The forgotten songs that Robert Smith crowned as the greatest of the 1980s
Before Robert Smith became the wild-haired frontman of the gothic titans, The Cure, he was the youngest in a family of five, absorbing an array of musical influences that would later inform his distinctive melodies.
“My parents were lending us their stuff; my mum made me listen to a lot of classical music to enable me to have a larger vision of music,” he explained to French magazine Les Inrockuptibles in 1997. At eight years old, Smith’s older brother, Richard, introduced him to ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix, setting him on a path of music discovery that was akin to entering another world.
“My brother was also crazy about Captain Beefheart, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, so much so that when I was seven or eight, to the despair of my parents, I became some kinda little devil fed on psychedelic rock,” he recalled. As a teenager, he grew into his love of punk music and soon, he aimed to “marry” Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “wall of noise”, as he described to Uncut in 2000, and The Buzzcocks’ melodies, to form the basis of The Cure’s mesmerising sound.
Harnessing one of the most recognisable voices and images of the 1980s, Smith’s interpretation of goth rock crafted melancholy love songs, where dreams could easily turn into nightmares. Entering into the decade’s pop landscape, he grasped at a similar subversive approach to the genre as his contemporaries did, and with a personal affinity for the wide spectrum of ‘alternative’ from the era, heard across post-punk, new wave and more, Smith acknowledged his favourite songs of the decade during a conversation with Sirius XM in 2014, compiled by The Cure TC.
An obscure pick on Smith’s list is ‘Tell Me Easter’s on Friday’ by Scottish post-punk band Associates, composed of duo Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine. Appearing on their 1981 compilation album Fourth Drawer Down, the song has a complex synth-pop atmosphere, a unique sound that earned fans in the likes of Björk and Bono. A friend of Mackenzie’s for over 20 years, Smith featured on two tracks from their debut album, 1980’s The Affectionate Punch, singing backing vocals on the title song and ‘Even Dogs in the Wild’, but the Associates never quite reached the heights of their pop contemporaries and, with Mackenzie’s sudden death in 1997, the band came to an end.
In 2001, Smith reflected on The Cure song ‘Cut Here’, written about Mackenzie’s suicide, sharing with Jam! Showbiz, “I kept passing on the opportunity to sit down and have a drink with him, have a chat… I was very regretful. I had never used the words. I wrote them down to get it out of my system… It is nice to sing a song that meant something.”
He also picked a lesser-known favourite from shoegaze progenitors My Bloody Valentine, ‘Lose My Breath’, from their debut album, 1988’s Isn’t Anything, a song that harnesses the band’s slower melodies, heard in the soft vocals of its writer, Bilinda Butcher. Of the recording sessions, Butcher explained to Spin in 2008, “Often, when we do the vocals, it’s 7:30 in the morning: I’ve usually fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing. Maybe that’s why it’s languorous. I’m usually trying to remember what I’ve been dreaming about when I’m singing.”
Smith acknowledged another hidden gem from the era in the form of ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ by New Order, a band formed by the remaining members of Joy Division, after the passing of their frontman, Ian Curtis. They initially emerged with a similar gloom, but their third single would mark their shift into dance music territory, with drummer Stephen Morris seeing the vision for the song’s title after hours spent in the studio, stopping to smoke a joint when he noticed the sunlight reflecting strangely into the window.
“Momentarily, the light seemed to me to take on a crystalline glow, giving the room an aquamarine haze,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir, “‘Everything’s gone green’, I observed. ‘That’s good, let’s call it that then’, said Bernard, who hadn’t noticed my Condor moment.”
Smith’s ear for some of the era’s most defining alternative classics makes for a playlist captivating in its nostalgia; listen to all of the musician’s favourite songs of the 1980s below.
Robert Smith’s favourite songs from the 1980s:
- ABC – ‘The Look of Love’
- The Associates – ‘Tell Me Easter’s On Friday
- Bananarama and Fun Boy Three – ‘It Ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It’
- David Bowie – ‘Let’s Dance’
- Kate Bush – ‘Cloudbusting’
- Cocteau Twins – ‘Persephone’
- Cristina – ‘Things Fall Apart’
- Daf – ‘Sex Unter Wasser’
- Depeche Mode – ‘Personal Jesus’
- Dinosaur Jr – ‘Freak Scene’
- Echo and the Bunnymen – ‘The Killing Moon’
- Peter Gabriel – ‘Red Rain’
- The Human League – ‘Human’
- The Jesus and Mary Chain – ‘Some Candy Talking’
- Joy Division – ‘The Eternal’
- Chaka Khan – ‘I Feel For You’
- Madness – ‘Return of the Los Palmas Seven’
- Mel and Kim – ‘Respectable’
- My Bloody Valentine – ‘Lose My Breath’
- New Order – ‘Everything’s Gone Green’
- Yoko Ono – ‘Walking on Thin Ice’
- The Pixies – ‘Gigantic’
- The Pretenders – ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’
- Prince – ‘Starfish and Coffee’
- Psychedelic Furs – ‘Heaven’
- Siouxie and the Banshees – ‘Dear Prudence’
- Soft Cell – ‘Tainted Love’
- The Sugarcubes – ‘Birthday’
- Suzanne Vega – ‘Small Blue Thing’
- Tom Waits – ‘In the Neighborhood’
