Robert Smith: You Asked
He Answered
2000
Q
Robert Smith flops into an armchair in a Richmond-upon-Thames hotel.
"I love the anonymity of being Mr Smith," he chuckles. "If I
book a hotel it's actually very funny. It's very nice to be a genuine Mr
Smith."
The Cure singer talks fast, but moves sluggishly. His hair is leonine
and heavily lacquered. "My wife prefers me with long hair so I keep it
long. I get more aggressive and abrasive when I have short hair."
Smith has reapplied (badly, of course) his make-up and is ready to face
his public after a lengthy absence. Since he and Q last spoke, his cartoon
incarnation (in the guise of a giant moth, of course) has rescued the town of
South Park from a marauding, Godzilla-sized Barbra Streisand, and he has
duetted with David Bowie at the latter's 50th Birthday Party in Madison Square
Garden.
The occasion of his resurrection is an oppressive, abstract,
"autobiographical" album called Bloodflowers. Bloodflowers is a grim
visit to the territory of 1989's Disintegration LP following the
restless experimentation of 1996's Wild Mood Swings and the
joy-by-numbers of their biggest-selling LP, Wish (a US Number 2 album
behind Def Leppard's Adrenalize eight years ago).
While Robert Smith is a wealthy man, it would hurt him if Bloodflowers
failed to improve on The Cure's second singles compilation, Galore: The
Singles 1987-1997, which flopped at Number 37 in 1997. "The record
company didn't even press enough for the album to go into the Top 30," he
grumbles.
Smith - who
once promised to disband The Cure when he was 40 - has intimated that the album
is to be his last. This threat has not escaped the notice of Q readers...
You
said Kiss me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me was going to be the last Cure album. Why should
we believe you this time?
[Samantha
Ribandi, London N8]
Yeah, I've often said this. I
always tell the band when we're recording that we should treat it as the last
album. Inevitably one of them is going to be. If Bloodflowers is the last Cure
album, I would feel that we've ended on a high.
Please
describe late-'70s Crawley.
[Don Owls, Hanley]
Grey and uninspiring with an
undercurrent of violence. My mum and dad still live in Crawley and I go back
regularly to see them, but I've never felt rooted. I was born in Blackpool and
the first few years of my life were spent up there. When I came down south, I
actually had quite a broad Northern accent and the piss was taken out of me
mercilessly at school. That probably didn't help me integrate.
Notre
Dame Middle School. Playground of ponces?
[Roy Williams, London NW7]
It was the first of the
middle-school experiments. We did pottery and tie-dying, and the school had a
camera so everyone got to make a five-minute film. I suppose you could say we
were indulged but I think that's how school should be. There was a school
uniform and I was made to feel very stupid for wearing a dress. I think the
teachers in the staff room laughed about it but they had to keep a straight
face when they were dealing with me.
I
have just turned 40. How did you feel about hitting the big 4-0?
[James Arnell, London E5]
Very little actually. Turning
30 had a big impact on me because I'd invested it with a lot of meaning. I
tried really hard as I turned from 29 to 30 to live as I had done in my earlier
years and almost ended up killing myself. It was a pretty excessive year. When
I turned 40 I didn't have the same confusion. I think since I turned 30 I've
felt pretty much the same. The reason why I enjoy myself more now is that I'm
more aware that I have less time.
Drugs.
Lager. Curries. Have you ever thought you were going to have a heart attack?
[Jason Andrews, Draycott]
No. I've got blanks in my
life - scary stories that I'm the central character in and I don't even
remember. And I've had panic attacks where I couldn't breathe and very bad
hangovers, but that's all. But I've been blessed-stroke-cursed with an
incredibly strong constitution, which means I'm genetically disposed to excess.
I met somebody yesterday whom I hadn't seen in a long time and they were quite
surprised that I still drink a lot, but the difference is that I used to drink
all the time. I was kind of excessive without really thinking about it. Whereas
now I go on binges.
Are
you obsessed with mouths?
