The Cure song that changed Robert Smith’s life: “I don’t think I’ll ever write a song that’ll ever move me as much”
When an artist says one of their own songs changed their lives, they are usually alluding to the commercial success that came with it, but not in the case of The Cure‘s Robert Smith.
While there are benefits that come with having a hit single, that pales into insignificance in comparison to the deep, life-altering realisation that came with the creation of one song. ‘Faith’ may have never topped the charts or got The Cure on Top of the Pops, but for Smith, it exists in a category of one.
When The Cure started, Smith was a teenager trying to find his place in the world. He was only 19 when he wrote and recorded the band’s debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, and over the next couple of years, a series of events would lead to Smith facing an eye-opening awakening.
Although The Cure’s gothic aesthetic wouldn’t make you think it, Smith was raised in a Catholic household. From an early age, the sceptic within him always questioned his religious background, and as he grew older, the musician lost his faith. However, as he’d been indoctrinated into Catholicism from such an early age, it took him a while to fully break free from the shackles of religion and wave goodbye to the church.
In 1989, he explained his complex feelings towards religion to The Face: “I don’t believe in God. I wish I did. I used to lay myself open to visions of God, but I never had any. I come from a religious family, and there have been moments when I’ve felt the oneness of things, but they never last, they fade away, leaving me with the belief that it’s only fear that drives people to religion. And I don’t think I’m ever going to wake up and know that I was wrong.”
The Cure’s third album, 1981’s Faith, wrestled with Smith’s emotions as he came to terms with the stark realisation that his faith had dissipated. The theme knits the entire record, and the dreamy titular closing track ties the whole album together. For Smith, it remains one of his favourite songs by The Cure, and is more than just another track, but a representation of a chapter of his life coming to an end.
Speaking to the Chicago Tribune in the 1990s, he honestly remarked: “I don’t think I’ll ever write a song that’ll ever move me as much as ‘Faith’, that’ll change my life as much as that song did, or encapsulate a period of my life as well as that one does”.
Smith’s attitude on religion has remained the same since he washed his hands of Catholicism on ‘Faith’. To this day, the notion of it still makes him shudder. During an interview in 2012 on the French television programme, Télérama, The Cure frontman was asked if his band were a religion, to which he responded, “Is The Cure a religion? Absolutely not. If The Cure was a religion, I wouldn’t do it. I hate religion, I hate all religion. I think religion is at the heart of so much discontent, and idiocy in the world. I think all faith is terror.”
The singer was then asked about his decision to name an album Faith if he detested religion so greatly. In response, he eloquently explained: “Yeah, because I was like 20 years old, and I was coming to terms with that. I was brought up in a religious family, in a Catholic family, and I knew when I was eight years old that it was shit but it took me a long time to escape the mindset of hell, angels, devils and stuff. We have devoted fans but I think we are more like a cult than a religion.”
‘Faith’ may not be as beloved as other songs in The Cure’s canon for most fans, but Smith didn’t write it for them; it was written solely for himself to help come to terms with a 20-year dilemma. Although it is only played infrequently at concerts these days, its importance to Smith is second to none.
