Dressing Up: The Cure’s Robert Smith Turns 65
A celebration of a goth icon
Old goths don’t die.
And while some of them most certainly fade away – where are you Alien Sex Fiend, Flesh for Lulu and Clan of Xymox – a hardy few of of ‘em shake off the death rattle of trends and time and keep coming at you year after year.
Sometimes, they may skip a year or two. Maybe more. But you know they’re there and you keep looking forward to the next surge.
No goth has been more resilient or resurgent than The Cure’s Robert Smith, who turns 65 on April 21st. His reconstituted band played massively long shows – three separate sets, really – last summer across the outdoor summer shed circuit of America.
Although, we should probably address the goth issue before we go too much further. Yes, at this point Smith has likely surpassed Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy as the poster boy, or at least the man you think of first, when the term “goth” runs through your brain. That wild, tousled hair, the ruby red lipstick, the black garb … the sound.
Reeves Gabrels – the American guitarist whose been with the British band since 2012 – had some perspective. Gabrels had been a longtime collaborator with David Bowie, first in Tin Machine and then as guitarist/musical director when Bowie went back to being a solo act. He’d been brought into the Cure fold, first as a touring guitarist, then made a full band member. (It’s a funny story; after three freelance years, they called him to a back-of-the-bus meeting, everyone all po-faced. He thought he was about to be sacked. The punked him and hired him.)
“That The Cure gets labelled as the ‘original goth band’ is in some ways amusing to us,” Gabrels told me last summer, “having had so many perennial ‘pop’ hits and still being thought of as “the gothfathers.’ It’s something that the band itself finds amusing as we do not see ourselves as goth but as a just a music band that plays what we write in a style that is our own. Maybe that mystery is part of the key to longevity and generational influence.”
“The Cure is an interesting beast,” Gabrels continued. “Every gig, when I look out, I see multiple generations. When I joined the band, I noticed that, in ways not dissimilar to bands like the Grateful Dead, we were playing for up to four generations at shows. I think therein lies the key. Like David Bowie, we seem to have a certain cachet that lends a certain ‘hipness.’”
Smith reflected upon something similar in 1992. We were sitting in his dressing room in Providence, RI, an hour after the show. He still had the lipstick and pancake makeup on. “It’s not like we haven’t had our audience grow up with us,” Smith said. “There is still a strange amount [of fans] that have stuck with us, far more than I would have ever thought. It isn’t all the teen-age angst you read about in newspapers. The songs are really good. We think very carefully about how we do things; we don’t do dumb things; we don’t sell people short. But [some people] blank when they get older, stop worrying about things.”
Who would have thought The Cure – a band that played the tiny, long-defunct Underground club in Boston in May 1980, whose post-punk pop music blasted out at hip dance clubs of the early-mid ‘80s – would be so huge, so iconic, so evergreen in the 21st century? Especially with Smith threatening to put the band to bed at numerous junctures over the decades.
Take one example. In 1989, Smith said that for The Cure, their concertizing days were all over. “Yeah, it definitely will be,” Smith told me. There might be more albums, sure, but no more tours. The end. Finis. Thank you and good night.
I mention his end-of-days declaration about playing concerts when we talk in Providence.
“This isn’t going to be the first time I’m going to be reminded of that,” Smith said with a chuckle. It’s the first show of the tour. He’s nursing a beer with band cofounder and longtime pal, bassist Simon Gallup.
“I am surprised to varying degrees, shocked that we’re [together],” Smith said. “I think that I’m made to forget the bad parts of touring, the reasons why I said I would never do it again. And I’m encouraged to remember the good parts, which is what we’ve just done. I’m being really honest. I’ve missed it. I didn’t think I would. But you get a bunch of new songs like `From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea’ and think `I would really like to play that in front of a big audience.’ “
“It’s a side of the group that’s always been important — the physical side to concerts,” Smith added. “We could choose from 50 songs. We could do a whole show that’s very up or we could do an entire show that’s completely miserable. . . But we are aware we are playing to people . . . That’s the side I think we’ve changed as a group. We primarily please ourselves, but we’re no longer as bloody-minded as we used to be. We appreciate that we’re entertainers.”
