The return of The Cure with brand new single Alone has prompted a resurgence of interest in the British goth icons. In 2004, founder and frontman Robert Smith spoke to Classic Rock’s Siân Llewellyn about the highs and lows of his band’s influential career.
There’s never been a plan with The Cure,” says Robert Smith. It’s 2004 and the frontman of one the UK’s most successful bands is holding court at London’s Olympic Studios. Head to toe in black, hair wild but bereft of his trademark smeared lipstick, Smith’s a jovial sort, and the antithesis of the material on the albums he’s here to discuss.
Two decades after The Cure’s Pornography album burned itself into music fans’ consciousness, Smith found himself at a crossroads. His band’s most recent studio album, Wild Mood Swings – never before had an album been more accurately titled – had failed to set the world on fire. “For a number of reasons I had reached this point where I didn’t feel like I knew what I wanted to do, and I’d never really felt like that before,” Smith says. “I wondered if this is how it felt when it was it. When it was time to stop.”
It wasn’t, but it took a long look backwards to figure out the way forward. “I tried to think what people would like us to do,” he admits. “I was trying to second-guess what The Cure meant to people rather than just worry about how I felt about it, which I’d always just done before.”
