Robert Smith (musician)
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Overview
- See also the history of The Cure
Smith was raised Catholic and went to St. Mary's high school as a teenager.
Smith has written or co-written the bulk of The Cure's music and lyrics in a career spanning 30 years. He has also been involved in other musical projects, including a stint with Siouxsie & the Banshees and his side-project with Steven Severin called The Glove. He has also contributed vocals to a number of independent projects and performances, among them the B-side of the Faith cassette, which is a 30-minute track from a movie project, Carnage Visors.
Smith is instantly recognisable for his deliberately smeared red lipstick and messy black hair that some have compared to a large spider. According to Steven Severin, he first used Siouxsie Sioux's lipstick while he was high on opium. Smith's image has contributed to the frequent classification of The Cure as a goth band, a moniker Smith rejects. Smith is also known for his distinctive wavering singing style.
Smith's lyrics are frequently poetic and as frequently inscrutable. Smith has stated that they are often the product of some "altered state," such as drugs or sleep deprivation.
Smith met Mary Poole in school when he was 14 years old. They have been together since and were married in 1988. Smith wrote "Lovesong" as a wedding present to Mary.
In October 2004, he stood in as one of three guest presenters for John Peel on BBC Radio 1, a week before the DJ's untimely death.
"Just Like Heaven" is reportedly Smith's favourite pop song that The Cure has produced and easily one of the public's most popular in which he details a lost love: " found myself alone alone alone above the raging sea / that stole the only girl I loved / and drowned her deep inside of me. "
While it is often assumed that Smith is constantly depressed, he has said that his songs do not convey how he feels all, or even most, of 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." -Robert Smith in a 1989 interview [link]
Discography
Band discography
→ See The Cure discography from 1976 (start) to present
→ See The Glove discography in 1983 (only album)
→ '' See Siouxsie & the Banshees discography: 1983-1984
Collaborations
In 2003, Smith worked in collaboration with the band Blink-182 on the track "All of This" off their album Blink-182.
In 2004, Blank & Jones remixed "A Forest" featuring Robert Smith on vocals. There is an EP with a bonus DVD with 4 audio remixes, a music video and an interview by Blank & Jones with Smith that takes place before the video shoot. That year, he also provided vocals for Junior Jack for the club hit "Da Hype". In November, he joined Placebo onstage at their Wembley arena gig to sing Placebo's "Without You I'm Nothing" and Smith's own "Boys Don't Cry." He also co-wrote and supplied vocals for the Tweaker song "Truth Is." That same year, Junior Jack did a remix of "Da Hype" featuring Smith on the album Trust It. He was also featured as a vocalist and cowriter on JunkieXL's "Perfect Blue Sky."
In 2005, Smith teamed up with Billy Corgan, the former lead singer and lead guitarist of both the Smashing Pumpkins and Zwan, to do a cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody" on Corgan's first solo release, TheFutureEmbrace.
Solo discography
For more than two decades, Smith has been hinting at a solo album which has never materialized. It is often believed that most of his solo writing ends up in The Cure, with such closer tracks as "Homesick", "Untitled", "Treasure", "Bare", "Going Nowhere", but Smith denied this, crediting those songs to other members:
- " I didn't write "Homesick" and I didn't write the music too. It's another misconception. […] Out of the 12 songs on the CD, I think I only wrote six musically... "Untitled"... (to Simon [Gallup]) You wrote that one ? ...It was Roger [O'Donnell]. So it [(Disintegration)] couldn't have been a solo album and if I'd done on my own it wouldn't have sounded anything like The Cure anyway apart from my own voice. The Top album could have been a solo album but it's not true the way we worked in studio […] " – Smith in a 1989 interview [link]
Curiosa Festival
For the 2004 "Curiosa" festival, Smith hand selected 11 bands to open for The Cure. It began with a concert in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 24 and ended in Sacramento, California on August 29. Those bands included Interpol, The Rapture, and Mogwai. The concert had two stages, with the headlining bands on the main stage and the less well-known bands on the second stage. Bands on the second stage changed throughout the tour, and included Muse, Cursive, Head Automatica, Thursday, Scarling., The Cooper Temple Clause, and Melissa Auf Der Maur.
Trivia
- Smith bears an uncanny resemblance to actor John Cusack as evidenced in some old photographs and music videos (such as the one for Let's Go to Bed) from before the time he started wearing makeup.
- Smith has confessed to drooling onto passersby from up in trees when he was a child.
- Smith voiced himself in an episode of South Park in which he defeats Barbra Streisand in a battle. Additionally, the episode has the main characters praise him a lot, most likely because one of the creators, Trey Parker, is an fan of The Cure (see Mecha-Streisand).
- Fat Bob, although never explicitly revealed as such, is a character in the Web Comic [Nice Hair] who is based upon Smith. The character pokes fun at Smith's frequently gloomy and introspective music by depicting Fat Bob as a mopey, obese, compulsive eater. The other two main characters in Nice Hair are Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton.
See also
- List of number-one dance hits (United States)
- List of artists who reached number one on the US Dance chart
External links
- [The Cure - A Large Livejournal Fan Community]
- [Official The Cure site]
- [Extensive 1989 Robert Smith interview]
- [Curefans.com - International Forum]
- [A Pink Dream - International Forum]
| The Cure | |
| Robert Smith | Porl Thompson | Simon Gallup | Boris Williams | Jason Cooper | |
| Discography | |
| Albums: Three Imaginary Boys | Seventeen Seconds | Faith | Pornography | The Top | The Head on the Door | Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me | Disintegration | Wish | Wild Mood Swings | Bloodflowers | The Cure | |
| EPs: Half an Octopuss & Quadpus | Lost Wishes | Five Swing Live | |
| Singles: "Killing an Arab" | "Boys Don't Cry" | "Jumping Someone Else's Train" | "A Forest" | "Primary" | "Charlotte Sometimes" | "A Single" | "Let's Go to Bed" | "The Walk" | "The Lovecats" | "The Caterpillar" | "In Between Days" | "Close to Me" | "Why Can't I Be You?" | "Catch" | "Just Like Heaven" | "Hot Hot Hot | "Fascination Street" | "Lullaby" | "Lovesong" | "Pictures of You" | "Never Enough" | "Close to Me (remix)" | "High" | "Friday I'm in Love" | "A Letter to Elise" | "The 13th" | "Mint Car" | "Gone!" | "Strange Attraction" | "Wrong Number" | "Cut Here" | "End of the World" | "alt.end" | "Taking Off" |
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