Robert Smith names the least accessible Cure album: “I didn’t fucking care what anyone thought”
It should be every artist’s dream to find something that connects with people in their music. Even for someone who has been playing music for years and already has their platinum plaques on the wall, it shouldn’t get any more gratifying than hearing someone say that they heard one of your songs and saw a bit of themselves in them. While The Cure has served as that soundtrack for millions of fans for years, Robert Smith was never going to have his audience in mind 100% of the time.
As much as fans might be the reason to keep making music for many artists, they can also be a bit difficult to work with. Anyone who loves an artist is going to feel betrayed if they go in a direction they aren’t a fan of, so while many artists conform to what their fans want, it can get a bit tedious trying to play the same song and hoping that you will find that same creative spark you had when you wrote your first hit.
And no one really was more acutely aware of that kind of problem than Smith. The goth rockers had already started off in the world of post-punk, and even when they started reaching out into broader territory on ‘A Forest’, they still had that poppy side that had people fawning at them for all the wrong reasons.
If anything, fans that have ever been in love with their favourite artists through their music owe it to themselves to listen to ‘End’ off of Wish. The song still sounds like a fantastic Cure song, but when Smith opens his mouth, he’s actually asking his fans to let him go to a certain extent, saying that he will never be the vision that people have of him in their minds.
From that album onward, Smith seemed to capitalise on that promise as well. Even though the band were still making the best albums they could, the days of ‘Friday I’m In Love’ were about to become a thing of the past, featuring many moments where they would spread out and make songs that didn’t have the kind of immediate hooks that were found on their early material.
Then again, that didn’t stop Bloodflowers from being one of the biggest successes of their later years, but when the album was nominated for a Grammy, Smith couldn’t help but be bemused by the idea of casual music fans liking it, saying, “I didn’t fucking care what anyone thought about Bloodflowers. The fact that it was our first Grammy-nominated album really amused me at the time, because it was designed to be, in my mind, a totally inaccessible album, it was just for Cure fans.”
However, after Wish implied that Smith was nothing like the glossy person shown in their music videos, this became the most authentic album he could have made. Since he produced the whole thing, songs like the title track and ‘Watching Me Fall’ gave him a chance to spread out a lot more, taking his time to make the kind of record that makes people think rather than sing along.
Still, the fact that the album worked its way into fans’ hearts might be an encouraging sign for Smith’s fanbase. He may not have been writing for the mainstream any more, but it turned out there were more than enough goth-rock fans out in the world who saw something in this music than he had originally thought.
