From The Sunday Times:
The Cure’s Robert Smith: ‘Ticket pricing is a scam. It’s driven by greed’
The singer is back with the band’s first album in 16 years. In a rare interview, he holds forth on touring, grief and why he’s going to call it a day at 70
Jonathan Dean
The first thing you notice about Robert Smith is that uniform of his — wild hair, black clobber, lipstick. It is a look he has worn since the 1980s when the Cure became a cult and also achieved chart success. That is what you expect from him, but spend any time with Smith and what you will remember most is the man’s smile. It is generous, one that rather flies in the face of his band’s well-trodden image as being about as fun as a funeral, of their frontman being the gothic prince of all darkness.
“Well, I don’t read by candlelight,” he says with a grin, well aware of the image people have. “Yet I do spend a lot of time walking outside in the dark, which is in character. But it cannot all be doom and gloom — you need some light and dark.”
Smith, 65, is glorious company — the personification of that light and dark. I met him a few years ago and was struck by his warmth and wit. Back then he was writing the Cure’s new album, their first in 16 years, and I was aghast by his candour about depression and inadequacy. Now that record, Songs of a Lost World, is here and it is clear he was simply processing a lot.
Songs of a Lost World begins with Alone, which tackles planetary demise, features at least two songs about the deaths of people close to the singer and one called Warsong that, according to Smith, is “the most dismal song on the album — but it’s got a great guitar solo”.
Forget The Lovecats or the 1990s school-disco staple Friday I’m in Love. Think, instead, of the sprawling melancholia of the albums Disintegration or Pornography for the back-catalogue benchmark of how this marvel sounds. It is eight tracks of lushly orchestral despair, written by a man struggling to figure out his place in a changed world. One song details how upset he was when someone flew a drone over his garden. “I was in my pants.”
Smith has been teasing a new record for years. “It’s drifted in and out of my life,” he says in a video interview he recorded for the label at Abbey Road a few weeks ago, admitting entire alternative albums have been binned. Still, the Cure are arguably more popular than ever, with a tour — 90 dates to more than 1.3 million fans— that peaked at Glastonbury in 2019. Smith planned to make a record for the 40th anniversary of the band in 2018, but that tour got in the way. And then there was the pandemic.
“I read War and Peace,” he says, beaming, about lockdown. “Everyone always says they’re going to read it, so I did.” Did he enjoy it? “I didn’t really.” He actually liked moments of lockdown; there were no planes and birds flew in the sky. But there was also, of course, loss. Smith’s parents had already died but “all my aunts and uncles died in care homes …” He sighs. In the time he has taken to make a new album, most of the people close to him have gone. No wonder Songs of a Lost World is a torrent of tumult — deeply personal, deeply moving.
“Our songs always had a fear of mortality,” he says. “I don’t feel my age at all but I’m aware of it and when you get older that fear becomes more real. Death becomes more everyday. When you are younger you romanticise death, but then it happens to your family and friends. I am a different person to the last record and I wanted to put that across. It can be trite. People could say, ‘Oh, we’re all going to die — surprise me!’ But I try to find some emotional connection to that idea.”
He more than succeeds. The album standout And Nothing Is Forever has the lyrics: “Promise you’ll be with me in the end/ say we’ll be together/ that you won’t forget.” It is about a promise that Smith made to someone who was very ill that he would be at their side when they died, but he was not. “It upset me,” he says. “So I thought that, by memorialising it, it would make things easier. And, yes, the person who it’s about would be happy with the song, I think.”
Then there is I Could Never Say Goodbye — about his beloved elder brother, Richard, who died suddenly some years ago. “He taught me everything when I was younger,” Smith says. “There was an enormous outpouring of emotion when he died, of words, music, painting. And this is a simple narrative of what happened the night he died. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It helped me enormously.”
Smith was born in 1959 — the third of four children. He mostly grew up in Crawley in Sussex. When he was seven Richard taught him his first guitar chords and Smith played in bands from his early teens. The Cure were formed in 1978. He loved Nick Drake, wanted to be Jimi Hendrix and was swept up by punk.
When Smith was 19 he went to see David Bowie play Earls Court. The men would later become friends, but what happened that night informed who Smith became. Bowie played for only 42 minutes and Smith was furious — he told himself that if he ever found himself in Bowie’s position, he would always do more for his fans and, as such, the Cure’s gigs run for hours. “I’d hate not to be able to justify myself to that 19-year-old,” Smith says.
This desire to do the right thing extends to the hot topic of tickets and how much firms like Ticketmaster and bands like Oasis charge fans. Last year, in an unusual move for an artist, Smith set prices for a US tour and then took Ticketmaster to task over the fees they had added, making the company refund punters.
“I was shocked by how much profit is made,” Smith says of modern ticketing. “I thought, ‘We don’t need to make all this money.’ My fights with the label have all been about how we can price things lower. The only reason you’d charge more for a gig is if you were worried that it was the last time you would be able to sell a T-shirt.
“But if you had the self-belief that you’re still going to be here in a year’s time, you’d want the show to be great so people come back. You don’t want to charge as much as the market will let you. If people save on the tickets, they buy beer or merch. There is goodwill, they will come back next time. It is a self-fulfilling good vibe and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it.
“It was easy to set ticket prices, but you need to be pig-headed. We didn’t allow dynamic pricing because it’s a scam that would disappear if every artist said, ‘I don’t want that!’ But most artists hide behind management. ‘Oh, we didn’t know,’ they say. They all know. If they say they do not, they’re either f***ing stupid or lying. It’s just driven by greed.”
He pauses and comes back to Songs of a Lost World and its inherent, questioning gloom. “The world is falling apart,” he says of its themes. “It’s insane. It’s greed, inequality, monetisation. I’ve realised some of my reactions to the modern world are a bit extreme, that I’m becoming an old grouch and that it’s easy to tip over to talking about the fond memories of a world that’s disappeared … but there are moments I just want to leave the front door shut.”
He’s even fallen out of love with his beloved football (he supports Queen’s Park Rangers). “It’s become about branding, sponsorship and betting — it’s just hair, tattoos and selling stuff.” He smiles and admits, “This is really curmudgeonly,” doing an impression of Victor Meldrew.
Smith plans to take the Cure on tour towards the end of next year and keep playing shows until 2028 — which will be the 50th anniversary of the band. “I’m 70 in 2029,” he says. “And that’s it, that really is it. If I make it that far, that’s it.”
“I’ve led a very privileged life,” he continues, sweetly, softly startled. “I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been. I’m still doing what I always wanted but the fact I’m still upright is probably the best thing about being me because there have been points where I didn’t think I would hit 30, 40, 50. My mind doesn’t function with the same acuity it once had, but I’m much more relaxed and easier to get on with.”
How does he know? He grins. “Because people smile at me more than they used to."
Songs of a Lost World is out on November 1
