Taking The Cure With ROBERT SMITH

Taking The Cure With ROBERT SMITH

FEATURES

Deborah Frost

Manhattan’s sumptuous St. Regis hotel, filled with people who look like C.E.O.s and deposed royalty and less fortunate souls yes-sir and yes-ma’am-ing them, is not where you’d expect to find a man who's made a career out of screaming sweet nothings like ”I will never be clean again!” But even though Robert Smith's tales from the dark side still sound like they come from a garret filled with filth and misery, the Cure has changed its place in this world. After a spell as a Siouxsie & The Banshees sideman, Smith has taken his reformed imaginary boyhood group on and upward to gold and arenas. At last count, last year’s Standing On A Beach double album set of Cure singles had sold 600,000 in the U.S. alone. On the eve of this year’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me tour, fanatical Curists fought for every square inch of mega-halls like New York’s Madison Square Garden and L.A. 's Forum. Not that this new status and record biz respectability seems to have had much of an effect on Smith. You are ushered into a monstrous marble-fixtured suite to find a figure in billowy white shirt, torn jeans, and unlaced hightops with his back to the door, nervously flicking the TV set on and off. He turns around. Beneath the lacquered rat’s nest on his head, the huge red smear across his lips almost looks like a smile.

• • •

What is Sussex, where you grew up, like?

It’s right on the edge of a green belt, next to Gatwick Airport. It’s a dreadful place. There’s nothing there. My dad works for Upjohn pharmaceutical company. We used to live in Blackpool, up near Liverpool, in the North of England. He had to move down to Sussex for his job. They’re based in Croydon. All my schooling took place around Crawley. It’s like a pimple on the side of Croydon. It’s not a very nice place. I go back there occasionally because my mum and dad have got a garden and I haven’t got a garden in London, so I go there to sit out in the garden.

Did you go to a public school—what we call a private school—or a regular school?

A regular comprehensive. I took an entrance examination to a public school, a boys’ school, when I was 11, but I said that I would run away if they sent me there. My dad thought it would be good for my education, but my mum appreciated that I actually wanted to mix with girls. She thought growing up in a house where I’ve got two sisters, it would be abnormal to suddenly send me to an all male environment. I’ve got one older brother and one older sister and one younger sister. My younger sister lives with Pori, the guitarist. She’s been with him for about eight years.

I had sort of a turbulent education in that I was overly educated before I went to school. Having an older brother and sister, I was exposed to a lot of ideas and a lot of literature, which most of my peers weren’t. I suppose no one grew up in as liberal a household as I did. My mum and dad used to let my brother wander about smoking dope when I was about 10. He’s 14 years older. My sister’s 12 years older. I was an accident. My mother wasn’t supposed to have any more children, and I arrived like 12 years after she’d been told that. Then she decided to give me someone to share it with.

My brother’s in his 40s now. He’s got three children. My sister’s got three children. But she’s married and he’s not. He always wanted to be a farmer. He was forced through the university system by my mum and dad, got a librarian’s degree just to prove he could do it, then he went off and bought himself a farm. So he’s now like a self-sufficient farmer out in Wales, living the hippie ideal. My older sister—they’re completely opposite. She went through various art schools, got all these art degrees and ended up married, the model mother. My mum and dad had the two extremes and they realized that the choices children make for themselves are quite often the right ones—if you’ve got a certain amount of intelligence. I was always treated as an equal by my family. I had a really good family life. School almost seemed to be the opposite. I couldn’t understand how the rigidity of school is designed to put you off reading and wanting to know anything. I got into quite a lot of trouble through wanting to change things. I was on this crusade. And I got frequently suspended, which I thought was ludicrous. I would always conduct my arguments in a very civilized manner and the recourse teachers saw was to put me on suspension. So I got very bitter in my teens.

And you decided not to go to a university?

