The Face (1989)

THE CURE

The Cure's Robert Smith has been worrying about the meaning of life since he was only 13. So have his armies of fans - Cure groupies don't want to sleep with him, they want him to read their diaries. Simon Witter talks to the man who has turned depression into an art form.

THE ART OF FALLING APART

Make-up-less and unshaven in a grubby, chunky-knit cardigan and dirty trainers, Robert Smith looks, by his own admission, his worst. Perched attentively on a large pair of red-velvet lips that double as a sofa, he looks like Pad- dington Bear, crossbred with Siouxsie Sioux, the morning after a very long night.

At once very shy and unexpectedly likeable, he talks for 15 minutes before making eye contact. "No subject is taboo," he says with a smile. "My only worry is that I'll come across more morose and obsessive than I know I am, and I'll read it and feel how wrong it is. If I'm quoted out of context I can sound like a right moaning bastard, which I'm not. I'm very aware of the fact that I've got less to moan about than almost anybody else."

This is true, for though Robert no doubt enjoys a wonderful life, his thoughts and feelings paint a relentlessly grim picture. We're talking about a man who worried about ageing and decay when he was 13, a man who feels guilty about success, finds contentment worrying and sunsets truly depressing. Sometimes it seems that Robert Smith has all the angst of a 15 year old trapped inside a body twice that age.

Then there's the private Robert Smith, open and friendly, likes a drink and a laugh, appar- ently the owner of a great sense of humour.

Fans of The Cure's post-Love Cats pop, and critics who've been happy to close the chapter on their early 80s funereal dirge, may be horrified to discover that their new album, Disintegration, marks a return to the feel of their Faith/Pornography period. When the band took a rest 18 months ago, Smith's discomfort with their pop direction was so strong that he began work on a solo album as an outlet for his pent-up emotions. Disintegration - an hour long with not a positive tune in sight - became a Cure LP mainly because he missed his friends.

The Cure are a very close and very private group. A few years back Smith married the girl he'd been going out with for the last 13 years, and now fellow Cure player, Porl Thompson, has married Robert's sister "There are no secrets or taboo subjects," he says. "All of us, including the girls, know everything about each other It's an unhealthily healthy atmosphere. I feel we shouldn't have it this good, that we're going to have to pay for it at some point, but that's just my gloom again."

The Cure are an inverted rock band, impeccably behaved on the road, but riotous at home. They have a deep, emotional loathing for the rock 'n' roll ethos, anything that would make them ashamed of being in the band, and it has been said that Cure groupies throw their souls at the band rather than their bodies.

"There's no such thing as a typical Cure fan, says Smith. "But over the years we do seem to have attracted some very strange people. People have gravitated towards us who are not quite right in a much worse way than me, and I've been pushed into the role of therapist, which I'm not very comfortable with. I get given the diaries of people who've killed themselves, and they're full of me, but it's not me, it's just a picture or a song. Then you meet that person's friend, and they want to be the same. It gets a bit much."

What do you mean "be the same "? They want to kill themselves? "Yeah. They think that if they kill themselves I'll read their diary, too. It gets that excessive. That exact situation has happened more than once. Sometimes you get a package left backstage and then there's a lot of screaming outside, and you think what a brilliant ploy, they're threatening suicide if I won't talk to them! But you never know ... "That kind of behaviour, if you were surrounded by the wrong kind of people, could encourage a self-importance within yourself to the point of insanity. I've had to develop a distance from the group at times; I know that it's not me they're obsessed by. But it's difficult when we meet people who are disturbed, who want something from the group that we just can't give them, like stability or a purpose. It's not within any of us to wander around laying on hands - we're just a group."

Another British group that have lyrics of self- doubt and gloom, and an obsessive following, are The Smiths. Smith, however, feels no kinship with them whatsoever. "I hate The Smiths and everything they've ever done. There's a self-importance about The Smiths that The Cure have never had, and Morrissey is precious, effete, glib, out-of-touch and a million other vile things that I can't be bothered to list. He makes me squirm."But the weird hand movements and facial expressions Smith pulls in videos do bear a resemblance to Morrissey's idiosyncratic body language.

"That's just me acting for the camera. I can't act and I'm not comfortable inside my own body, so I'm hardly going to be a very graceful person, but I'm not twee like Morrissey. Everybody he associates with, like the Pet Shop Boys, has this supercilious, patronising clever-clever attitude, working with people like Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield who were complete bollocks the first time out. How can you be taken seriously when you get involved with the kind of haggard old has-beens who sit on TV game shows talking shit about shit?"The Cure stay out of the way; if you don't like us you can ignore us. I'd never make a religion out of the fact that I don't sleep with everyone I meet. Most of the people I meet don't want to sleep with me anyway."

But it's still hard to understand The Cure's downbeat mood. Smith, however, denies life is depressing, even though it sounds that way on the new album. "I have more fun than anybody I know. I'm not morose, I can join in and find stupid things funny, but I can't deny a part of me that's always nagging away, I have to confront it sometimes, and that's where The Cure comes in - it's a kind of therapy.

