Goth Talk: Margie Borschke talks to Robert Smith, Nylon, February 2000

Published in Nylon, February 2000
(This may be a different edit than the published article.)

Goth Talk
by Margie Borschke

Robert Smith looks unhappy. He is posing for a photo outside his house in England, wearing a baggy tracksuit top, dark trousers, a mop of limp black hair and no makeup. His smile is forced. Next to him stands some blonde kid from Germany, beaming like a maniac. The picture is posted on the website, the Holy Hour, under the heading My Cure Holidays. It was snapped early last fall shortly after Smith finished recording Bloodflowers, the latest (and rumored to be last) album from The Cure.

When I meet up with Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan he looks somewhat less beleaguered. Just slightly. As lead singer, chief songwriter and the Cure’s key fixture (12 different musicians have been a part of the band’s 23 year history; Smith and guitarist Simon Gallup are the only constants), he is the band’s obvious though reluctant spokesman. He hates fans that show up on his doorstep and finds interviews and photo shoots almost as tedious. Smith, despite having never worked any other job, save a week with the post office (sacked) and a month as a gardener, is still uncomfortable with pop stardom. He blushes when asked for an autograph and is genuinely upset by fans who camp out on the beach near his house, smoking dope and playing Cure songs.

Robert Smith is forty now, married for 11 years to his long-time girlfriend Mary Poole, and most definitely grown-up. He lives in a quiet seaside town near Brighton and speaks more often of afternoons with his young nephews and nieces than of wild nights on the town. He has a tidy fortune tucked away. He seems happy. Even content. Actually, he’s very much the sensible Englishman. Yes, his hair is lightly teased, his lipstick is smeared, he’s wearing eyeliner and enormous club-kid black boots, but we should all be so outrageously mature at mid-life. And yes, he can still find beauty—and a moody pop song—in melancholia


Elektra, the Cure’s US record company, has rented a suite at the Chelsea Hotel to give the interviews some “atmosphere”. There are more models around than junkies these days, but the Chelsea remains as eccentric and downwardly fashionable as ever. Smith, who spends enough time in hotels to value comfortable beds over hip quotients, isn’t staying here. Actually, he doesn’t seem the least bit enchanted with the place. “It’s all very Elvis Costello, isn’t it,” he deadpans, poking about the sunny suite, whose cracked plaster walls are painted a jarring lime green. He sinks into an armchair covered in mauve velvet. “Fun-kay.” He says, sarcastically. It seems Robert Smith, onetime innovator of freakish streetwear trends, is suspicious of down-market glamour.

The Cure are not just a success, they’re a phenomenon. In over two decades they have recorded 23 albums and sold millions, all with next to no help from commercial radio. They’re among the most bootlegged bands of all time, up there in Grateful Dead territory, a distinction that speaks volumes about their fans’ devotion. Yet they have never succumbed to commercial pressures—they don’t chase trends and they will not allow their music to be used in advertisements. “We’re so morally right,” Smith laughs. “I am protective about the music. I never let anyone get in the way of it or tell me what we should be doing.” Hence the band does not employ a producer or a business manager. Smith is content to do the dirty work himself. He even has a hand in their website. Smith doesn’t come off as a control freak so much as someone who stayed true to his DIY roots. (Long before Jarvis bared his bottom at the BRITS, Smith declared the ceremony a farce after being named band of the year in 1990.) Success has made him neither arrogant nor jaded. What other Platinum selling band would place a Melody Maker ad when they needed a new drummer? “Famous band needs drummer,” read Jason Cooper, the band’s current drummer, in 1994. “No metalheads. ” The man is so damn grounded.

The Cure started out as a high school band in Crawley, a sleepy suburb 30 Miles outside London. His childhood friend Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst played drums and Simon Gallup, the town’s only other punk, guitar. Smith sang and played keyboards. It was 1976. They were The Easy Cure. Their first gig was at a school-sponsored jazz/fusion festival. They played nothing of the sort. “We played a Bowie song, a Thin Lizzy song, and a Hendrix song,” Smith remembers, smiling. “The rest of it was our sort of punk stuff which was really quite bad, although we did do Killing an Arab.”

