"Until the end of the world"
After bleeding, the flowers blossom again in "The Cure". Here's Dr. Smith's
strange case
by Simona Orlando
There are songs without which we wouldn't be what we are. Without which we
wouldn't remember what we were. There are objects that hide eternal instants,
and when you find them they give you back the past you couldn't reach by
yourself. A record has this power. A Cure records, according to some generations.
At the Neapolis Festival the group presents the new album The Cure, unexpected
release after the pshyco-dramatic trilogy, made up by POrnography (1982),
Disintegration (1989) and Bloodflowers (2000), that would have marked their
retirement from the scenes. A ruining army waits outside for the show, thousands
of pale faces, enlisted of the dark aesthetism, actors playing the death
of hopes.
Robert Smith arrives on time in the dressing
room, carrying with him his usual mask, distorted by the signs of time: the
bush-like hair, the dark make-up, the red lipstick that doesn't follow his
lips' line, a black shirt up to the hands' knuckles. He serves himself a
beer. He moves his body like it is an annoyance, without knowing where to
lay his arms or his legs. He has polite manners. He wanted to give a granitic
title to this last records, almost like the identity card where three decades
of career sum up: "I really believed Bloodflowers was the end, the final
chapter of our history together. I had produced the trilogy I was proud of,
and the line-up who made it was my favourite. It was the image of the band
I would have loved to remember in the future. Then, in 2002, while we were
touring the Eurpoean festivals circuit, I met the producer Ross Robinson
(Korn, Slipknot), who started talking me into working on another album. I
was committing to my solo project, but he insisted so much that in the end
i gave up. It was an opportunity I wouldn't have wanted to regret, but I
refused to write songs by force. So we made an agreement: if the songs would
have been comparable to what I love most of the Cure, I would have collected
them under our name. And it would have been fun to make such a step in this
point of the careeer. The approach was to imagine that it took 25 years to
reach this point and not to have 25 years of albums behind to overcome. I
was so convinced the Cure were over with the trilogy that proposing new material
to the audience still gives me a strange feeling. Hearing Robert Smith talk
is like hearing him sing: a strange sensation, a cold and an anxiety never
cured. His voice is very high in The Cure, screamed inside the listener's
nose: "We recorded it live, in a very narrow space. We were close one to
the other and I felt the drums in my stomach. I had to tear my throat apart
to hear me. I was always competing with the drums, that's why I scream as
I never did in the previous albums. For Ross it was fundamental that I sang.
He said that if I made the songs explode from the inside I would have provoked
emotions in him. The rest didn't count. Partially this loaded me with responsibility,
but it was also a great encouragement. He's been always following us, and
he claims he realized every fan's dream: to tell me what to do." The lyrics
of this album deal with failures and losses, with the fear of growing old,
of faded feelings and broken promises: "Love will save us all / Time will
heal / Make me forget / You promised me " (The promise). Looking back at
his figure, stayed unchanged since the beginning, and thus ensuring, I ask
him how does he refer to the inevitability of growing: " I always come back
to the same topics, year after year. Bloodflowers took his title from a collection
of letters in which Edvard Munch moaned about coming back to paint always
the same subjects. The strangest thing is the more I grow old the less I
understand about my age. I knew more when I was young and the songs "Lost"
and "Labyrinth" deal precisely with this. When you're a boy you like anniversaries,
but when you grow up you tend to sadden and the days become hours of memory.
It's really depressing. To create something from nothing, that lasts more
than me, gives me the feeling of winning against time. I suppose it's the
reason for which I don't have children: I already passed my genes to my songs.
When I listen to the compositions of thirty years ago I feel old. I ask myself:
where is that time gone? It seems so close. I remember every detail in studio,
every speech, every smell. And at the same time they seem to me the longest
25 years of history, lived the more intensely as possible. The feeling of
time passing is a powerful emotion. There is no way to overcome it and neither
one to ignore it".
Words last, flesh does not. Everything that is
born has to die, every rose that blossoms fades, and he does not give up:
"Say it's the same sun spinning in the same sky / Say it's the same stars
streaming in the same night / Tell me it's the same world whirling through
the same space / Say it's the same house and nothing in the house is changed
/ Say it's the same taste taking down the same kiss" (Labyrinth). Edgar Allan
Poe's raven repeated Nevermore, and this very truth torments Robert Smith
like a woodworm in a woody vein. Consciousness is an end and sometimes a
punishment, because it generates that kind of premature death we call melancholy
that is a sort of far-sightedness, the sharp faculty of visualizing that
makes you witness powerless the world progress. "It's this sense of futility
that saddens me. In every way you live in the present, it will pass. It's
terrible. Writing is my way to fight, to crystallize, to hold, but only
when I'm on stage I can live the present in full. It's like getting out of
yourself and of your obsessions. Leopardi (Italian romantic poet, famous
for his pessimism) wrote "Live, be great and unhappy".The romantic poets
Smith often quoted in his lyircs believed that pain fed creativity, that
it was the best inspiration: "I am a tendentially happy person, but I don't
feel the need to write about my happiness. I think tranquillity is not useful
to art, not to my art at least. When I get out with my friends, I have a
good time and I am confortable in talking about the past. But when I am alone
I can't help but thinking that these beautiful days are gone, and will never
come back, not in the same way. This nostalgia is what I need to translate
into music. I wrote tens of sad songs for ths album and Ross is sorry I did
not include them [a note of my own: wasn't the final running order a decision
by Robert & Ross together???]. He believes they're the best of them all.
