The Cure album Robert Smith called “totally inaccessible”
The Cure’s uncompromising streak runs through everything they have ever made. Unlike many other groups of similar stature, the English goth-rock band have never diluted their vision for mainstream success and, on occasion, deliberately attempted to be inaccessible.
Ultimately, The Cure only make music for themselves, and anybody else’s creative or commercial thoughts are irrelevant while they are in the studio. They’ve never been one for tailoring their sound to accommodate current musical trends and would rather dance to the beat of their drum than follow others. If people like what they produce, that’s fine, but The Cure won’t go out of their way to appease the masses.
However, despite not making music with the audience in mind, frontman Robert Smith initially cared about the public reaction to their records. Following the release of Wild Mood Swings in 1996, which was poorly received, Smith had an epiphany and provocatively made a conscious decision to make an album which would be divisive.
Speaking to Spin in 2004, he explained: “I realised, probably when were doing the Wild Mood Swings album, it got such a kind of terrible press when it came out, and yet a lot of went into the making of the record was really genuine, was really heartfelt. I felt so disturbed after that. I felt, ‘Well this is sort of what I want to be doing.'”
From a commercial perspective, Wild Mood Swings was the lowest charting release from The Cure in over a decade. As it was an album Smith had poured his heart into creating, this was initially hard to take, but it led to the frontman returning to his gothic roots on their next album, Bloodflowers.
The LP was solely aimed at hardcore fans of The Cure, and the English band didn’t release any singles to promote the album. While this could have been a counter-productive move, The Cure were past caring about earning radio play.
Smith explained to Spin: “I took a step away from worrying what other people thought about the band, and I started to think, ‘Why am I still doing this after all of these records?’ and Blood Flowers was really a translation of that, because I didn’t fucking care what anyone thought about Blood Flowers.”
He continued: “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. I was going right back to the days of Faith and Pornography.”
As Smith stated, Bloodflowers gave The Cure their first Grammy nomination, which was never his incentive during the recording process. In all likelihood, if the band had attempted to achieve critical acclaim and entered the studio with that at the front of their mind, they would never have achieved the desired result.
Listen to Bloodflowers below.
