Robert Smith never wanted to write like Wham: “What’s the point?”
Even though he’s a legend in his own right, Robert Smith has had his share of haters.
It doesn’t take an expert to figure out why, and in rock, especially, when there’s a specific image of how certain rock stars should look and sound, Smith isn’t exactly what you’d call the perfect embodiment, because, if you put it this way: look at an image of Mick Jagger next to an image of Smith, it’s clear that one of them stands out as the quintessential frontman more than the other.
Smith is painfully aware of this, too, as he himself has been at the receiving end of a handful of harsh remarks from his peers, including one particularly scathing one from Paul Weller, whose words were so intensely aggressive that it’s hard to even repeat them, but others, like Morrissey, have also come after Smith, but the singer remains diligent in the face of adversity.
With Morrissey, in particular, Smith later described their back-and-forth as an “imaginary feud” and one that became its own beast the moment that the internet hooked its grip into it. As he explained, “It never really got to me, and then in later years it was this setup, and I thought, ‘Why?’ And so since then I’ve realised how easily these things can spiral because people want it to be something. They’re desperate for it to be some sort of soap opera.”
People have come after Smith for almost everything you could think of. If it’s not his looks, it’s that his music isn’t rock or “gothic” enough. And if it’s not that, it’s that the music is too pop-leaning or formulaic to be considered groundbreaking. All of that is, of course, complete rubbish and entirely reflective of the cesspit that is social media and fandom noise, but it does say something interesting about how The Cure’s prominence makes others feel threatened.
That said, Smith isn’t entirely innocent in his ability to stand back and simply observe, and sometimes, he dishes his two cents on others, too, sharing his opinions on people who he feels are less deserving of their fame, success, or time in the spotlight, as everybody knows that Smith is a class act when it comes to songwriting and storytelling, and apparently, this is an opinion he holds, too.
In 1985, Smith trash-talked the one and only Wham, using them as an example of the type of songwriting he’d find easy to imitate. He told Ro Newton, “I could write songs as bad as Wham’s if I really felt the urge to, but what’s the point? So many songs these days are very shallow. I hate the idea some bands have of refining songwriting. I can sit down and write a single pretty easily – it’s like a pretend exercise. Most of our so-called ‘songs’ are really pieces of music – there’s a difference in the way you approach writing them.”
Despite the harshness of his words, it’s unlikely that Smith would make a similar statement today, not when you consider how George Michael’s legacy and reputation have shifted since the days when Wham were so-called pop gimmicks. At the same time, the point that he’s making speaks louder than his casual disregard for their music.
After all, his comments also came amid a bigger storm about The Cure’s position in music, taking on a subtly defensive tone that sought to prove that they were, in fact, worthy of their successes. Maybe calling Wham’s music “bad” was uncalled for, but he was right about another thing: that The Cure’s songs really are “pieces of music”, and really bloody good ones, at that.
