‘Faith’: Robert Smith on The Cure song that will “stand the test of time”
Having one of the biggest albums of your career can tend to be the best and worst thing that can ever happen to you as an artist. The thousands of people buying the record and turning up at venues singing along might be nice in the moment, but there’s always that nagging feeling in the back of your mind wondering how the hell it’s going to look if the bubble bursts. Even for a band that had been going strong and been as consistent as The Cure, Robert Smith knew that some records set the bar a little higher than others.
Looking back at where the goth legends started, though, it was clear they already had some work to do. Three Imaginary Boys wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but if all anyone had heard of them was tracks like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and ‘Killing An Arab’, they probably wouldn’t have seen something like ‘In Between Days’ or ‘Just Like Heaven’ coming later down the road.
When they started work on Seventeen Seconds, though, there was some added element to their sound the minute that ‘A Forest’ came on. Everyone was playing the same instruments, but there was a certain atmospheric change to the way they were playing, trying to create the same kind of tense mood of a band like Television, only with Smith’s voice shaking throughout the entire track.
And as for the rest of their discography, their best albums going forward may as well have been an extension of what ‘A Forest’ was. Disintegration is still one of their finest albums because of that balance of tone, and even if Wish was home to their poppiest songs like ‘Friday I’m In Love’, Smith still had enough songwriting chops to put in tunes like ‘End’ to distance himself from his mainstream side.
Before they even caught their first whiff of success, Faith was one of their strangest outings. While nothing on the album is necessarily cut out to be a single outside of ‘Primary’, this is one of the densest albums they ever made, taking the pieces of their older sound and paving the way for where they would be going.
Even if the album is the epitome of a transitional album in some respects, Smith still felt that there was no way that any other Cure song was going to manage to top the title track for him, saying, “I think ‘Faith’ probably will never be dislodged from the place it occupies in my heart. For what it meant at the time. I felt that it was the first song I ever wrote where I felt I had done something that would stand the test of time. I also sort of felt that with ‘Forest’.”
It’s not like Smith wasn’t far off the mark in terms of its impact. His first goth-rock masterpiece may have been the proof of concept for this new sound, but listening to him talk about the twisted side of his personality, the title track might as well be a prequel to the kind of dark themes that he would get into when making songs like ‘Shake Dog Shake’ a few years later.
Considering Pornography was also a few years away from arriving, Smith seemed to be testing the waters of what he could get away with before building entire walls of sound with his guitars. ‘Faith’ might not be one of the most successful or even the biggest fan-favourite, but looking at where it brought the band, it serves as a practical road map for what would be coming next.