One is the saddest I ever wrote. It's called "The boy I never knew". I played
it to who came in the studio, and everyone broke in tears, for so much it
was powerful. Too much, for me. I didn't feel like releasing it now, but
someday I will".
There is nothing to do, the most beautiful songs
are those with the most desperate thought. In the last page of the booklet
which accompains The Cure there's the advice to turn down the lights and
turn up the volume. Darkness gives space for the imagination to exagerate
and it is sweet to shipwreck in the wavy sea of uncertainties [this is a
quotation from Leopardi, whose most remembered line reads: "And sweet to
me is shipwreck in this sea", from the "The Infinite", translation by Alan
Marshfield], being dandled by black lullabies and waking up on friday and
you're in love: "I am strongly attracted by melancholy, but I don't want
to be considered an unhappy person in the conventional sense. There is nothing
in this life that makes me unsatisfied: I do all that I dreamed to do, I
don't have a boss, I don't have schedules, I don't have to wake up in the
morning, people love what I do and wherever I go I am always welcomed with
pleasure. My existential problems are universal. If i did a job I hated,
if I fought all day to survive, probably I would be able to feel happier
because I would not have time to reflect so stubbornly, up to sectioning
the very atoms of my thought. In the weekend I would go dancing, I would
empty myself, I would appreciate every little freedom. Like every artist
I tend to think more than how much is healty.
He quotes poems and books in his speech - from
Shakespeare to Proust - , he loves cartoons - South Park on everything else
- and he admits he is very strict in judging on other band's lyrics: "I become
furios when I listen to music because very often it is very good but it is
together with horrible words, just thrown there without order. I ask myself
why there are stupids who waste their opportunity to say something important.
It's one of the reasons why I like Mogwai: rather than telling nonsense they
chose to leave their songs instrumental. When I sing I believe firmly in
what I say. I am immersed up to my bones in it. It took me four years, not
to write, but to write what I feel. It's too easy to go with rhymes. People
feel it and understand it. You can't touch them if you're not sincere": The
Cure were born and grew up in a period in which music was a cultural movement.
They survived up to now when it seems like it has no direction anymore:"
Music is more fragmented than then, more individualistic. When I began, in
78, punk was just born and nobody was excluded from it. It influenced anyone
in my generation in England. It's hard to imagine that a similar phenomenon
may happen today. Grunge started in the same way, with a strong message that
hit consciences. Electronic music is revolutionary, but sticks to the form
without going deep into the meaning. We hadn't decided to be part of a cultural
movement, the historical and sociological conditions declared it. Personally
I never took any political side and it would be suspicious to say the least
if I did it now. But my message arrived anyway. I lasted because my problems
are universal and don't expire. The Cure really occupy an unusual position
in the musical scene. We're still a band of a certain success, but we cannot
be defined as mainstream. People who don't follow us is scared by us. They
don't understand who we are, where we are placed. It's the reason why I still
have fun. I would hate to have an adult audience. We call young people and
I want to have them around me. In my private life I am in touch only with
people who have at least ten years less than me, those of my age have lost
any type of enthusiasm, they are resigned and boring. I am still curious.
I like going to festivals because I discover artists that radios don't play
and you only stumble on them, if you're lucky, on the internet".
He confesses he allows himself less vices than
in the past and I ask if we have to worry: "I am far more moderate, but always
angry in the same way and for the same reasons as in the beginning. My manners
are softer and I learned to accept the others' point of view. Falling down
drunk today is not like it was before, it really becomes clumsy at 45. I
know it for experience and experience, whether you want it or not, is a compromise.
I don't fear external judgement, because I know what's right for me, but
I can't be so useless as a leader. It's too demanding living to the extreme.
I don't have the physique anymore" He gets up, slowly. And still it seems
he considers his body an annoyance. Smith's figure is the one of a melted
pierrot; " stupid head and stupid make-up", this was his definition of himself
around the times of Faith. He often laughs, but his big blue eyes don't close.
He is absent, like the fool in the taroc cards hunting butterflies; mocking
and lucid like the "fool" [in english in the article], the clown who disguises
wit into madness to bear its weight. Lost in the trees in "A forest" since
1980, in "Lost" he's still screaming from the deep without having found a
way out. Captain of a ship going nowhere ("I'm going nowhere") with a crew
that, for this reason, will follow him anywhere.