The “main, motivating reason” why Robert Smith formed The Cure
“I can’t recognise myself in some of the early stuff we do,” Cure frontman Robert Smith once told the Associated Press. “I squirm with embarrassment, and I’m fascinated at the same time.”
That’s certainly not an unusual perspective for an ageing musician to have when looking back at their younger days. Robert Smith said these words, however, when he was still just 27 years old. The year was 1986, and The Cure were touring the US promoting their sixth studio album, The Head on the Door. The band, with the benefit of hindsight, were still on the early upward trajectory of their career, with much bigger heights to come, but to Smith, playing to increasingly large crowds in America had little to no bearing on his process as a singer and songwriter.
“The goal of global success was never considered when we started,” he said in the 1986 AP interview. “I don’t see why we should now think in those terms. I’m still basically entertaining myself with the Cure. We’ve sort of proven so far that if I like what we do, it’s going to be liked by a certain number of people.”
Even if Smith wasn’t consciously trying to reach a larger audience, it was rapidly happening nonetheless. Whereas the first five Cure albums had all fallen flat in America, The Head on the Door, with its slightly poppier sound and hit single ‘In Between Days’, had finally cracked the code with US listeners, leading to shows in front of 6,000 fans at New York’s Radio City Music Hall and 10,000 at a theater in Los Angeles.
Already well established stars in the UK, Smith and his bandmates often found themselves saddled with the reductive “goth” label in America, and while that did bring out a certain instantly recognisable segment of their new audience – clad in black and caked in makeup – most converts were drawn in by Smith’s increasingly strong songwriting and the Cure’s refreshing disconnect from some of the other more unfortunate pop trends of the ‘80s.
Part of Robert Smith’s personal appeal was also his willingness to talk about that very subject: the landscape of pop music that the Cure found themselves awkwardly navigating.
“The main motivating reason why the Cure was started,” he explained, “and why I wanted to sing in the group and write songs, is I thought most everything I was confronted with on the radio and TV was dross. I still do… If I thought we had become redundant, I would write the whole thing off.”
Smith acknowledged that, throughout the first decade of the Cure’s existence, there had been extended hiatuses and that he himself had sometimes been “difficult to get on with,” but he also seemed to have a fully formed understanding of what the band’s artistic principles ought to be, and even a way of testing whether it was time to put the whole thing to bed.
“The Cure will continue,” Smith said, “As long as I can hear us and think, ‘that’s a really good group. I wish I was in it.’”
Nearly 40 years later, Smith decided he still wished he was in the Cure, and so the band reunited to release its 14th studio album and first in 16 years, Songs of a Lost World, in 2024. It went to number one in the UK—as ever, a gem amongst plenty of dross.
