The two albums that make Robert Smith cry
“Boys don’t cry,” The Cure frontman Robert Smith once ironically proclaimed. In fact, as it happens, he actually wrote all the lyrics of the album Seventeen Seconds one weepy night in Newcastle after a brief exchange of words went awry with three businessmen in an elevator. So, it is clear to see that floods of tears have never been far from Smith’s idea of artistry when it comes to alternative music.
These tear-jerking albums seem to rise out of the ether and tap into something personal within us. They’re a gift to the soul, quite literally: crying releases oxytocin and endorphins that can improve your mood and soothe both physical and mental pain. For Smith, that’s a pinnacle that even goes beyond the achievement of what he terms as modern music’s finest creative masterpiece.
“David Bowie’s Low is the greatest record ever made,” he told NME in 2013. “I bought it on cassette and the same day I went to a garden centre with my mum. I’d ordered it from the local record shop, and Paul, who was in the band, and is my brother-in-law, had dropped it through the letterbox. It’s like one of those weird days.” This illuminated the world in a bright new way for the Godfather of Goth. And yet, when it comes to an emotional response, he still places two records above it.
It was the expansiveness of Low that proved mind-altering more so than emotionally connective in a resonant sense, as he explains: “When I put it on now the sound, dunk dunk, everything is just fucking genius! There are other albums that I love much more, like viscerally much more, like Axis: Bold As Love, or Five Leaves Left, albums that I can cry to, but Low was the album that had a huge impact on me, just how I saw sound. No other album has done that to me.”
Five Leaves Left is Nick Drake’s debut album from 1969, and the song, ‘Time Has Told Me’, even inspired the name of Smith’s future band with the stirring verse, “Time has told me, You’re a rare, rare find, A troubled cure, For a troubled mind.” But his appeal stretched beyond the poetry on display. “[He] wasn’t worried about what people thought of him. He wasn’t worried about being famous,” Smith once said, recognising a kinship.
However, there is also a gothic morbidity to the appeal that explains why Smith gets quite so weepy with Axis: Bold As Love and Five Leaves Left. “I think also that because he had an untimely death like Jimi Hendrix, he was never able to compromise his early work. It’s a morbid romanticism [something Smith and The Cure could definitely relate to] but there is something attractive about it,” he continues to explain in the book Never Enough.
Nevertheless, that morbidity is only a background factor that would be lost if the attraction was baseless. “Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free,” Smith once said of his hero when taking part in the tribute album Stone Free. “When you’re nine or ten, your life is entirely dominated by adults. So he represented this thing that I wanted to be. Hendrix was the first person who made me think it might be good to be a singer and a guitarist — before that I wanted to be a footballer.”
Albums that make Robert Smith cry:
- Five Leaves Left – Nick Drake
- Axis: Bold As Love – Jimi Hendrix
