Since last year’s stunning Songs of a Lost World recemented them as a creatively potent force, the Cure have returned to their rightful place as one of British music’s most important bands.
Since their inception in the dull suburbia of late seventies Crawley, the band - captained by the make-up clad presence of Robert Smith - have been behind some of the most critically acclaimed records of the late 20th century.
Across cherished keystones like Disintegration, Wish and Pornography, the Cure demonstrated their considerable mettle as emotion-led pioneers of the burgeoning goth and alternative scenes.
Yet Robert Smith was also capable of knocking out a few timeless pop classics amid the turbulence and gloom, keeping their stock consistently high in the public consciousness.
Often lazily assumed to be a band swamped in misery, just one listen of 1992’s Friday I’m In Love (a contender for the most positive-sounding record ever) disproves the notion in a heartbeat.
Yes, Smith was also a dab hand at conjuring a killer pop hook and a lyric that resonated beyond the poster-adorned bedrooms of the Cure hardcore.
The Lovecats, Close to Me, Inbetween Days, Boys Don’t Cry - all instant, irresistible mood-lifters.
While Robert is the band’s chief lyricist, and typically the principle songwriter, he’s also willing to embrace the ideas of the band’s other members (namely those from Simon Gallup, Roger O’Donnell and former members Pearl Thomson and Lol Tolhurst) into the Cure’s creative cauldron.
But it’s Smith’s magnetically verbose personality that is most often interrogated about the Cure’s songwriting. And he's given some fascinating - and always entertaining - responses over the years.
Here’s a collection of a few of his choice insights into how a Cure-song is born.
1: “My songwriting originated when I was very young, my Dad used to tell me, if there was anything bothering me, I should write it down. Externalising it would solve half the problem, if I could look at it, look at what was bothering me. And it just grew out of that.”
Interview with Paul Freeman, 1996
In this quote, Smith reveals that his love for songwriting stems back to this single foundational moment - when his dad told him to take any problems out of his head and log them in a journal.
It was this practice that eventually morphed into songwriting as Robert approached adolescence.
We can infer then, if this remains the starting point of his songwriting approach, that it’s generally the more cloudier, negative emotions that are the seed of the lion’s share of the Cure’s songbook.
Years later, happier songs like 1996’s Mint Car, Smith found more difficult to construct “A song like Mint Car, in some sense, is more contrived than the more miserable songs”
2: “The reason why I wrote songs and wanted to perform had disappeared, and I didn’t want to force it out. I’m not afraid of getting writer’s block - I think that concept is way out there. If I don’t write, it’s because I have nothing to say.”
Gaffa Magazine, 2000
As well as having to be led by honest reflections of his actual emotions, Smith here explains that forcing out songs built on untruthful starting points was something that he didn’t want to do. This can often be the reason Cure projects take a long time to materialise. Songs of a Lost World in particular, took 16 years to gestate.
In an effort to navigate around periods when things were going swimmingly in his personal life however, Smith would keep fastidious notes on tiny details, hoping that they’d spark something creative down the line; “I woke up this afternoon surrounded by sheets of paper covered with writing,” Robert continued in Gaffa Magazine. ”I’ll dutifully tuck them away and try to make some sense of them in a few months. I’m absorbing things all the time. I won’t do anything creatively for months at a time, and it all sort of bottles up inside until I just feel the urge to explode.”
3: “I’m blessed, or cursed, with the ability to remember what I’ve dreamed. When I was 11 or 12, I used to write them down as soon as I woke up, and after doing that for about two years I found that I didn’t have to. It’s good and it’s bad - it’s awful waking up and remembering you’ve just axed to death a family of 15.” Interview with Harold De Muir, 1987
In search of expressing fundamental truths in his songwriting, it’s no surprise that Robert is influenced by the imagery of his dreams (and nightmares).
And Smith’s perfect-recall superpower has proven to be an incredible boon for triggering lyrical ideas. 1989’s sublime Lullaby was triggered by a recurring teenage nightmare wherein a giant spider slowly ate him, while dreams as a motif recur throughout the band’s songbook, from The Walk B-side, The Dream to the 2008 album 4:13 Dream.
“I don’t think I dream any more than anybody else,” the devoutly nocturnal Smith stated in the same interview. “I can’t, because I sleep less than the average person.”
4: “Sometimes [other band members] will come up to me and say ‘I don’t think it suits us, but what about this’ - sometimes [their idea] is great, like some of the jazz songs on Wild Mood Swings. It forces me to write lyrically in a different way, and sing in a different way. The band becomes better for it. It expands in ways I wouldn’t have imagined.”
Thecure.com interview, 2024
There’s nobody quite like Robert Smith, but he’s not the only creative powerhouse within the Cure. The group’s sonic universe has expanded considerably due to the myriad contributions of Cure personnel past and present into the songwriting process.
Lol Tolhurst, Simon Gallup, Pearl Thompson and - as Smith alludes to in the above quote, Perry Bamonte - have all suggested new ideas over the years that Robert himself freely admits he’d never pursue if he was writing in complete isolation.
Rather than shun these often off-the-wall proposals, Robert frequently pursues them, encouraged by the thrill of trying something different. Delighting in confounding those who seek to pigeon-hole.
5: “I could write songs as bad as Wham’s if I really felt the urge to, but what’s the point? So many songs these days are very shallow. I hate the idea some bands have of refining songwriting. I can sit down and write a single pretty easily - it’s like a pretend exercise. Most of our so-called ‘songs’ are really pieces of music - there’s a difference in the way you approach writing them.” Interview with Ro Newton, 1985
Ouch! While we’re big fans of Wham! (and George Michael) here at MusicRadar, the thrust of this quote - brimming over with typical Robert Smith-sass - is quite an interesting one.
Robert explains that in his view the ‘craft’ of writing songs to order for mass consumption is not something that he’s particularly interested in. But as time has proved, Smith has demonstrated clearly that he can rustle up hits with the best of them.
But from Robert’s perspective, his version of songwriting is something borne out of genuine complex human emotion. This attitude has left him feeling quite detached from those working to more structured methods. “I honestly don’t class myself as a songwriter. I’ve got ‘musician’ written on my passport: that’s even funnier,” He told Newton.
6: “I drink a box of red wine if I want something really morose, and cider if I want something more upbeat.” Select, 1993
While we’re not suggesting with the inclusion of this quote that this should be a songwriting strategy for anybody (please do drink in moderation, Ed), it offers an insight into Smith’s passion-led attitude towards the process.
Tying into the previous quote where Smith shuns the idea that songwriting should be a craft, this (semi-joking) response also reiterates that Smith's internal world is always the starting point for all his songs.
While drinking might have been a route that occasionally worked to unlock these feelings, it could just as frequently lead him down blind alleys; “I’ll write six pages and I’ll leave them for a day, and the following night I’ll pick them up and think, It’s the same old stuff," Robert continued. "So I’ll rip them up into very small pieces and get aggressive with myself for bothering to waste my time when I could have been reading a book or watching a good film.”
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