Robert Smith (musician)
Robert James Smith (born 21 April 1959) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known for his work as the co-founder, lead vocalist, guitarist, primary songwriter, and only continuous member of the rock band the Cure since 1978. His unique guitar-playing style, distinctive singing voice, and fashion sense—almost always sporting a pale complexion, smeared red lipstick, black eye-liner, unkempt wiry black hair, and all-black clothes—were highly influential on the goth subculture that rose to prominence in the 1980s.
This article is about the English musician with the band the Cure. For other musicians, see Robert Smith § Music.Smith's other work includes playing the lead guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees from 1982 to 1984 and being a member of the short-lived band the Glove in 1983. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Cure in 2019,[1] and Rolling Stone magazine ranked him as the 157th greatest singer of all time in 2023.[2]
Early life[edit]
Robert James Smith was born in Blackpool on 21 April 1959, the third of four children of Rita Mary (née Emmott) and James Alexander Smith.[3][4] He came from a musical family, as his father sang and his mother played the piano.[5] Raised as a Catholic,[6] he later became an atheist.[7] When he was three years old, his family moved to Horley, where he attended St Francis' Primary School.[8] When he was six, his family moved to Crawley, where he attended St. Francis' Junior School.[3] He later attended Notre Dame Middle School from 1970 to 1972, and St Wilfrid's Comprehensive School from 1972 to 1977.[3] He and his younger sister Janet received piano lessons as children.[9] He later quipped, "[Janet] was a piano prodigy, so sibling rivalry made me take up guitar because she couldn't get her fingers around the neck."[10] He told Smash Hits that, from about 1966 when he turned seven years old, his older brother Richard taught him "a few basic chords" on guitar.[11]
Smith began taking classical guitar lessons from the age of nine with a student of guitarist John Williams, whom he called a "really excellent guitarist". However, he said, "I learned a lot, but got to the point where I was losing the sense of fun. I wish I'd stuck with it."[10] He has said his guitar tutor was "horrified" by his playing.[12] He gave up formal tuition and began teaching himself to play by ear, listening to his older brother's record collection.[9] He was 13 or 14 when he became more serious about rock music and "started to play and learn frenetically".[13] Up until December 1972, he did not have a guitar of his own and had been borrowing his brother's, so his brother gave him the guitar for Christmas. Smith said of this gift, "I'd commandeered it anyway—so whether he was officially giving it to me at Christmas or not, I was going to have it!"[14] Rock biographer Jeff Apter maintains that the guitar Smith received for Christmas of 1972 was from his parents, and equates this item with Smith's notorious Woolworths "Top 20" guitar that was later used on many of the Cure's earliest recordings.[15] Smith was quoted in several earlier sources as saying he purchased the guitar himself for £20 in 1978.[16][17][18]
Smith described Notre Dame Middle School as "a very free-thinking establishment" with an experimental approach, a freedom he claims to have abused. On one occasion, he said that he wore a black velvet dress to school and kept it on all day: "The teachers just thought, 'Oh, it's a phase he's going through, he's got some personality crisis, let's help him through it.'"[11] He said "four other kids" beat him up after school, although Apter notes that Smith has given several conflicting versions of the story. Apter also reports that Smith put in just enough effort at Notre Dame to pass tests, and quotes Smith as saying, "If you were crafty enough, you could convince the teachers you were special; I did virtually nothing for three years."[19] St Wilfrid's was reportedly stricter than Notre Dame.[20] In the summer of 1975, Smith and his school bandmates took their O Levels, but only he and Michael Dempsey stayed on to attend sixth form at St Wilfrid's from 1976 to 1977.[21]
Smith has said that he was expelled from St Wilfrid's as an "undesirable influence" after his band Malice's second live performance shortly before Christmas in 1976, which took place at the school and allegedly caused a riot: "I got taken back [in 1977] but they never acknowledged that I was there [...] I did three A levels—failed biology miserably, scraped through French, and got a 'B' in English. Then I spent eight or nine months on social security until they stopped my money, so I thought, 'Now's the time to make a demo and see what people think.'"[11] According to Cure biographers Dave Bowler and Bryan Dray, the school expelled ex-Malice co-founder Marc Ceccagno along with Smith, whose new band Amulet played the December school show.[22] Smith has given conflicting accounts of his alleged expulsion, elsewhere saying that he was merely suspended and that it was because he did not get along with the school headmaster,[23] and on another occasion saying he was suspended because his "attitude towards religion was considered wrong".[24]