I took the Oxford-Cambridge exam and I passed. I just wanted to see if I’d be able to get in. I passed the exam, but I wasn’t accepted. I did an interview and I arrived in a big woman’s fur coat. I had a place in Sussex University—it was supposed to be the best university for drugs in the country. But by then I wanted to start the group. They let you take a year off and see the world—so I compromised with my dad, I’ll take a year off and then I’ll go to a university. But once I started the group and they realized I was serious about it, I wasn’t just using it as an excuse to go around and get drunk all the time and pull women, they dropped all sort of ideas of me furthering my education. I’ve furthered my education immeasurably more by being in the Cure than going to university. And I read—my passion is still to read.

What are you reading now?

I’m just about to start The Man Of The High Council by Philip Dick. It’s out of print. I found it in a bookshop yesterday.

I just finished Snow Country, by a Japanese writer, Kawabata. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction. I get intrigued by certain things. Two years ago, it was mental health. I read a lot of books about psychotherapy. This year I started off reading a book about witch-hunts in the Middle Ages. Then someone gave me a book about mass hysteria and popular delusions and how it’s existed through the ages, like the McCarthy witch-hunts and the parallels between that and what happened in the Middle Ages. I’m reading it a bit at a time. It’s not very light, not something you curl up in bed with.

You got in a lot of trouble recently in this country for “Killing An Arab," a song inspired by Camus’ The Stranger, which nobody paid much attention to the first time around.

It arose in a very hazy manner, through a DJ pronouncing it A-rab, in a very contentious and cbnfrontational way. I thought if someone’s gonna be as insensitive and stupid as that on the air, they’re gonna do it without us ever having written the song. It was totally unfair that we were singled out. It was unfortunate. I was angered by it, particularly when I read somewhere towards the end of last year that we were feeding the fire, on the basis that any publicity is good publicity. That’s when I decided we should ask radio stations to take it off their playlists, if it was ever on there. We got a really strange reaction. College stations have written back saying they’re not going to stop because they’ve been playing it for eight years and they’ve never had any complaints.

When I wrote the song I realized it was a very inflammatory title taken out of context. But I never imagined that the two could be divorced. “Killing An Arab” is a title of a song which is about a certain prescient event which happened in a book written by Albert Camus. Otherwise, you might as well give titles purely for shock value like heavy metal bands do. I found it absurd that a group like the Cure should be singled out for that kind of attack. We spoke with them and they understand our position. A degree of compromise was involved. I couldn’t see any alternative. It was either that or ignoring the whole thing. I felt just obliged, as my name is attached to it, to make it very clear what our position was. But I hate all kinds of differences—racism is such a convenient way of categorizing people. I think it’s nonsense. I mean, I’m not proud to be English. The way other people talk about “the Russians,” I’ve always found that really ludicrous. It’s only language that’s the problem. If everyone spoke the same language, I think things would be a lot easier.

Have you written other songs inspired by books?

There’s one song on the new record that’s inspired by a Baudelaire short story, “How Beautiful You Are,” but nothing else. In the past, I’ve been influenced more stylistically by writers than taking the subject. Like Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, just the way they use words. I spend a lot of time on the words. When I was young, the people I admired were writers. I always wanted to be a writer. And I was very disappointed when I got to about 13 when I realized I wouldn’t be a writer. I didn’t have the concentration to be a writer, the solitude you have to exist in to be a writer. Distilling one particular feeling or emotion and putting it in a song is infinitely easier than trying to make a coherent statement in a book. When did you discover guitar?

Around the same time. I played piano up ’til I was around 13. My brother bought me a guitar. My younger sister was a child prodigy on the piano. It used to dishearten me. I used to try and compete with her. As soon as I started playing guitar, I felt much more comfortable. I didn’t write a song until I was 15. A terrible song. I can’t remember what the title was. Strangely enough, it was very similar to “Why Can’t I Be You.” It was my desire to be something ... it was pretty minimal, three chords.

