“It was like pantomime”: The genre Robert Smith never took seriously
Pop, indie-pop, alt-pop, dream-pop. Punk, post-punk, pop-punk, egg-punk. Rock, heavy rock, yacht-rock, goth-rock. Who knows what any of it means? The attempt to distill music and it’s energy into words is an on-going battle. New terms come and go as people try to capture a sound or a moment but even when a certain label sticks, it might not be representative. For Robert Smith, all the tags pinned to The Cure never quite fit.
In particular, one label didn’t fit; “goth”. It’s another one of those terms that, realistically, means now. Google it, and it gives you two definitions. The first: “a member of a Germanic people that invaded the Roman Empire from the east between the 3rd and 5th centuries. The eastern division, the Ostrogoths, founded a kingdom in Italy, while the Visigoths went on to found one in Spain.” That one definitely doesn’t match up to The Cure unless those invaders were blasting ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ on their way to pillage.
The second makes more sense; “a style of rock music derived from punk, typically with apocalyptic or mystical lyrics.” That would work for the band. Not only did their music obviously take hints from the earlier wave of punk, but the New Wave and goth scene crashed when bands like Sex Pistols gave way to something else. But they also tick that box for “apocalyptic or mystical lyrics” as Smith’s angst has a distinct cinematic edge where his love songs feel spiritual and his moody songs feel grumpy to a world ending degree.
Both of those definitions miss the mark of ‘gothic’ though, with the whole goth aesthetic and energy undeniably coming, in part, from gothic literature and its various tropes. The uncanny, the glamorous, the emotional extremes, and the interest in madness are all present in what the music world came to coin ‘goth rock’.
But regardless of how well-suited it might be, Smith simply didn’t like it. “We got stuck with it at a certain time when goths first started,” he said as the label was pinned to them from the beginning. Actually, it was pinned to them before that as before his own band took off, Smith was most recognisable as Siouxsie Sioux’s guitarist in Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1979, right after their debut single ‘Hong Kong Garden’ caught attention.
“I was playing guitar with Siouxsie And The Banshees, so I had to play the part,” he said about that era, but after that, when moving onto his own project, the word mostly followed him like a stink. “Goth was like pantomime to me. I never really took the whole culture thing seriously,” he said.
Sure, Smith was no stranger to some eyeliner, but he never had an interest in dressing up in the costume of a certain genre. Instead, he’s always just wanted to be Robert Smith, The Cure’s leader, working in his own lane as he built the band’s distinctive sound with no regard for genre conventions or limitations of whatever label someone might pin on him.