"I didn't want to spend six months living with the idea that we were a group making a pop album. I wanted to be involved with something with a lot more depth, a lot of emotions, rather than something glib like Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me [their last album - which sold over 2 million copies], half of which was pretty facile. "This album is a return to the more atmospheric side of The Cure, which we've been neglecting for several years. It's music that won't get much radio play, music you won't hear if you walk into a clothes shop." And why should it have more meaning than a pop record? "Not more meaning, just more depth of emotion. It's inherent in the music, the same way that a piece by Beethoven is more emotive than a Bros single. You know it, but it's not easy to explain. I knew I had to focus the band in a certain direction, so I gave them the lyrics I'd written and the title Disintegration before they went away over the summer, so that they had an idea what they were writing music to. "They deal with the same troubles I always write about. I'm obsessed with certain subjects, and they're my limitations. To be honest, I expected this album to be far more unlistenable than it is. However dreadful - in the original sense - we try to make our music it always seems to come out tuneful. I get very frustrated by our inability to write anything without a tune, but in retrospect it has probably saved us from becoming completely turgid."

Smith describes his obsessions as "very basic, universal obsessions like decay, ageing, the loss of naivety and innocence". It seems odd that a pop audience might be worried about age and decay? But Smith doesn't seem to find it strange. "I've been worrying about disintegrating since I was 13. 1 think it's all inherent in my lack of faith, which undermines everything we do. Something like The Love Cats, which is all good fun, is not what I enjoy doing most. I'm more comfortable with my obsessions, and they don't interfere with what we do now. "Seven years ago, around the time of Faith and Pornography, I was literally obsessed with ageing, dying and decaying, but I'm not now. I've come to terms with my demise."

Smith obviously suffered from a heavy dose of teen angst. "It's the overriding pointlessness of everything. When you have no belief in anything but yourself you tend towards apathy; you see no reason for doing anything, and nobody can find a reason for you. People listen to the songs we write and that reaffirms our worth, which becomes more important as I get older. I used to value nobody else's opinions, but now I value communion more and more. But I can't win, because every time I reconcile myself to things, I remember that when I was 15 I knew that with age I would become softer and let things slide. So when I start to feel content - and I am much more contented now - I think, oh no, the aging's started.

"I don't wander around or sit in the pub wondering if I really exist, but when I'm driven to write something that other people are going to react to, those things seem to transcend an otherwise mundane existence. I used to lay myself open to visions of God, but I never had any. I come from a religious family, and there have been moments when I've felt the oneness of things, but they never last, they fade away leaving me with the belief that it's only fear that drives people to religion. And I don't think I'm ever going to wake up and know that I was wrong."

Perhaps it's just that Smith has a naturally grim disposition? "Unfortunately. When I'm happy it seems unnatural, and my personality is very extreme. I have violent mood swings. I can't drink moderately, eat moderately or be happy moderately. But I'm much more content now, and people who have known me for a long time say I'm much more sociable and outgoing now, the kind of person you aren't scared to sit down with, not in a physical sense, but because I might burst into tears or be nasty for no apparent reason." Were you like that? "Yes, but then a lot of people around me were of a similar disposition. I'm not like that any more, but I do feel tense a lot of the time for no reason.

"I formed a band so I wouldn't have to work for anyone else. The day I left school I vowed to myself that I would never again get up in the morning to go and do something I didn't want to do, and I was prepared literally to die rather than do that. I went on the dole for eight months, and I really enjoyed that, it was fun - mind you, I did have a girlfriend who paid for my drinks at the pub."

For a shy person who probably doesn't want to be recognised in public, Smith's image is conspicuously odd. "True, but it isn't a contrived image, it's the way I feel comfortable, so I refuse to compromise it in any way to avoid recognition. It's not a very helpful attitude I suppose, and I can never go shopping with Mary [his wife] in summer because I won't go out looking like a hippy and she won't go out with me with my hair up, cos of all the foreign tourists."

The Dubliners were the only unpredictable entry in a recently published chart of Robert Smith's favourite records (topped by Joy Division). "I hate all the hype and expectations around new bands, so I usually discover records on my own about two years after they're released. It doesn't bother me because good music doesn't date. I liked the attitude and idea of acid house, but I can't get into the music because it's dance-orientated and I can't dance. "I've just bought that Paula Abdul 12-inch, and I'm completely in love with it. I put it on and it makes me want to dance, but I don't know how."

The new sociable and outgoing Robert Smith now claims to be motivated by fun. "I think we're a complete idiot band. There are moments on stage and in the studio when we have some kind of communion, and then we're serious, but the rest of the time we behave like a bunch of irresponsible kids. We never go on the rampage in public, because I have this old-fashioned idea about us meaning something to some people, but the nights and days we spend together in places like Boris's house are surreal. "The people who call us depressing are either remembering the Faith/Pornography period, or they never listen to our music. We're too stylistically varied, too kaleidoscopic to be called depressing. Of course we've been involved in tours and records that have been depressing, but it's not an attitude. When we're on stage it's usually elating, it excuses the mundaneness of the previous 22 hours. I can forget the fact that maybe 18 hours ago I was throwing up over a balcony. "When you get involved in something more emotional and serious, people either join in with you or feel very uncomfortable. Like if someone's crying at a funeral, one person might comfort them, and another might not know how to handle it. I think people who like The Cure are the sort of people who'd be comforting them."

Thanks to Robin Juric for the Article

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