Robert Smith’s five best songs away from The Cure
Few artists have been so gifted with King Midas’ touch as much as Robert Smith.
Even during the first decade or so of The Cure’s existence, Smith would drive his little post-punk band from Crawley toward sharp creative U-turns that would always reap serious rewards. Following the hooky new wave of debut Three Imaginary Boys, in came a suite of funereal, dramatic, anguished thunder leading up to 1982’s Pornography.
Then, just as a whole cohort of goth fans had plastered their bedroom walls with Smith alongside the likes of Bauhaus or The Sisters of Mercy, The Cure deep-dived into the frothy pop of ‘Let’s Go to Bed’, sparking off the colourful videos handled by longtime director Tim Pope. Dominating the charts and forming a perennial feature on MTV, Smith packed in the popsmith duties and lapsed back into the ruminative shroud of 1989’s Disintegration, a seemingly inaccessible slice of dark contemplation that ended up standing as The Cure’s most successful and critically acclaimed record yet.
Such confounding swerves may have slowed down a little in the last 20-odd years of alternative rock-centred records, but The Cure have always glowed with an unerring sense that Smith is captaining an artistic course entirely on his terms and with little in the way of compromise. Such convictions, coupled with an eclectic mosaic of artists who namecheck the band over the years, have unsurprisingly pulled many of music’s big names to pluck up the courage and request a collaboration or guest vocal.
Never one to hide his opinions on any given artist, magnanimous with praise and excoriatingly catty in equal measure, should Smith give the thumbs-up to a co-write or joint jam, you know confidently you’re in The Cure frontman’s good books, and that he wants to be there with you for entirely uncalculated reasons. Across a myriad of cameos and guest appearances, we take a look at five of the best numbers Smith moonlighted for outside his day job.
Robert Smith’s five best songs away from The Cure:
The Glove – ‘Mr Alphabet Says’
By 1983, The Cure’s future was in doubt. Limping on as a duo with founding drummer Lol Tolhurst, the very nature of the band was in flux, existing as a largely studio project and committing to a flurry of singles without a studio album. While conjuring the fantastic ‘The Walk’ and ‘The Lovecats’, Smith became so fatigued by his Cure duties that he sought escape by joining up with Siouxsie and the Banshees, replacing John McGeoch on lead guitar.
Despite the busy schedule, Smith managed to cut one record with Banshees bassist Steven Severin as The Glove, dropping the psychotropic Blue Sunshine in September. While the majority of the album is sung by Jeanette Landray, Smith was able to lend his croon to ‘Perfect Murder’ and ‘Mr Alphabet Says’, the latter stealing the record’s show. Written by Severin, Smith fronts the surrealist playbook with comic ease, reeling off lines concerning smiling weasels and tin men atop the colourful strings and piano Wonderland stroll that would anticipate the lysergic sonics of The Top waiting around the corner.
Tweaker – ‘Truth Is’
For many, Chris Vrenna represents Nine Inch Nails’ classic heyday.
A founding member from 1988 til shortly after The Downward Spiral’s industrial capture of the Billboard charts, Vrenna’s powerhouse drumming forms an essential part of Trent Reznor’s volatile cohort back in the days when they could be found playing on stage caked in mud during their arresting slot at Woodstock ‘94.
Crafting his own slice of warped synthpop under the Tweaker moniker, Vrenna pulled in everybody from David Sylvian, Johnny Marr, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy for 2004’s 2 am Wakeup Call. Fronting the warped ‘Truth Is’, Smith lets loose his most braggadocio vocals ever heard, giving voice to the song’s devious lyrical play of romantic sleight-of-hand with oozing sneer, congealing masterfully with the thick coating of gurgling electronic bass and spooky keyboard whines.
The Twilight Sad – ‘There’s a Girl in the Corner’
In the crowded darkwave post-punk world, Scotland’s The Twilight Sad made an impression as a quintet that was able to brew mordant pop skulks without lapsing into derivatives, a hard task for any would-be gloom merchant.
Following near-unanimous acclaim from 2007’s Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters debut, 2014’s Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave would prove such a smash in the alternative world, a certain lipstick-smeared elder statesman would take a stab at its opening track.
Issued as a B-side to ‘It Never Was the Same’, Smith pours deep love and affection into his cover of ‘There’s a Girl in the Corner’, cutting a passionate take charged with his evident fandom for James Alexander Graham and Andy MacFarlane dual songcraft, complete with a subtle electronic shift toward a more synth realm away from the original’s more stirring psych-thunder. Such a fan, Smith selected The Twilight Sad to support their CURÆTION-25 set at his 2018 curated Meltdown.
Gorillaz – ‘Strange Timez’
It’s hard to predict just how big Gorillaz would become way back when ‘Clint Eastwood’ struck the pop charts in 2001.
While infectiously catchy with its zingy trip-hop lethargy, just how seismic Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s virtual project would land on global charts must have been a surprise to the respective former Blur frontman and Tank Girl cartoonist, pulling in some of music’s heavyweights over the years and selling over 30 million albums worldwide.
A single featured on 2020’s Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez, and as part of the Song Machine web series, Smith resurrected some of the old habits that had swirled around The Cure’s studio time during the febrile era of 1983/4, Smith hoarding a whole slew of instruments, including the guitar, bass, and music box in a spurt of ‘anything goes creativity’ on ‘Strange Timez’s electro carnival bounce. As well as enjoying a vocal interplay with Albarn, Smith takes the steering wheel and cruises along with ease, standing as one of the virtual band’s best latter-day numbers.
Crosses – ‘Girls Float † Boys Cry’
While orbiting the nu-metal glob that seized the rock world as the 1990s passed into the 2000s, Deftones were always channelling something much deeper and celestial than their Kerrang! TV contemporaries. After a string of celebrated shoegaze, smothering heavy space rock records, frontman Chino Moreno teamed up with Far guitarist Shaun Lopez to immerse themselves in their love of ethereal synthpop and enchanted industrial with the shimmering Crosses side-project.
Releasing their sophomore Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete in 2023, Crosses dreamed up the electric ‘Girls Float † Boys Cry’, a caustically radiating vision that lifts some of Drab Shadow’s frigid tundra with the glacial fog that obscures The Cure’s Faith over over forty years earlier. Not stopping there, Crosses managed to recruit Smith to bellow backing vocals in its attacking chorus, slathering their brooding darkwave with an unmistakable air of authority across its apparitional soar.