“We actually had a singer for that concert,” He continues. “His older brother had a van [and we needed transport] so he got to sing the covers. It was peculiar. He was so scared about the audience that he actually did his bit of the show wearing a crash helmet. He thought they would throw bottles.” Mostly they smashed chairs and scratched cars out in the parking lot. “It was the dawning of punk in the suburbs.” Smith shrugs. His non-jazz/fusion playing ass was temporarily suspended.

England in the late seventies and early eighties was most definitely not swinging. There was no work. London was mired in riots. Thatcher came to power. But from the hopelessness, emerged an underground youth scene that found inspiration in everything falling apart around them. There was nothing else to do, they thought, so why not make some art. Smith looks back on these days fondly. “The climate was pretty bad but the advantage was that when I left school there was no work and I was able to go on the dole for over a year. You had to attend one job interview a month and everyone used to go barefoot so they’d get another month. I bought a second hand fur coat to wear to interviews. Just one look—Bare feet and a fur coat and people think DRUGS!.” He laughs. “[I sat] home and wrote songs.” The support bought the band the time they needed to get a demo tape together. Now a foursome with Michael Dempsey on bass, they played the clubs and developed a following. By 1979 they’d released their first record, Three Imaginary Boys (1980’s Boy’s Don’t Cry in America.)

Their first single, Killing an Arab, a bit of punk-pop based on Camus’ novel the Stranger, charted and Boys Don’t Cry, a new wave-ish pop song, was a minor hit that same year. But it was the single A Forest (1980) a minimalist atmospheric song that hearlded the darker mood that came to be associated with the band. This gloomy sound, dubbed post-punk, struck a chord with the youth in the UK. After all, they were all on the dole.

The Cure remained underground—famous to a few. They lived hand to mouth—they couldn’t even move to London until 1982. When they missed the last train, they slept on the studio floor. If the record company gave them cash for a hotel they spent it in the pub. They played in clubs, drank heavily, dressed like inspired freaks, and did things on their own terms. “We didn’t really sell that many records then.” Smith remembers. “When we were doing Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982) no one ever came to see us. We only kept going because we didn’t really need anything [except] the opportunity to make another record. We always sold just enough in order to pay for the next record.”

The US didn’t pay much attention. The cheerier singles Let’s Go to Bed and the Lovecats made some waves in 1982 but it wasn’t until 1985’s Head on the Door, a melodic pop album, that the band’s popularity gelled. Both their accessible lighthearted follow-up, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987) and 1989’s Disintegration, described by one critic as “a monumentally depressing album that mentioned death in almost every song”, garnered more commercial and critical attention stateside. After Disintegration, however, Smith was worn out. He had just turned thirty, spent much of the Disintegration tour smashed and had to fire Tolhurst for being drunk since 1982. He told reporters it was over. 5 albums followed. Each one purportedly the last. By 1997, there was enough material for Galore, a second collection of singles, starting where the first retrospective Standing on a Beach (Staring at the Sea on CD 1986) left off.

The Cure has a far more varied sound than the band is given credit. Just think, they are simultaneously known for their minimalist pop (the Lovecats, Close To Me), their brooding atmospherics (almost all of the Pornography and Faith) and, of course, their layered rolling guitars (In Between Days). The Cure, themselves, have never been that gloomy—making something beautiful out of hopelessness and despair is itself an optimistic act. And there are far more upbeat and whimsical songs, both in spirit and lyrically, than their dour reputation would have you imagine. (After all, Smith is a man who sang “The Sun is up/I’m so happy I could scream.”) The tie that binds it all together is Smith’s vocals. His voice is a paradox—at once piercing and deep and passionate to the point of effortlessness, there’s always a moment where it sounds as if he might lose control. That’s the joy of it.

Bloodflowers, out this month, is a serious record. One of the songs is based on an Iain Banks novel; many others are preoccupied with loss. Smith is the first to admit there is not a single radio-friendly tune on the album. Apart from the melodrama of the title track (“These flowers will always die!” he screams, surely to the delight of some sullen chick wearing too much kohl) the album is populated by assured contemplative songs, all written in a noticeably mature voice. “Over the last three albums I’ve written songs that expressed more questions that come with experience,” Smith says of the record’s tone. “ There is a kind of world weariness that it probably rings truer [now] because I am older and more experienced.“

But don’t file it under Adult contemporary. “ I really fucking hate adult rock,” says Smith. “ For this album I wrote a few songs on more ‘adult’ things but when I sang them I didn’t feel comfortable. I think that the idiom that I work in doesn’t lend itself to [so called] adult themes. We do well with a particular kind of song and music. Beyond that, why bother? I read books. I talk to people. Putting everything I think about into songs would be kind of stupid really. It would be living my life out in song.”

