How Robert Smith of the Cure Became Rock’s Most Dogged Activist
With his band’s first new album in 16 years out Friday, post-punk’s dark prince discusses enduring on his own terms and clashing with the most powerful company in live music.
At Brighton Electric, a warren of rock rehearsal spaces in an old brick tram depot in this English seaside town, young guitar luggers stream in and out while the thudding jams of baby bands reverberate throughout the building.
But a corridor in the back leads to a spacious, gear-crammed private studio occupied by the Cure — the multiplatinum band that defined a gloomy strand of British post-punk, and scored international hits with spiky confections like “Friday I’m in Love.” On a recent Sunday evening, the band was gathered to prepare for promotional gigs supporting “Songs of a Lost World,” its first studio album in 16 years, due Friday.
Seated beside his guitar rig was Robert Smith, the group’s leader, explaining his reluctance in recent years do an interview. “I don’t really want my head to be drawn back into this idea that I’m ‘Robert Smith of the Cure,’” he said, raising a blue-shadowed brow. “It just doesn’t suit me anymore.”
Yet at 65, he is still unmistakable as Robert Smith of the Cure, dressed all in black, with a smear of lipstick and his signature tangled mop of dark hair, now a shade of ash. At the Cure’s commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, he was a dandy prince of the alternative scene, his disheveled haystack inspiring not just a look but also an entire indie-kid personality type — the lovesick goth — while the band charted a path through melancholic angst (“Boys Don’t Cry”), danceable ear candy (“Just Like Heaven”) and an expansive, moody neo-psychedelia (“Pictures of You”) that made it a model for generations of artists.
Inducting the Cure into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said that Smith had used his “singular vision to create that rarest of things — a completely self-contained world with its own sound, its own look, its own vibe, its own aesthetic, its own rules.”
Formed in 1976, the Cure — with Smith its only constant member — has remained vital well after it departed the upper rungs of the charts, with a fiercely loyal fan base that flocks to the band’s sprawling, three-hour live shows. Recently Smith has also unexpectedly become a prominent voice calling for reform in the bewildering world of concert ticketing, where prices are spinning out of control and fans are often left feeling frustrated, confused or ripped off.
In a series of social media posts last year that rallied fans and enthralled the music industry, Smith drew attention to the problems that surrounded the sale of tickets for the band’s most recent tour. He channeled fan complaints, railed against scalpers and complained to Ticketmaster over fees that in some cases had doubled the cost of an order. “I am as sickened as you all are,” he told fans in a characteristic all-caps post on X.
Coming just a few months after Ticketmaster’s meltdown during the presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, his efforts added pressure to the company and its corporate parent, Live Nation, and demonstrated the power that a star can wield, if only they are willing to stick their neck out. Within a day of Smith’s complaint, Ticketmaster agreed to issue partial refunds to fans.
“It was one of those moments I thought, ‘No, I’m not letting this go,’” Smith recalled. “And so I didn’t.”
Over more than two hours of conversation, Smith spoke about the long gestation of “Songs of a Lost World,” his late-career shift into hands-on management of the Cure’s business and the lessons he learned from his clash with the most powerful company in live music. Far from the sullen creature listeners may imagine from his songs, Smith was chatty and open, giving long, thoughtful answers and smiling at his self-deprecating humor.
And he spoke with some astonishment at simply surviving a life of rock, to the point where the Cure is now approaching the half-century mark — an odd milestone for a man who sang the words “Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die” in 1985.
“If I go back to how I was when I was a younger man, my plan was to keep doing this till I fall over,” Smith said in the studio. “My idea of when I fell over wasn’t this old.”
“SONGS OF A LOST WORLD,” the Cure’s 14th studio album, might well have never happened.
When the last iteration of the Cure fell apart, after the tour that followed the band’s 2008 album, “4:13 Dream,” Smith said he was left feeling drained. He no longer wanted to be in the band, and toyed with making a solo album. But after a break he reconfigured the group, and by 2011 restarted it as a live vehicle; for nearly a decade, the Cure toured solely on its thick back catalog, with no new recordings (despite some teases along the way).
Smith was still writing songs, and after curating the Meltdown festival in London in 2018 — the 40th anniversary of the Cure’s first single — he felt reinvigorated. Recording sessions the next year generated enough material for multiple albums, though the coronavirus pandemic delayed completing them.
