The one artist Robert Smith and Morrissey both hated
There is no shortage of inflammatory statements that Robert Smith and Morrissey haven’t said about each other over the years.
You could have the biggest falling out with one of your friends, but even if they stole from you, killed your family, and tried to make sure no one saw your face again, ‘The Moz’ would have something in the holster even more hostile for the Cure frontman. But even for all the vitriol they had over the years, there were the occasional moments where they could actually see eye-to-eye on something.
Granted, you’d hardly find any of those commonalities today. Smith has made sure that he would make sure to eat meat specifically because it would piss off the Smiths frontman, and it’s not as if the status quo looks changeable in the foreseeable future. Both of them could see through each other, but when they were coming up, it was in their nature to be a bit more cutthroat when they gave interviews.
The punk regime wasn’t about being the most upstanding member of society and trying to make nice with everyone. Sex Pistols virtually announced themselves with one middle finger in the air when they premiered on television for the first time, and while The Smiths and The Cure came out a little after the fact, they still had that same spirit. Morrissey was never going to mince his words thanks to what John Lydon said.
But when you listen to their music, both The Smiths and The Cure took drastically different approaches to what they wanted to do. Both of them were melancholic in a way, but whereas Smith could actually make perfect pop songs, there came a point where ‘The Moz’ could make the kind of political statements that could make Bono blush. He was brutally honest every single time he sang, and when it came to Elton John, he could be downright diabolical.
Despite Morrissey not having that much animosity towards the piano icon as a person, he felt that his music was everything he despised about pop, even saying years later, “Bring me the head of Elton John…which is one instance in which meat would not be murder if it were served on a plate.” Charming as always, but it wasn’t like Smith wasn’t feeling a little bit similar when releasing his masterpiece.
Disintegration may have some of the finest songs in the alternative rock canon, but when it first came out, Smith remembered singling out John alongside acts like Dire Straits when talking about rockstars that needed to be eradicated from the charts, saying, “I still feel the same as when we started during the punk thing. What we do is an alternative to Elton John and Chris Rea and all those fucking old bastards who were there then and still are. It’s so embarrassing to see these old people doddering about, like Dire Straits. They’re hideous”.
A lot of it may have been the result of adolescent angst, but it’s not like Smith wasn’t proud to be relatively close to John later in life. Although Morrissey seemed to think that John was pleasant enough, Smith at least got to play on an album with John, even if both of their appearances on Gorillaz Song Machine Volume One were on completely different tracks.
The jury’s out as to whether Morrissey will dial back his comments about John at all, but it’s not like there’s an argument anymore. You can complain all you want about how he might be a dinosaur of the rock and roll scene, but the reason why he’s still here is that he has the same fire that he did when he first began making music with Bernie Taupin all those years ago.