[Sian Secombe, Edgware]
I think there was a period of
time when I was obsessed by orifices in general - the idea of holes in people's
bodies. I'm sure that was drug-induced.
What
car do you drive?
[Jonathan Krell, London NW6]
I've driven four-wheel-drive
cars, since about 1980. The best car I've ever had was a Lada imported from
Russia in 1981, which had two dials on it, both in Russian, and the world's
hottest heater. I get very attached to cars, they're full of junk - drawings
and stuff - because when I take out my family's kids they bring crayons along.
I go off-roading occasionally, not properly, but drunkenly at night, across
fields. I first did it when we were doing the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me album
in 1986 and I managed to roll the Lada down a mountainside with the whole band
in it with me.
I've
heard Siouxsie Sioux state she's responsible for your "lipstick
look", is this true?
[Jonathan Matthews, Wickford]
No. I wore lipstick at
school. I copied my lipstick from my mum, not Siouxsie, although there are
similarities between the two. I've worn make-up to varying degrees since I was
13 but I do wear less now than I used to. I started developing the smeared
lipstick look when we were doing Pornography.
Did
you ever fancy Siouxsie Sioux?
[Dean Miller, Bedford]
No.
What
happened during your "chemical vacation" with Banshee Steve Severin
in 1983?
[N. Witcham, London SW2]
At the time I didn't have
anywhere to stay in London and so I just used to sleep on Severin's floor,
wrapped in coats as I remember. It was kind of an experiment in disorientation
which ended up as the Glove album. There was this unspoken idea that we should
make the album while experimenting with as many different drugs as we could get
our hands on. The Cure went to America for two weeks around this time
apparently, and it's really worrying because I don't remember anything about
it.
Around that time I started
making the Banshees album, Hyaena, and The Cure's Top and I wasn't sleeping at
all. The Cure were living in a pub, an incredibly stupid thing to do, and
recording in Reading while the Banshees were at Eel Pie studios in Richmond. So
I'd finish with the Banshees, get in a cab to Reading, and the barman would
leave the bar open for us because _we were living there. I'd usually meet up
with Lol Tolhurst and Andy Anderson, then Andy would make a big pot of magic
mushroom tea before I'd start work on the next song for the Top album. Then I'd
stagger to bed at lunchtime, get a couple of hours' sleep, take a taxi back to
Eel Pie and continue with the Banshees. I didn't exactly have a breakdown but I
was like a clockwork toy that ran down.
How many songs do you reckon you owe to New Order?
[Anthony Black, Thetford]
Not as many as they owe to
me. I think Blue Monday came out a bit earlier than The Walk but I wanted it to
sound like the band Japan, not New Order. Simon Gallup and Peter Hook have got
similarly aggressive personae on stage, although I think Simon is a far
superior bass player. And the six-string bass was an instrument we both picked
up at the same time in the early '80s. But I've never deliberately copied New
Order.
The 1986 LA "stabbing incident", where a fan got on stage and
started cutting himself: how did that make you feel?
[Justin Horton, Jersey]
We heard all this screaming
just as we were about to go on stage and we kind of looked out from the side
and there was this kid _surrounded by policemen with stun sticks, trying to
stop him as he stabbed himself. People in the immediate vicinity realised it
was pretty serious and wasn't staged but perhaps some of the crowd who'd smoked
too much dope might've thought it was some sort of art installation. It was
quite shocking, but the kid who did it was pretty disturbed. We found out later
that he had a history of doing this, so it wasn't particularly driven by our
songs.
That wasn't the scariest. In
Argentina someone died because of a Cure show, but it was outside the stadium
we were playing. The promoters oversold the stadium because they weren't sure
how popular we'd be. It held 60,000 and 110,000 turned up and there was a riot
and a hot-dog salesman got killed. That was ugly. It was the one time I've been
really frightened with the Cure, because we were locked in this basement room
and we could smell burning, sirens were going off and I thought, We're not
going to get out of this. They'd allowed people in to the stadium from 10 in
the morning and we weren't on until 8 pm. But all the sanitary facilities
stopped working, then they ran out of water. It took us two or three hours to
get to the stadium with police out-riders waving their guns in the air and as
we started the show, the people outside broke the police lines and started
forcing their way in. It was really horrible. We did a rampaging version of
Killing An Arab and then ran for our lives.