Now, back three years to 1989, when The Cure were already knee deep – eight studio albums – into a career that already had taken some remarkable twists and turns, from post-punk pop, to more somber, despairing post-punk rock to bouncy new wave pop to harsh grinding goth to … well, you were never quite sure where The Cure were going to end up on any album.
So, The Cure was touring in support of Disintegration. The album started like this with “Plainsong”: ” ‘I think it’s dark and it looks like rain,’ you said. ‘And the wind is blowing like the end of the world,’ you said. ‘And it’s so cold it’s like the cold if you were dead,’ and then you smiled for a second.”
I was again talking with Smith- who turns 65 April 21 – and made the leap that perhaps The Cure’s singer-songwriter-guitarist, had hit bottom again. But no.
“I loathe the Morrissey kind of wallowing in despair,” Smith said, referring to the former singer of The Smiths (no relation). “It’s too easy. You have to tone down that side of your character if you’re with other people. I wouldn’t expect to have any friends left if I let myself go and I wouldn’t deserve to have. I don’t find it very entertaining to be around somebody who’s morose all the time. So, there is a line to be drawn. In the privacy of your aloneness, you can act however you want. Look, I don’t think I feel any more deeply than anyone else or despair any more than anyone else. So, I find it, in a way, compromising to try and pretend that I do.”
This is one of the most honest rock ‘n’ roll quotes I’ve been privy to. The artist separating his off-stage self from his art or his on-stage (or on record) projections, that is, what we think he’s like. And admitting the depths of his emotions – up or down – are no more profound than your own.
Disintegration is a somewhat thematic effort and represents a reversal, one Smith equates with the stark and gorgeous Faith LP from 1981. The music drifts downward; Smith sings of betrayal and treachery, nightmares and ghosts, distant memories and tainted love.
“I’ve felt materially comfortable for quite a few years now,” said Smith, “but I’m still troubled by the same old things. I’m still fixated by the same things and I imagine I always will be. The thing is it’s easier for me to cope now, but I felt the need to, I suppose, reiterate those kind of emotions because we hadn’t done anything like that in quite a few years.”
Smith said he knows it looks like a lot of the twists and turns The Cure takes seem planned, calculated. He pleads innocent: “When I’m writing stuff, there’s never a rational explanation. I knew I didn’t want to make a follow-up to ‘Kiss Me.’ I knew that a lot of people, particularly people that were going to make money out of us, were expecting a lot of ‘Just Like Heaven’s’ together on a very upbeat album. So the obscure and horrible part of me wanted to disappoint all these people.”
“The one thing about Disintegration, ” he added, “is it is superficially a despairing kind of record, but in fact, a lot of the songs are quite hopeful, I think.” He mentions “Lovesong,” “Fascination Street” and “Lullaby.” He points with pride to Tim Pope’s “Lullaby” video where a pajama-clad Smith is attacked by giant spiders. “As absurd as anything we’ve done,” he says. “Completely idiotic.”
VIDEO: The Cure “Lullaby”
And now, summer of 2023.
The Cure has a new album in the works, the first since 2008’s 4:13 Dream. (Curiously, four hours and 13 minutes is the longest Cure concert ever, which took place on Smith’s 54th birthday in 2013 in Mexico City.) It’s been mixed and they play up to five songs from it on their tour. They’re just not sure when it will come out or what will be on it.
“There is no release date to my knowledge,” Gabrels says. “We went in [the studio] to keep it concise and do 12 songs we’d all written. Then we worked ‘em up as a band, moved ‘em around, normal songwriting things. And I think we ended up recording 34 songs. We over-achieved.”
There’s a songwriting analogy Gabrels says he learned from Bowie: “It’s like trying to get a fire started outdoors, camping. You’ve got flint and kindling and you all have to crowd around it and protect it from the wind so that spark turns into a flame. And you don’t judge the quality of the fire when it’s just the spark. So, we’re in the ‘unfortunate’ position of having 34 pretty good-looking fires going. My point was we couldn’t judge them; we couldn’t see which ones to take to the final stage.”
Maybe 2024 will be the year and The Cure drop the surprise on us. I’m not putting good money on it, mind you, but you never know with the mercurial Robert Smith.
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Happy Birthday, Robert.