‘Faith’: The Cure song Robert Smith will never beat
Although The Cure is often recognised for frontman Robert Smith’s somewhat comical, lipstick-smeared look and innocuous hits such as ‘Friday I’m in Love’, this common perception does the Crawley band a disservice. Much of their best material is musically, aesthetically and thematically substantial.
The question regarding The Cure’s best period is subjective, but for the more gothic-inclined of us, their period at the start of the 1980s is their finest. This was when the band was shedding the simpler post-punk of their earlier teenage years and fusing the genre with mature gothic sentiments and compelling psychedelic twists.
During this period, Smith and the group produced a trio of gloomy albums that contain some of their best efforts: 1980’s Seventeen Seconds, 1981’s Faith and 1982’s Pornography. Not yet the globally famous band that they would be at the end of the decade, their cult status allowed them to expand creatively and explore their art more uninhibited than they would be able to in the future.
Faith is a record where the thematically weighty parameters of Smith’s work would explicitly come to the fore, as he used it as a conduit to grapple with being brought up in a Catholic household. He’d never fully trusted religion, and as he entered music and developed out of his late teens, he came to realise he had always hated it.
On Faith, the band’s third album, Smith addressed the idea that he never believed in Christianity, which is a stark realisation for a 21-year-old whose family were thoroughly indoctrinated. This theme permeates the whole record, with the title track a fitting way to close out the body of work. As the song was such a masterful way to tie the album together and because of its general significance to his story, The Cure leader thinks he’ll never top it.
He told the Chicago Tribune in 1992: “I don’t think I’ll ever write a song that’ll ever move me as much as ‘Faith’, that’ll change my life as much as that song did, or encapsulate a period of my life as well as that one does”.
Later, when speaking on the French programme Télérama in 2012, Smith was asked if The Cure is a religion. His response resoundingly clarified his position on all faiths. He explained: “Is The Cure a religion? Absolutely not. If The Cure was a religion, I wouldn’t do it. I hate religion, I hate all religion. I think religion is at the heart of so much discontent, and idiocy in the world. I think all faith is terror.”
Listen to ‘Faith’ below.
