Two classic songs by The Cure songs that Robert Smith wrote aged 16
Long before he found fame as the eyelinered, gothic frontman of the Cure, Robert Smith found a love for music in his hometown of Blackpool. Growing up surrounded by musicians – his mother played piano while his father sang – it was no surprise that Smith himself was inspired to take up music. He learned piano and guitar in his youth and was playing in a band with his siblings by the age of 14.
By the mid-1970s, Smith found himself playing piano in The Cure and eventually taking up the lead vocalist role. In 1979, the trio released their first record, Three Imaginary Boys. Just one year later, they put out Boys Don’t Cry, which contained songs from their debut amongst more material.
Both records also included songs Smith had been working on since his teens. As he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone, the opening track to Three Imaginary Boys, ‘10:15 Saturday Night’, was written when he was just 16. With eerie but potent guitar-driven instrumentals and repeated lyrics of “And the tap drips drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip”, the song finds a young Smith channelling melancholy and loneliness.
The controversial ‘Killing an Arab’ is another track Smith penned at the age of 16. The song was based on Albert Camus’ The Stranger and received backlash for inciting violence, which Smith has both refuted and accepted.
Though he wrote them at 16, the band only recorded the songs when Smith was 18, so the frontman found himself unconvinced by some of the songs, adding: “The pop songs like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ are naive to the point of insanity [laughs]. But considering the age I was and the fact that I had done nothing apart from go to school – no real-life experience, everything was taken from books – some of them are pretty good.”
Taking into account his age and inexperience, they certainly were impressive songwriting feats. ‘10:15 Saturday Night’ was also the song that landed the Cure their record deal – Chris Parry, founder of Fiction Records, was taken by the repetition of the word “drip”, which led to their signing. This was another element of their first album, which was to irk Smith.
“The first one is my least favourite Cure album,” he explained, “Obviously, they are my songs, and I was singing, but I had no control over any other aspect of it: the production, the choices of the songs, the running order, the artwork. It was all kind of done by Parry without my blessing. And even at that young age I was very pissed off. I had dreamed of making an album, and suddenly we were making it and my input was being disregarded. I decided from that day on we would always pay for ourselves and therefore retain total control.”
Since then, Smith and the Cure have retained that control over their artistry and their aesthetic, honing one of the most coherent careers in music history.
