of
mischief or mystery. Groups who start out making grand confrontational gestures
tend to buckle rather quickly and turn into transvestites. But the Cure has
endured by being elusive, indeterminate, unpredictable. It's sold a lot of
records but it has never pandered.
We've
never really been bothered with confronting people. We've gradually become more
accepted, just 'cos we've been around for so long. We've upset a lot of people
in the business 'cos we've shown that you can do things exactly how you wantand
be successful. Most confrontational gestures are so shallow that they're
laughable. The KLF carrying machine guns at the British record industry awards
- you just have to look at the front page of any newspaper to put that kind of
gesture in proper perspective. There should be confrontation in pop, but I think
the people doing it often believe they are achieving a lot more than they
actually are. The premeditated, Malcolm McLaren idea of confrontation is
lamentable. Things are only really threatening if someone does something for
it's own sake and it happens to upset people. The only time we've come close to
that is the Killing an Arab debacle.
That
song was grossly misconstrued as racist by sections of the US media. In fact,
it was inspired by Camus' novel The Stranger, the story of a nihilistic young
man in French colonial Algeria, who, involved in an altercation with a native,
chooses to pull the trigger out of sheer fatalistic indifference. Embroiled in
unwanted controversy, Smith was obliged to defend himself, denouncing his
accusers as Philistine bigots. "for a couple of days we made the national
news in America. And it was the last thing in the world I wanted to get caught
up in. Debating Camus on US cable television was totally surreal."
The
Cure hasn't been subversive so much as topsy-turvy: by cultivating its capacity
for caprice and perversity, its managed to remain indefinable.
It's
very difficult, having been around so long; a persona builds up around you
that's continually reinforced despite your attempts to break away from it. It's
like trying to fight your way out of papier-mache; There's always people
sticking bits of wet newspaper to you all the time. I conjure up in my mind
figures like Jim Kerr [of Simple Minds] or Bono, and I always have an image of
what they represent. It might be really far away from the truth, but they're
trapped in it. I often hear people say or read things about me and the group
and they are completely at odds with how I think about us. We do things from
time to time that are mischievous, and in the videos we play around with
caricatures of ourselves. But at other times, we're not really mischievous:
That implies that we're doing things for nuisance value, and we never have. We
can't win really: we're either considered a really doomy group that inspires
suicides or a we're a bunch of whimsical wackos. We've never really been
championed or considered hip, and so we've never been treated as a group that
stands for something, like, say Neil Young or the Fall have. Which I'm glad
about, but the downside is that we're dismissed as either suicidal or
whimsical.
For
all Smith 's belief that the "attitude" has been a constant, the Cure
didn't really draw much from the punk, apart from the initial impetus to
do-it-themselves. Punk's main influence on the Cure was minimalism, a distaste
for sonic excess. Hence, the clipped crisp power pop of Boys Don't Cry, the
terse, translucent, bleakly oblique Seventeen Seconds. When the Cure tried to
develop musically, while still inhibited by punks less-is-more aesthetic, the
result was the grey draze of Faith and the angst - ridden entropy of
Pornography - some of the most dispirited and ehydrated music ever put to
vinyl. but once the Cure stepped out of the fog of post-punk production and
into the glossy light of Love Cats, it wasn't long before the group became what
it always essentially was, an art-rock group, maximalist rather than
minimalist, indulgent rather than austere. And then cam the over-rip, highly
strung textures of The Top and Head on the Door, the sprawling art-pop
explorations of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the lush luxurious desolation of
Disintegration.
The
truth is that punk rock was just a blip, a brief interruption, in the perennial
tradition of English art-rock. Robert Smith was once described by the Aquarian
Weekly as "the male Kate Bush", which is probably going way too far,
but it does highlight the way the Cure enjoys the English art- rock
blessing/curses of eccentricity, self-consciousness, stylization, preciousness.
Above all, the Cure has always been a literate band. Smith is a voracious
reader. Recent input includes Stendhal ("very trying"), Blaise
Cendrars ("very peculiar"), the poems of Cattulus ("very
ribald"). And Nietzche
I
just read Ecce Homo, which he wrote at the end of his life, when he was going
mad. It's Nietzche summing up his life and his work, and it's pretty
disturbing, by the end he's majestically deluded. I also read a book about
Nietzche and that era. I didn't realize that his sister founded New Germania in
Paraguay. She took 82 perfect Aryan specimens and attempted to found the new
super race. The colony is now virtually extinct, because there was so much
inter-breeding over four generations.
I
try and combat this feeling that I'm missing out on something very fundamental
to life that I should have by now realized, by reading ferociously. And I still
come to books that ave been recommended to me by people I consider wise, and I
always wonder "have I missed the point, or is this something I knew
anyway". I think it's really worrying, getting older and not really
knowing anything more intellectually. I don't think I know any more than when I
was 15 , except on an experiential level. I only things that I wish I didn't
know. But I never really craved wisdom. I enjoy the discussions we have in the
group. Everyone's well read. The discussions can soar sometimes.
Which
leads on to another set of polarities that Robert Smith oscillates between. On
one hand, he's arty and literate; on the other, he's very much 'an ordinary
bloke', partial to beer, soccer, Indian food, soap operas.
I
don't think its two sides to my character; its all me. In the group we have
quite intense emotional conversations about things. At the same time, we can go
to the pub and get so drunk that I don't remember how I got home, but I don't
feel bad about it later; I don't think it doesn't fit with how I'm supposed to
be. Equally, I wouldn't feel embarrassed if someone asked me what I was reading
at the studio, and I said Love by Stendhal. I never feel guilty about either
end of the spectrum. I object to people who only exist to go down to the pub,
or people who think 'oh no, you can't watch football, its just a pack of men
kicking a ball 'round a field.' I would feel weird excluding one aspect 'cos I
felt it wasn't appropriate. It's all me.