Finding the Cure
Robert Smith's adventures in home taping

Last year's Wild Mood Swings was a strange watershed in the Cure's long career. "Over the past five, six
years," bandleader Robert Smith now says, "the group has sort of, not become unmanageably big, but I've
been led astray. I've listened to other people too much. I've gone a bit soft, I think, and I've been doing
stuff that's intended to please others rather than please myself. So I've made a very conscious decision this
year to disregard everything and everyone and just go back to how I used to be in the good old days of the
Cure dictatorship."

What led Smith to this revelation were the bloated recording sessions that produced Wild Mood Swings,
which found him laboring over take after take of vocal tracks in a way he now describes as obsessive
compulsive, while the band racked up weeks of studio time just looking for drum sounds. "I realized,"
Smith says, "that we had sort of turned into everything that I loathed."

That's why Smith has retreated to his home studio and other small rooms to work on the Cure's next
album, which he hopes to release in the first half of 1998. He's working fast, and not always with the rest
of the band. The first product of this new approach is "Wrong Number," which features David Bowie
sideman Reeves Gabrels on guitar but no other members of the Cure, save for some drum fills by Jason
Cooper. It's the lone new song on the singles collection Galore, and perhaps a hint of the Cure's future. In
this interview with RockNews.com, Smith discusses Galore, his obsessive-compulsive past and tinkering
in the home studio and on his website. (Matty Karas)

Singles Galore

Robert Smith: I really like every song on Galore, and I just think they're better songs than those on
Standing on a Beach. I mean, there're some really, really good songs on Standing on a Beach but there're
some really awful songs . . . like "Hanging Garden" and "Primary." They're all right, but they're not
singles. For a period of time I wasn't writing singles. The least obscure track on the album would be
released as the single. "Forest" is a great single, and "Let's Go to Bed" is a good single, but there are others
on there that aren't . . . I think the three best singles [on Galore] are "Friday I'm in Love," "Mint Car" and
"Wrong Number." But "Just Like Heaven" probably overall is my favorite song.
 

Home Work

I'm doing a lot of [the next album] at home. I've realized that I spent an awful lot of time doing demos,
and something is kind of lost in the group context. I listen to what everyone wants to do, and it's worked
in some songs but on other songs, I think, "We didn't need this. I didn't need someone else to replay what
I played in the first place, just because that's what they do." Like "Wrong Number" -- essentially, I'm the
only person playing apart from Reeves. And Jason [Cooper] has done a few drum fills. I'm trying to get
the group to think more along those lines. The song just either works or it doesn't work, and it's not to do
with allocating who does what just because they did it last time. That everyone's kind of got their own
fixed position within the group -- I've started to find it really boring, that kind of, you know, "I mustn't
play bass 'cause Simon's the bass player."
 

Take 60

I had a weird breakdown in about 1989, during Disintegration, and ever since then I've been fighting this
urge for everything to be exactly as it should be -- you know, rearranging things on table tops. That kind
of obsessive-compulsive stuff stems from something else. It's actually running away from confronting
things that have been upsetting me, which I've done this year, and I now find that things can just be on the
table top however they want. It doesn't bother me anymore . . . Doing Wild Mood Swings, I would redo a
vocal take something like 50 or 60 times, and everyone thought I was going insane and I sort of was,
really. I'd be saying, "Can you not hear this?" I'm worried about, like, one "s" in one word in one line.
 

TheCure.com

We set it all up, me and Roger [O'Donnell]. Everything on there's done by us. It's easy because we do it
all on Page Mill, so I don't program. I can't write HTML. When we're in the studio, we generally rig up a
CU-SeeMe thing. We've got a reflector site where I think we can have 150 people looking. Some very
embarrassing pictures -- they've started to turn up on other people's websites. It's a bit disturbing, actually,
because this little golf ball sits in the corner of the control room and after a few hours everyone forgets it's
there . . We've got demos, photos that no one else is going to see. I've done a couple of alternative videos,
just cutting together footage that we've shot with the group backstage. It couldn't be more hands-on.

Interview by Paul Biel