All around, 13 was a really strange year. Up until that time I listened exclusively to what my older brother and sister would listen to. My sister used to like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper sort of stuff. My brother used to like Captain Beefheart, Nick Drake. I used to know all the words to “Safe As Milk.” He used to sing me to sleep with it. I sort of discovered my own generation’s music when I was 13. Gary Glitter and Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust was the first album I ever bought. It was only a couple of years later that punk happened. It was a good time to grow up, really. It just all fell into place. My brother took me to see Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight when I was 10. I’ve got a picture of me standing outside this orange tent with a glazed expression on my face. My brother took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey when it came out. I went to see it 11 times in two weeks. That gave me a bit of brain damage as well. I used to go to school, no one knew what I was talking about. I’d be trying to understand the end sequence and everyone at school was there talking about football. But I was never like an outcast. I used to play football as well. It was just that I used to lead this other life when I was at home, which was really strange. Other people’s older brothers and sisters, I suppose, were a bit more normal. My older brother did the whole trip. He went to India and got cholera and stuff. So I was really heavily influenced by it. And my mum plays piano. My dad sings. And they were always doing duets at the piano. It was a noisy house!

Were you in any other groups before the Cure?

No. I was still at school and we got a contract with Hansa Records. We answered this ad for a talent competition and we won, out of about 1100 groups, when I was just 16. They signed us to a contract, but we never released anything. We went into the studio a few times, but we just used it for our own advantage, to get used to things. We never had any intention of releasing a record, because we were all still studying. They said if something happens, you’ve got to be prepared to leave school. And I thought, leave school, that’s a stupid idea.

How did you win?

“Boys Don’t Cry” was one of the songs. But they just liked the picture of us. We were very young. They just thought they could turn us into a teen group. They actually wanted us to do cover versions and we always refused. “I Fought The Law,” that the Clash eventually did (laughs) was one of the songs they wanted us to do. I finished school and I would have starved rather than get a job. I decided at a very early age I’d never work for anyone. I couldn’t see much point in being alive anyway. Day after day, doing something I didn’t enjoy. I’d probably end up killing myself, so there’d be no point in starting.

You were living at home?

Yeah. And I had a girlfriend that used to pay for my drinks. I’ve since paid her back... I kept going to job interviews and being very belligerent. I used to explain to them I didn’t want to work. I’d be happy if someone else took the job I was being offered. We played local community halls for free, then we started charging 50 pence. We started playing pubs, we’d lie about our age. We’d get paid in drinks at first... it just escalated. Because no one else in Crawley was doing what we were doing. They still aren’t. This was 1977-78. We never played in London before we signed to Fiction in 1978.

“I put make-up on when I wake up. Sometimes, if I’m going shopping, depending upon what shop I’m going to, I wear it. If I’m going round to the news agent’s, I don’t bother. It’s difficult explaining... ” —Robert Smith

’77 was the heyday of the Clash. Who were your influences at the time?

The Sex Pistols. The Clash. Buzzcocks. Particularly the Buzzcocks, because they actually had tunes. But it was all just fun. Much has been made of it as a social movement. The whole thing derived purely from people wanting to go out and get drunk and jump about. And you couldn’t do it to Genesis. It had no social importance a’tall. There was a frustration that was evident in being out of work. But nothing like what it is today. So it can’t have had that much to do with people being out of work. You were able to stay on the dole for a longer time. It seemed like things were much easier then than they are now. But it was just good fun. For two years. The summer of 1977 was like this pinnacle. Everyone says oh, 1975. It wasn’t a’tall. In 1977, the Sex Pistols were number one. And in the charts there was like the Stranglers, the Buzzcocks. It was brilliant. In the nation’s Top 10, there were like five really hard punk groups. You thought ah, things are changing. Everyone jumped onto the bandwagon and made it into a style, which is unfortunate. Record companies thought they could make money and that’s when you got all these parodies of punk groups appearing.

That’s when you got signed, too.

But we never really played punk songs. We were always playing songs like “Boys Don’t Cry,” we were sort of playing pop. Just we were playing it badly. So we were labelled a punk group. A bit like the Buzzcocks were doing. We sounded quite like the Buzzcocks.

Was your hair wild then?

No. It was just cut very short. Up until Faith, in 1981,1 had it short. I was gaunt enough to carry it.

When did you start wearing eyeliner and lipstick?

