In late 1979, dissatisfied with the scratchy, primitive Three Imaginary Boys, Smith had an icily clear idea of what he wanted the Cure’s second album to be. He crystallised this existential quandary most brilliantly in A Forest: the sound of a band becoming themselves, even if they would later become many other things. In real life, Smith was admirably prolific and ambitious but in his songs, the biggest Camus fan in Crawley suggested that action and inaction had the same result. In one song Robert Smith is waiting for something that will never happen in the other he’s looking for someone who isn’t there. “It’s always the same” is such an archetypal Cure sentiment that before it appeared in A Forest it featured in 10:15 Saturday Night. As a loser-in-love’s anthem, it’s unparalleled.Ī ghost story from the brothers grim – one to envelope them all. Here, a funereal beat establishes a slo-mo groove, which, overlaid with frostily sustained synth chords and a gentle, flanged strum, broods for almost two minutes before Smith launches into a litany of woe, recounting the memories of a lost love evoked by just such a stack of photos, which he ultimately tears to pieces in despair. This glacially-paced weepie was, however, anything but a recent bridegroom’s rush of euphoria. One had graced the cover of 1981’s Charlotte Sometimes, distorted and reversed into negative, but would be displayed in full clarity for the sleeve of Pictures Of You – the elegantly poised seven-minute masterpiece that discovering this cache of images inspired – when it was released as the fourth single off Disintegration in March 1990. Freshly married that summer to his childhood sweetheart, Mary Poole, the singer raked through the wreckage and came upon a wallet filled with photographs dating back through the ten-plus years they’d been together. In Autumn 1988, a domestic fire destroyed Robert Smith’s home in Sussex. Love and loss, frosty and glacial – Smith’s high watermark I frazzled numbness. But as MOJO’s Top 30 emphasises, the world of his band is already bursting with wonders. Smith announced in 2022 that a new Cure album, Songs Of A Lost World, was imminent. Tears, tunes and boxes of lipstick-flavour chocolates – Robert Smith dispenses them all, sweet and sour, like Willy Wonka with a baritone guitar. A post-punk Monet, Robert Smith has worked with a consistent palette for more than 40 years – but thanks to the rigour and intricacy of his craft, there’s always something new to catch your eye.īecause The Cure’s song canon is as varied as any in pop, comparable with Smith’s hero David Bowie for creative handbrake turns, a sonic landscape that permits DayGlo fantasy and monochrome gloom, the euphoric and the infernal, The Love Cats (“So wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty!”) and One Hundred Years (“It doesn’t matter if we all die!”). Yes, it says: you can do whatever you want, all the time, in your own time, and people will fill football stadiums to vindicate you. From playing songs of suburban alienation in English church halls to symphonising the mysteries of life across the world’s most prestigious stages, the odyssey of The Cure spans six decades and defies rock’n’roll logic.
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