But with lyrics like “the last day of summer” and “one last time before it’s over” one can’t help but wonder if this is the fond farewell? Smith seems indecisive. ”When I turned thirty I promised myself that at forty I would do something else. I would like to hold true to that. I want to do is a solo album. The songs are done and I’m desperate to do it. [I’ve told the band] it won’t include them and I suppose we’ve never done that before. But in a few years I might think it would be cool to do another Cure album.

“I think [Bloodflowers] is the best album we’ve ever done,” he adds. “I had more fun making it [than any other record.] It would be really hollow if in the same breath I say “I’m never doing it again.” [If] I enjoyed it so much and think it’s so good why wouldn’t I want to do it again? Never say never.” Smith says, trailing off. Right now he’s more concerned with getting through the months of touring they have scheduled through the end of summer.

The Cure play bigger shows today than in the post-punk days. They will play some eighties favorites live, but their concerts are dominated by newer material. The Cure is not a nostalgia act. Their fanbase is diverse, much of it young and rabid. The World Wide Web is crowded with Cure fan sites where tapes, photos and paraphernalia are swapped, lyrics are analyzed, guitar tabs are posted and brushes with the band recounted. (Even meeting former band mate Laurence Tolhurst’s brother merits an essay.) It’s not quite a teeny-bopper set but many Cure fans were in diapers when the band began recording its most innovative work. “After about 1989 the audience, [which until then] was about the same age as us, started to get younger,” Smith says noting that graying temples are also not unusual at their shows. “The things I write about, the things that bother me, are things that people start worrying about in their teens and twenties. [A lot of people] kind of forget about them [they think they’ll] never get the answers so why worry about them. It’s a notion of growing up. I’ve never been able to grow up and out of questioning things.” And contrary to popular perception, Smith points out, their audiences are not entirely dominated by Robert Smith look-alikes.

And that brings us to the Goths: something about the underground fashions of Smith and his contemporaries circa 1983 took root. Today, the look, together with suitably dark music and a couple of Anne Rice books, has become an entrenched teen sub-culture populated by the dramatic, disaffected and pseudo-suicidal. “I think we appeal to people who don’t fit in,” says Smith. Both Smith and Siouxsie Sioux (whose style Smith is said to have one-upped when he toured with the Banshees in 1983) have disputed that they were “goth”. However, Smith will admit that he has always delighted in using fashion to get a rise out of people. He tells me he often wore “weird second hand clothes” to school just to see what the teachers would do. “As the group’s become popular and as I’ve become more known I’ve had less desire to do it,” says Smith dressed today in black cargo pants and a baggy black shirt. “ When I was younger and unknown I probably did want to be noticed. But when I started getting notice I thought I don’t need to do this anymore.”

So, how does he account for the hair? The face-paint? “It always comes across slightly ludicrous [when I say this] because of what I look like and what I do,” he admits. But Smith is notoriously stage-shy. He usually needs a drink or two for courage (A taping of VH1’s Hard Rock Live in New York City was the first show Smith had ever done sober) and he must wear makeup. “It’s a ritual. When I put the makeup on then I can perform. It affects me psychologically. It makes me louder. I use makeup and the whole look in the way that thousands of people have through thousands of years –[I use it to perform]. It liberates [me].”

Smith will not be freed from his designation as King Goth anytime soon. His clones and the media will make sure of it. No matter how many ecstatically happy songs he sings he will always be the mopey English guy with the weirdo hair and smudged make-up who pens soundtracks for depression in the popular mind. It drives him crazy. When he shaved his head ten years ago MTV ran hourly news stories. (“It was like completely insane. “) In Mike Leigh’s film Career Girls, he was the unchanged man in a changed world. (“I resented that.”) But he’s beyond ridicule. In South Park’s first season, he saved the world from a mechanical Barbra Streisand. It’s who we want him to be. Robert Smith is iconographic.