Wild Mood Swings: shit album, isn't it?
[Stephen Wallis, London W9]
I think he would be alone in
thinking that. When Wild Mood Swings came out I was surprised by the, let's
say, mixed reaction. The failings of Wild Mood Swings is that it's two songs
too long - Gone and Round And Round shouldn't have been on there - but it's one
of my top five favourite Cure albums.
From
how far away can you read this letter?
[Daniel Travers, Gillingham]
I can't focus beyond the end
of my hand. I wear glasses to drive and for the cinema but I watch telly
without most of the time. For about a two-year period I was getting really
paranoid because my family has a history of really bad eye disease and I'd had
really good eyesight before it suddenly started to deteriorate. I thought,
Fuck, I'm going to be blind at this rate. It was around when I turned 30, so it
was probably stress-induced.
Why did it take you so long to sack Lol Tolhurst?
[Hugh MacFarlane, Edinburgh]
Because we were good friends.
Lol was a school friend and he was crap at drums. It didn't really matter that
much because I quite liked being constrained by his inability. He could never play
keyboards either but it was always nice to have him around until about 1987 and
then the drink overtook his personality. I didn't know who he was any more and
he didn't know who he was either.
Why
were you so horrible to poor Lol Tolhurst?
[Michael McKeown, Belfast]
We were playing shows and he
was too pissed to stand, so I think he was being horrible to me, really. In
about 1986 the piss-taking directed at Lol started getting really nasty, partly
because we were trying to make him see how ridiculous he'd become. In the end
Lol kind of validated himself by being a victim and a clown. He was a
safety-valve and took all this stick because it was the only way he could
justify to himself being in a group. He didn't write or play anything. Making
the Disintegration album I used to despair and scream at the others because it
was fucking insane the way we were treating him. Even then I kept him in the
band because I felt a certain responsibility towards him. But the other band
members gave me an ultimatum that if Lol was going on tour they weren't. I was
then very angry when he took me to court and I felt sorry for him when he lost.
Lol turns up at Cure conventions which is a bit sad. He sent me a letter a
month ago for the first time and I think I'll send him a Christmas card because
it's gone on long enough.
Do
you have any odd bedroom habits?
[Kristy, e-mail]
I talk in my sleep a lot
apparently when I'm in the middle of recording or on tour. I've been told that
I relive things which is sort of worrying actually because I have no control
over it.
Somebody
once successfully got through the audition stage for Stars In Their Eyes
performing an apparently worthy impression of yourself. Permission was sought
by you for the performance to go ahead but you refused. Please explain.
[David Moore, Hanworth]
I love the "apparently
worthy" bit, it really puts me on the spot. It's true. To me Stars In
Their Eyes represents a side of British culture I abhor. I was the first person
ever who didn't give permission for them to perform the song. I don't just pay
lip service to the notion that we're not doing this to be rich and famous, because
we're not. We turned down the National Lottery, and Stars In Their Eyes
represents something similar to me, which is shit.
Will
you and Mary ever have a child?
[Gianni
Manicardi, Modena, Italy]
No. We decided when we first met that we
would never have children together and it's never been a question since then.
I've been lucky because if Mary had wanted children, I probably would have had
them, so I'm very pleased that she didn't. Her only maternal instincts are
towards me, thankfully. I could not really justify bringing a child into the
world because I still have an overriding sense of the futility of existence.
And more simply I find it impossible to tell children off or impose discipline
on children. I've got twenty-one nephews and nieces, so I'm constantly
surrounded by children as an uncle and I find that's my perfect role. Being in
South Park has made a huge difference to their lives. Now that I'm a cartoon
character I'm fully accepted into their world.
What's the greatest lesson you've learned about yourself and the world
around you?
[David (Moontrip) Beahm,
e-mail]
These days I know when to
stop.