Music career[edit]
School bands: 1972–1976[edit]
Smith has said that his first band when he was 14 consisted of himself, his brother Richard, their younger sister Janet, and some of Richard's friends. He remarked, "It was called the Crawley Goat Band – brilliant!"[11] However, while the Crawley Goat Band may have been Smith's first regular group, he would have been just 13 when he and his Notre Dame schoolmates gave their first one-off performance together as the Obelisk, an early incarnation of what would eventually become the Cure. The Obelisk featured Smith (still playing piano at this point) alongside Marc Ceccagno (lead guitar), Michael Dempsey (guitar), Alan Hill (bass), and Laurence "Lol" Tolhurst (percussion) and, according to the Cure's official biography Ten Imaginary Years, gave their only performance at a school function in April 1972. Jeff Apter, however, dates the performance to April 1973,[25] which is at variance with Smith and his bandmates having already left Notre Dame Middle School by this time.[3]
During the latter part of 1972, the nucleus of Smith, Ceccagno, Dempsey and Tolhurst had gone on to secondary school together at St Wilfrid's Comprehensive, where they and their friends continued playing music together. Smith said that they were known simply as "The Group" "because it was the only one at school so we didn't need a name."[11] Dempsey, who eventually moved from guitar to bassist for the Group, said that another name they toyed with was the Brat's Club – a reference to Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust.[25] Smith said that "the group" eventually became Malice, "sort of a sub-metal punk group -with Michael Dempsey, Laurence and two other blokes."[11] According to the band's Ten Imaginary Years biography, between January and December 1976, the shifting line-up for Malice featured several "other blokes", with founding guitarist Marc Ceccagno being replaced by Porl Thompson, an early drummer known only as "Graham" replaced by Lol Tolhurst, and "Graham's brother" replaced by vocalist Martin Creasy. By 1977, Malice had become Easy Cure.
Musical influences[edit]
Smith has credited his older siblings Richard and Margaret with exposing him to rock music such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones when he was six years old.[13] He has said that his early songwriting "was influenced by early Beatles – the sense of a three-minute guitar-pop song",[148] and early in his career the Cure's second single "Boys Don't Cry" was compared by British music paper Record Mirror to "John Lennon at 12 or 13".[50] His parents encouraged their children's musical development, as he told French magazine Les Inrockuptibles: "My parents were lending us their stuff; my mum made me listen to a lot of classical music to enable me to have a larger vision of music."[13] When Smith was eight years old in 1967, Richard played him "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix, who became hugely influential.[149] Of this period, he went on to say, "My brother was also crazy about Captain Beefheart, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, so much so that when I was 7 or 8, to the despair of my parents, I became some kinda little devil fed on psychedelic rock."[13]
Smith was 10 years old in 1969 when he first heard Nick Drake's album Five Leaves Left: "Nick Drake's on the other side of the coin to Jimi Hendrix. He was very quiet and withdrawn ... I think also that because he had an untimely death like Jimi Hendrix, he was never able to compromise his early work. He was never able to put a foot wrong. It's a morbid romanticism, but there is something attractive about that."[149] It was not long afterwards that Robert Smith attended his first rock concert: Jimi Hendrix at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.[13] At the age of 13 in 1972, Smith first saw David Bowie on television, performing "Starman" on Top of the Pops. He recalled, "Every person in Britain who saw that performance, it's stuck with them. It's like Kennedy being shot for another generation. You just remember that night watching David Bowie on TV. It really was a formative, seminal experience."[149] Smith said that the first LP he ever purchased with his pocket money was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.[13] According to Apter, Bowie also paved the way for Smith's love of glam rock bands such as Slade, the Sweet, and T. Rex, and during the same period, he also became a fan of Roxy Music.[5] His parents maintained their supportive attitude: "My mum and dad were encouraging us to talk [about] the records we liked. I remember staggering talks about Slade and Gary Glitter."[13]