Around the same time. I used to wear eye make-up when I was at school. When we did the Pornography tour, I used to wear loads of lipstick around my eyes, so it looked like blood when I’d sweat. We all used to wear it just to look horrible. It changed my personality when I put it on. It’s like warpaint. It was always designed to be very theatrical and not sort of enticing. I’ve never applied it for reasons of vanity. I haven’t got a mouth, basically. That’s why I started wearing it. People don’t know where my mouth is otherwise. Would you have been wearing eyeliner and lipstick if you hadn ’t done a photo session today?

Yeah. I put it on when I wake up. Sometimes, if I’m going shopping, depending upon what shop I’m to, I wear it. If I’m going to the supermarket, I generally put it on. If I’m going ’round to the news agent’s, I don’t bother. It’s difficult explaining what you look like when you’re in a group because people necessarily think that’s your image because you’re a singer in a group. Whereas everyone presents an image to other people. Mine is through the same desire to convince people that I am a certain way. It isn’t really to do with the group. The group doesn’t have an overall image, despite what everyone maintains. I mean, if you put me and Boris in a lift and you walked into that lift, you wouldn’t think that we knew each other. The same with me and Laurence and me and Pori. Simon and me have got similar hair, but that’s probably it. When I cut my hair off last year, you couldn’t have found five more dissimilar people if you tried.

It was great that you were able to do that.

A lot of people sort of missed the point—again. I just did it just to prove to myself that it didn’t matter. When I walked into the Fiction office, the same people that have been with us for like eight years, they were horrified that I’d cut my hair off. They said you’ve got to go to America in two weeks! I said yeah, well I haven’t broken my fingers or anything, it’s just my hair. I just wanted to look more severe because I was fed up with being called cuddly.

Was it scary when you first saw people imitating you?

The only way I think people are openly copying me is when they put make-up on badly—boys—and I’ve seen that more and more the last couple of months. They’re maybe identifying themselves with an image which they’re presented with through the media of me, but I don’t think they’re trying to copy me. I don’t think of myself as the person that’s on magazine covers. I have to distance myself. Otherwise, I’ll go funny.

When you started the group, did you want that kind of adulation?

No. Still don’t, to be honest. The group started—the two main reasons—one, I wanted to do something. I wanted to be involved with everyone else doing something. The second is that I felt the same disgust at what people were expected to listen to on the radio. I thought I could do better. But I’ve never had any sort of ambitions beyond being able to continue for as long as I want doing as I want. Which,

I suppose, is not a small ambition in itself. We’ve never tried to capitalize on a format. Something that was pretty successful, we don’t go back to it. Much to the record company’s disgust.. .which is why we swap record companies quite often in America. They can’t understand why we won’t make more of the same thing—Why are you committing commercial suicide? I certainly don’t think of myself as a pop star. It’s happened much too gradually, much too slowly for me to suddenly wake up and think, oh, I’m a pop star. And when we play in Phoenix we’ll be lucky if we get 1,000 people to come see us. Where in Los Angeles, we sell out the Forum in under an hour. The two extremes exist. The thing is I don’t believe in any of them. It doesn’t actually affect the core, the reasons why.. .I mean, I step outside of the group and if I don’t want to be me, then the group would stop. That’s always been the criteria behind whatever we do. I want the Cure to be the group that I want to be in.

And it did stop for a while.

And maybe will in the future. I’m very critical of what we do. And I agonize over how we do things. And when it gets to a point which it did after Pornography where I just got really sickened by everything... What happened? Did you have a nervous breakdown?

I just got fed up with being the front person in a group. I just felt trapped. I thought I was becoming a parody of myself. It was coming out really stylized. The image of the group really got so obvious. Everything we’d do was becoming very cumbersome.

Were you drinking a lot? Or doing a lot of drugs?

That didn’t help.

That’s why you joined Siouxsie & The Banshees as a sideman?

