Five songs that changed Robert Smith’s life and shaped The Cure
Although it seems like The Cure’s Robert Smith is probably brimming with pearls of wisdom when it comes to making it in the music business, his one piece of advice is actually fairly obvious. “I only had one life and I didn’t want to waste it doing things I didn’t want to do,” he once said, saying that you only get a real shot at music when you make things you actually want to make.
This mentality is probably also why Smith finds it difficult to pick out one album he loves the most, or the one he’s proudest of. Because, for the most part, they’ve all come from a very real place, even if those places are resigned to specific moments in time and from the mind of someone he doesn’t necessarily identify with anymore.
But even those he places above the rest – Disintegration, Pornography, Wish – show how aware he is of those moments he’s on top of his game, more authentically reaching down into the depths of who he truly is as an artist. But this learning curve also came from those he absorbed when he was younger, when he said what he described as his most “passive” time, when he was merely a “sponge” waiting for his moment while taking notes on everybody he loved.
Smith shared five of these seminal moments during an interview with Triple J in 1993, discussing three records that influenced him the most and went on to shape the brilliance of The Cure. Many of his choices taught him about how to pour specific attitudes into music while also creating stories that resonated, some more obvious in that department than others. Like Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, for instance, which he became so obsessed with that he played it on repeat.
“It’s the first Hendrix song I heard,” he said. “I remember my brother bringing home the single, and I was eight. I was just awe-struck by it, and I must have played it 20 times a day, day in, day out. I drove everyone else in the house mad. I learnt everything about it. I was just obsessed with it.” He also discussed how most just celebrate Hendrix as a guitarist, but that there’s also “brilliant songwriting”, like ‘Purple Haze’, which has “elements” of everything that made him great.
Another he fell in love with at an early age was Nick Drake and his track ‘Time Has Told Me’. Drake, for someone like Smith, was an idol he hadn’t known he’d needed, someone who was reserved but who poured their soul into their music and let it do the talking. “[He’s] everything that I would aspire to in understated mood songwriting and singing,” Smith said.
Adding: “He’s the perfect example of somebody who genuinely felt everything he sang about and wasn’t worried about what people thought about him.” Smith first heard Drake when he was around ten years old and becoming aware of the world, and found solace in his “withdrawn” demeanour, identifying with the idea of being a quiet presence but with a head swimming with thoughts about the world.
But David Bowie and Alex Harvey were the real idols he’d been waiting all his life for. Smith praised ‘Starman’, while discussing how, around the same time, he’d started listening to The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and tracks like ‘The Faith Healer’. “[He’s] my only real idol,” Smith said of Harvey, adding: [He’s] the original punk, the forerunner of the punk movement. It was very British street theatre. IT was powerful music but brilliant tunes. It was the first time I felt like this was a group of my generation.”
And finally, perhaps unsurprisingly, Smith discussed Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’, saying it was the first song he’d heard by them out once that made him stand to attention, like he’d realised he was smack bang in the middle of a movement he felt very much a part of. “I remember hearing it for the first time at a party and thinking, ‘This is it’,” he said. “[They were a] group who had it at the right time. There hasn’t been anything quite as good since.”
While seemingly different tracks from distinctive corners of music, each shaped Smith’s thinking and The Cure’s mystical haze perfectly, taking rich elements of Drake’s outsider approach and mixing them with the gorgeous songwriting of Hendrix. He also cherry-picked the anarchic elements of punk he identified with the most, specifically when alluding to the darker aspects of life, while also adopting Bowie and Harvey’s unrelenting boldness with artistic expression. Ultimately, therefore, if you were to mix all of these together, it’s clear where you’d end up.
The songs that shaped The Cure:
- Jimi Hendrix – ‘Purple Haze’
- Nick Drake – ‘Time Has Told Me’
- David Bowie – ‘Starman’
- The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – ‘The Faith Healer’
- Sex Pistols – ‘Anarchy in the UK’