Smith said that he was 15 when he first heard Alex Harvey, and that the Sensational Alex Harvey Band was the first and only group he ever really followed. He said, "[Harvey] was probably my only real idol. I travelled around the country to see them. [...] People talk about Iggy Pop as the original punk but certainly in Britain the forerunner of the punk movement was Alex Harvey. [...] I remembered the power of that live performance and I've tried to have that in my mind since I started up my own group."[149] He soon became influenced by the emergence of the UK punk scene of 1977 and has cited the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers, Elvis Costello and the Buzzcocks as important influences on his own music from this period. He described the release of "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols as "the last time something major happened to me and changed me [...] it was the best summer of my life. I remember listening to 'Anarchy' for the very first time at a party and thinking, 'This is it!' You knew straight away, you either loved it or hated it, and it polarised an entire nation for that summer."[149] Elsewhere, Smith said that the Stranglers were his favourite punk band and that Costello "was a cut above the whole lot of them" in terms of lyrics and song crafting.[18]
Smith was influenced by Siouxsie and the Banshees' "wall of noise" and the Buzzcocks' melodies, and aspired to combine the two.[150] He said, "The two groups that I aspired to be like were [Siouxsie and] the Banshees and the Buzzcocks. I really liked the Buzzcocks' melodies, while the great thing about the Banshees was that they had this great wall of noise, which I'd never heard before. My ambition was to marry the two."[150] Ian Birch of Melody Maker recognised the Banshees' influence on Smith's band early on, comparing the Cure's 1978 debut single "Killing An Arab" favourably to Siouxsie's "Hong Kong Garden" (released a few months earlier).[151] Speaking of his stint of playing guitar with Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1979, Smith said, "It allowed me to experiment. I inherited an approach from John [McKay] which was just to have everything full up. [...] It was phased/flanged distortion noise."[152] From that time, Siouxsie and the Banshees "were a massive influence on me". He said, "They were the group who led me towards doing Pornography. They drew something out of me."[153]
Along with the Banshees, early Cure gigs from 1978–1979 supporting other post-punk bands such as Wire and Joy Division also influenced Smith's shift in musical direction from the Cure's 1979 album Three Imaginary Boys to 1980's second album Seventeen Seconds.[148] Playing support for Wire (at Kent University in October 1978) gave Smith the idea "to follow a different course, to hold out against the punk wave [...] Wire pointed out another direction to me".[18] When asked what were his five favorite guitar tracks, Smith listed "Purple Haze" by Hendrix, "Hanging Around" by Hugh Cornwell of the Stranglers, "Head Cut" by John McGeoch of Siouxsie and the Banshees, "White Riot" by Mick Jones/Joe Strummer of the Clash and "White Light/White Heat" by Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground.[154]
Stage persona and image[edit]
Smith began sporting his trademark physical appearance of a pale complexion, smeared red lipstick, black eye-liner, a dishevelled nest of wiry black hair, all-black clothes, and brothel creeper shoes in the early 1980s, around the same time as the goth subculture took off. However, he denies any credit for this trend and claims it is a coincidence that the styles are similar, stating that he wore makeup since he was young and stating that "it's so pitiful when 'goth' is still tagged onto the name The Cure".[155] The sombre mood of early albums, combined with Smith's on-stage persona, cemented the band's "gothic" image. The band's aesthetic went from gloomy to psychedelic beginning with The Top. Although considered a "goth icon",[156] Smith never connected with the label and subculture, stating in 2018 that his aesthetic is a "theatrical" custom, and that he "had to play the part" as he was performing with Siouxsie And The Banshees. "Goth was like pantomime to me. I never really took the whole culture thing seriously."[157]
Although his public persona could be deemed to portray an image of despair, Smith has stated that his songs do not convey how he feels all the time: "At the time we wrote Disintegration [...] it's just about what I was doing really, how I felt. But I'm not like that all the time. That's the difficulty of writing songs that are a bit depressing. People think you're like that all the time, but I don't think that. I just usually write when I'm depressed."[158]
In 1986, Smith famously altered his image by appearing on-stage and in press photos sporting short spiky hair and bright polo shirts, which can be seen in The Cure in Orange. His new look made the headlines.[159] He soon returned to his usual style.