Yeah, they could get hold of better drugs... I just wanted to disappear. I still wanted to play, I just didn’t want to have all the responsibility that went with it through being the leader of the Cure. A lot of it was the peripheral things which I’m involved in which is everything from compiling the video to making sure that all the artwork’s right. Just because I want it all to be how I want it to be. I’ve sort of shied away from delegating. Because I’ve never found any people I can trust. In a practical way. So that is a self imposed kind of responsibility and pressure. Then again, if I delegate and it went wrong, I’d bemoan other people.

Why did you decide you wanted to do it again?

I looked at it and I thought having a group is still a good idea. I should just go about it in a different way. So we started from scratch again and I did “Let’s Go To Bed’’ just to break the mold, so people didn’t know what was occurring. I wanted to release “Let’s Go To Bed” with a different name. I thought it would be exCure, whatever it was. I thought that was an even more stupid name than the Cure. It’s always fluctuated wildly. People forget that when we stared we were playing pop, then we went all sort of ding-a-ling. Depending on what the first thing you heard by the group was, your perception of the group might be radically different from someone sitting next to you. People come up to me and say “I’m an old fan.” I’m thinking how old—“Lovecats” or Pornography? Do you mean really old, like “Fire In Cairo”? It just makes me laugh. The diversity that’s always been there, there’s no logic to it. It’s always tangents from the same sort of hub—like the big hole in my head.

Why did Laurence go to keyboards?

Because he accepted his limitations as a drummer and he couldn’t stand being beaten up so savagely day after day when he couldn’t play certain things.

But you decided to keep him in the band.

Yeah. He’s part of the makeup of the group. He never has contributed particularly much to the songwriting—he used to write a lot of the words with me in the early days. He’s since stopped, dried up—(laughs) he’s become a husk. He’s just part of what goes on in the social life of the group, which is 99 percent of what we do. If he left, it would be a dramatically different group. He contributes in a negative fashion...

When you came back, the band became more successful than ever.

Yeah. Although I think it’s retained the edge that it had. We’re in a very strange position in that we’re able to play really crass pop songs and yet people still accept that I can sing about issues with far greater emotional depth and take it seriously. I’m surprised at how big our audience is at the moment in America.

Do you think a lot had to do with the fact that the singles, the songs on Standing On A Beach, had already been proven? It was a sort of “Best Of” compilation.

People say it’s a greatest hits. It’s greatest non-hits. That was put together really because a lot of the singles were deleted. I thought it’s stupid to keep hearing people paying $30 for an old copy of “Jumping Someone Else’s Train.” I hate that sort of musical snobbery and the collectibility of records and things. We made all those songs to be listened to the first time ’round. We didn’t have a very big audience and not many people heard ’em. So I thought there’s nothing wrong with bringing ’em out a second time. I think they’re really good. They’re not my choice of best Cure songs.

What would be?

“Faith” is still my favorite Cure song. “Figurehead” I really love. “Siamese Twins” I like. “Accuracy” I’ve always loved. The ones that I suppose could never be singles. The singles have always been released knowing they’re supposed to be played on the radio. It would be dumb of us to release a six-and-a-half minute improvisational piece and expect it to be played on the radio. It’s difficult enough trying to get “Why Can’t I Be You” played on the radio without cutting our own throats. Why is Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me a double album?

TURN TO PAGE 54

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35

We were trying to get something that was like The White Album, or Electric Ladyland. We all had our favorite double albums pinned up in the control room. What to aspire to. Pori’s choices were Prince and Physical Graffiti. Simon’s was Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Mine was Ummagumma, Electric Ladyland. Dave Allen’s was The White Album. I was really surprised at how much we’d written. We could have had a triple album.

The record company allowed you to do it?

They’ve never had any say in that side of things. Ever since the first record, we’ve always used our own money to finance ourselves and we reinvest in the group. They’re always presented with a finished thing. They have to put it out as is. That’s part of our contract with every company we go through. They’re not allowed to meddle with it a’tall. We live very modest life styles. My life style hasn’t changed a’tall in the past five years. We certainly made a lot of money from Head On The Door and Standing On A Beach combined to allow us to go out and spend 10 weeks with this new one, which could have taken six.

Ten weeks for a double album is really nothing.

