“Fucking genius”: Robert Smith discusses the greatest album ever made
The Cure’s frontman and founder, Robert Smith, has had an illustrious career that has seen him hailed as an icon of various different areas, with his musical contributions stretching from post-punk into gothic rock, and even at times straddling pop music. While people often search for ways to categorise their listening habits, it’s a tricky situation that one is faced with when it comes to slapping a label on The Cure, because they’ve never chosen to sit still for a period of time.
Of course, there were plenty of punkish elements to their sound, but much like their contemporaries in bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division, they belonged to a different branch of punk that appeared to be more stylistically varied and informed by more avant-garde or untraditional approaches. There are clear parallels to be drawn between what The Cure attempted to do and what these other acts did, and while their love of other guitar-driven music wasn’t ignored, it was the broad scope that helped them establish something far more unique.
The band regularly used their instruments as textural elements rather than simply conveying melodies or hooks. This innovation was borrowed from the art rock movement of the 1970s, which saw acts like Roxy Music and Can toy around with the classic rock formula to create something far more expansive and open to exploration.
While Smith was still busy diving into the records of Nick Drake and Jimi Hendrix, who he had adored listening to in his adolescence, there was one particular album that dramatically altered his perception of sound, how it was produced, and the seemingly limitless possibilities that there are for generating these decorative textures. Yes, Drake’s morose folk balladry makes it into The Cure’s work, and the psychedelic leanings of Hendrix are another feature that has worked its way into Smith’s songwriting, but it was David Bowie’s Low that flipped his brain on its head.
The record, released in 1977 as the follow-up to his divisive Station to Station, split audiences even further, as Bowie honed in on his growing appreciation for the avant-garde. Working alongside producer Brian Eno, the first half of the album is relatively similar to his previous record in its approach, but the instrumental suite that takes up the second half of the record is a surreal and abstract leap far removed from anything he had previously endeavoured to release.
Speaking about how he first heard the album, having pre-ordered it on cassette, Smith recalled that his first listen to Low blew him away. “I walked home from school, there was the cassette and we had a cassette player in the car,” he said. “I went with [my mother] to a garden centre, and I listened to Low while she went and did whatever mums do in garden centres, and I was like utterly, my whole perception of sound was changed. Just how something could sound completely different, everything I heard was astonishing.”
His love for the record hasn’t changed in the slightest since his first encounter with it as a teenager, and you can tell how impactful it was on his own songwriting from how parts of The Cure’s output, such as Pornography and Disintegration, bear resemblance to it.
“When I put it on now, the sound, everything is just fucking genius,” Smith claims. “Low was the album that had a huge impact on me, just how I saw sound. No other album has done that to me.”