In popular culture[edit]
Early television and film references[edit]
An early "pop culture" reference to the Cure is found in the eleventh episode of BBC2's anarchic alternative comedy series The Young Ones, from 1984. The series featured regular cameo performances from British rock and pop groups of the period, such as Motörhead, the Damned, and Madness. As the episode's title "Sick" suggests, all four of the main characters (Vyvyan, Rick, Neil and Mike) are ill, prompting Vyvyan to send Mike to the pharmacy for medicine. Neil remarks: "I hope Mike hurries back with the cure!" to which Vyvyan replies, "No Neil, Neil, it's madness this week."[169] The band Madness then performs a musical cameo. Rock biographers Bowler and Dray note that increasing popular interest in the Cure in America during the mid-late 1980s became "a pat shorthand for TV and film writers to indicate mixed up children – the Steve Martin film Parenthood uses a bedroom poster of Robert to underline the point that 'this adolescent is confused and miserable'".[170]
Personal life[edit]
Marriage[edit]
On 13 August 1988, Smith married Mary Theresa Poole (born 3 October 1958), whom he met in drama class at St Wilfrid's when he was 14.[11][208] They have no children.[209] Smith said he was against having children as he not only objects to having been born but refuses to impose life on another.[210][211] Smith adds that he also "does not feel responsible enough to bring a child into the world".[211] Smith and Poole have 25 nieces and nephews.[211]
Smith later revealed that early in his musical career, Mary had not always shared his confidence and vision for the Cure's future, which was a significant motivating factor in his ensuring that the band was successful.[212] It has been reported by the Daily Express that Mary used to be a model and worked as a nurse with intellectually disabled children; however, as the Cure became more financially successful during the mid-1980s, Mary gave up her day job so that the couple would not have to spend so much time apart.[212][213][214]
Smith told The Face that he had once left a video camera running in their home "and after a couple of hours you forget that it's on and I was quite horrified at the amount of rubbish we say to each other. It's like listening to mental people ... I feel more natural in the company of people who are mentally unbalanced because you're always more alert, wondering what they're going to do next...". He claimed that Mary "used to dress as a witch to scare little children", that she sometimes dressed up as Robert Smith in his pyjamas, and that he could never take people home "because I never know who is going to answer the door".[215]
While the Cure was recording the Wish album at Shipton Manor, Oxfordshire, between 1991 and 1992, among the objects pinned to the wall was "Mary's Manor Mad Chart", listing seventeen members of the Manor's staff and residents (including the Cure and their entourage) "in order of instability". Mary was ranked in second place, after a woman named Louise who worked in the kitchen. "We all voted", said Smith, "and we had an award night. It was very moving".[216]
Family[edit]
Smith is the third of four siblings, and has said his mother Rita "wasn't supposed to have me", which was the reason for the significant age gap between him and his two elder siblings. "And once they got me, they didn't like the idea of having an only child, so they had my sister. Which is good, because I would have hated not having a younger sister."[9] He has described his younger sister Janet as a "piano prodigy"[10] and "the family's musical genius", but said that she was too shy to become a performer herself.[9] As well as having participated in the Crawley Goat Band since around 1973, Janet played keyboards as a member of Cult Hero in 1979, and their older sister Margaret contributed backing vocals to the project.[217][218] Janet, together with Simon Gallup's then-girlfriend Carol (both dressed as schoolgirls), with real-life schoolboys "the Obtainers", sang backing vocals for the Cult Heroes' live performance at the Marquee Club, opening for the Passions in March 1980.[219]
The Cure's in-house design company Parched Art created the album cover for the Cure's The Head on the Door using a manipulated photograph of Janet Smith taken by the Cure's guitarist and album cover artist Porl Thompson.[220][221] Janet had known Thompson since they were children,[222] and the pair began dating during Thompson's early tenure as lead guitarist for Malice and the Easy Cure.[223] During the mid-1980s, Janet gave up a professional career as a pianist to spend more time with Porl and the Cure,[213] and the couple were married in March 1988, making Robert Smith and Thompson brothers-in-law until the couple divorced in 2000.[224] Janet is also credited with having taught Robert's guitar technician Perry Bamonte to play piano while the band were recording Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, prior to Bamonte joining the group as keyboardist in 1990.[225] According to Bamonte, "With the patience of a saint, she spent a month teaching me the rudiments of playing piano. Before this, I knew nothing."[226]
During a concert at Tauron Arena in Kraków on 20 October 2022, the Cure introduced the song "I Can Never Say Goodbye", dedicated to Smith's recently deceased brother Richard.[227]
Views[edit]
Smith says that he is generally uncomfortable with interviews and conversations with strangers, and does not express an interest or desire to engage in either.[210] He has been shown to have a typically British dry sense of humour, as exemplified by a video of his induction into the 2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that went viral due to his deadpan reaction to an excited American interviewer.[228] He has a presence on multiple social media sites, but uses them solely to share Cure-related announcements and prevent people from following fake accounts.[210]
Smith has described himself as a "liberal kind of guy" who is "uncomfortable with politicised musicians".[210] He sported a "citizens, not subjects" slogan on his guitar on tour in 2012 and 2013,[229] and has openly expressed his disdain for the British royal family, lamenting how musicians he respects have accepted honours while stating that he would rather "cut off [his] own hands".[230] In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, he said of his political views, "I've always held what could be considered a socialist viewpoint on the world [...] I think right of centre is always wrong, and that's as political as I get in public."[231]
Collaborations