It was in a vineyard, which is why it took 10 weeks. It would’ve taken considerably less if we’d recorded in a proper studio and it wouldn’t have been as much fun. They were wary. . . they sort of screwed up their noses over the phone when they heard it was a double album. But as soon as they heard it, they could understand why it was a double album. With a lot of double albums, people say it could have been a single album. But with this one, it could have been two single albums, but it couldn’t have been one. So we thought, “Why put a time span on it?” Fiction was saying “You’ll get twice as much money if you release two single albums and also you’ll get out of your contract quicker with Elektra and renegotiate” and all that sort of stuff. I was thinking this isn’t why we make records. If I was worried about not making another record, I would never make another record. It’s like whatever we do, we think it’s going to be the last thing we’ll ever do, so we try and make it the best thing.

Is it amazing to you that you may actually be becoming real pop stars?

It pleases me that more people are listening to us. I would really love not to have the fame attached. It sounds dreadful, it sounds very insincere. Having seen people who are famous and what happens to them, I would much prefer not to be famous. In the past, I’ve closed down quite a lot and not done interviews, not gone on the media circus because I didn’t want the group to be too spotlighted. I think part of the charm of what we do is this hint of mystery. We’re not that well-known. We’re never seen anywhere, we don’t go out and mix. You don’t see photos of us vomiting over other people. The groups I like, I don’t know very much about—like the Cocteau Twins and Echo & The Bunnymen.

Do you see yourself primarily as a guitarist, a singer, or a songwriter?

Depends what mood I’m in. A singer, I would say at the moment. Certainly not a guitarist. I like what I do on the guitar, but I don’t think of myself as a guitarist. I have enormous limitations. But I’m quite content to live with them rather than practice.

Do you write about real people?

Not always, but generally. More often than not, the songs actually take off things that have happened to me. Not necessarily in the recent past, but at some point. If not, then they’re either taken from what other people tell me or something I read, something I see on television.

‘‘The Catch” seems to be the most perfect pop song on Kiss Me.

That’s about a real person. That’ll be the second single. That’s supposed to sound like an old Velvet Underground song. You’ve said before that your songs are influenced by your nightmares and your dreams. Any recent nightmares or dreams you care to relate?

My dreams have been very stable over the past few days. They’re very quiet. A lot of pink bits in my dreams. I exaggerated the reliance I had on my dreams. Over a short period of time, I gathered together all I was dreaming. They were sort of like half dreams, more like drug-induced dreams than REM sleep.

When you sing ‘‘I want to hold you like a doll” on Kiss Me, do you think women might be offended?

I’m laughing. Because that’s what my girlfriend thought I was singing—“I want to hold you like a doll.” It’s “I want to hold you like a dog.” You see, Simon holds his dog very lovingly, very gently. I actually meant dog in a more lustful manner.

You’ve had the same girlfriend for over 13 years. And you wear what looks like a wedding ring.

It’s not a wedding ring. I’ve always worn a ring on that finger. Since I was about 14, 15. It doesn’t fit on any other finger.

So there’s no special significance?

There is an extremely special significance, but it’s not marriage. I don’t acknowledge the institution or the sanctity of marriage. I much prefer being boyfriend and girlfriend. It just suits my personality better—makes me feel younger.

What does your girlfriend do?

She works part-time with mentally handicapped people—when I’m not there. When I’m there, she makes do with me. She keeps in practice.

Do you get lonely?

Not really. I’m usually either so drunk or so exhausted by the evening. I feel happier when I’m with Mary than when I’m not, but I don’t feel incomplete. I’ve always felt content on my own. I actually feel better if I’m with someone I love. But I get on so well with the others that we sort of substitute each other... I mean I can talk to the others about anything I want. We don’t have qualms about displaying emotion in front of each other, so it’s not like it’s a trial being away. We’ve never really been away on tour for that length of time, just because I feel the concerts suffer. We never go for more than a month. So it’s always been very civilized way of working.

Any clues as to what you’ll do next?

I’ll wake up one morning and it will be very evident, very natural. But I don’t know what it is yet. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be in the studio.