Smith works in his home studio on the south coast of England, after leaving London when he turned 30 in a determined lifestyle change after years of rock-star-level drinking and drug use. He has been married for 36 years, and his daily life suggests the jumbled diaries of a middle-class retiree and an obsessive auteur. He goes for long walks listening to music on an iPod and has never owned a smartphone.
“I have the music room at home,” he said. “My ideal Saturday night is often just having a few drinks and making loud noise. I mean, it’s the reason why I wanted to be in a band.”
But “Songs of a Lost World,” which Smith says is the first entry in a possible trilogy, is one of the darkest albums he has made. It is an eight-song suite of despair, rage and brooding thoughts of a life — and maybe a planet — that has fallen into what he calls an “inexorable slide.” “Alone,” the first track, harks back to “Disintegration,” the band’s gloomy psychedelic masterpiece from 1989. With a slowly pulsing pattern of synthesizers, bass and piano creating a backdrop of broken grandeur, Smith sings lines adapted from the Victorian poet Ernest Dowson (“This is the end of every song that we sing”) in his instantly recognizable crying tenor.
“I think it’s natural, as you grow older, to feel more and more despairing of what goes on,” Smith said. “Because you’ve seen it all before and you see the same mistakes being made. And I feel like we’re going backwards.”
“A Fragile Thing,” about a relationship strained to the breaking point, has a classic Cure bass line — bouncy and spare — by Simon Gallup, who has been part of the band for most of its nearly five-decade run. The lineup on “Songs of a Lost World” also includes two longtime players, Jason Cooper on drums and Roger O’Donnell on keyboards, along with the guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who had a long association with David Bowie and has been in the Cure since 2012.
The new album’s lyrics, Smith said, reflect personal stories of loss and mortality; “I Can Never Say Goodbye” is about the death of Smith’s older brother Richard, who had introduced him to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Smith’s early idol. “Songs of a Lost World” is only the second Cure album (after “The Head on the Door,” 39 years ago) on which Smith has sole writing credit on all tracks.
Still, the sense of a broader breakdown looms behind nearly every track. An early iteration of “Warsong,” about a relationship in constant conflict, dealt more directly with the world’s endless cycles of war. But Smith strove to keep the songs from being explicitly political. For one thing, he said, he would be an easy target for complaints.
"I wear lipstick, I’m 65,” he said. “I’m not the person to stand up to say what’s wrong with the world.”
BUT SMITH DOES NOT back off from a fight, as was evident from his battle with Ticketmaster last year.
For the Cure’s first North American tour in seven years, Smith was determined to keep prices affordable, making sure that each venue had seats at $20 or $25 — an extraordinarily low entry point for an arena show at a time when the average cost of a seat for one of the top 100 tours is $131, according to the trade publication Pollstar.
In part, he was thinking about his youngest fans. Though he has no children, “I have an enormous family now, a wider family,” he said. “And I know how they struggle just to live.”
From the start, there were signs of trouble. The band’s business contacts insisted that the prices were unrealistic, that Smith’s plans “ran contrary to all proven business practice and that it would be a complete disaster,” Smith said.
But he didn’t buy it. In the years after “4:13 Dream,” the Cure was without a label or management, and Smith began to study closely the economics of the business he had been in since he was a teenager. He decided that a tour could be run profitably on a small budget and with modest ticket prices. To ensure that tickets ended up with fans and not scalpers, he used Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan registration system and made tickets nontransferable. The band also did not use dynamic pricing, which allows prices to fluctuate (usually up) with demand — a scheme that has been used by stars like Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and Oasis, and which Smith bitterly calls a “scam.”
Soon after tickets went on sale, things began to go haywire. Fans complained of problems, and scalpers went as far as trading “aged” Ticketmaster accounts to get their hands on Cure seats. Then a screenshot ricocheted through social media showing that fees added $92 to an order of four $20 tickets. On March 15, 2023, Smith said he had asked Ticketmaster to justify those fees; the next day, he said the company had agreed to return up to $10 for each Verified Fan order. In a podcast interview last year, Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation, said the decision had cost the company a “million dollars or so.”
Speaking about it now, Smith still seethes over his interactions with the live behemoths.
“What sparked me was because they wouldn’t take me seriously. It’s as simple as that,” Smith said. “I was spoken to in a certain way by a certain individual. And something in me was like, what? You know, it’s like a ‘Run along, Sonny’ kind of moment.”
“And it just gradually escalated until I was thinking, ‘No, I’m not backing down. This resolves how I want it to resolve,’” he added. “In my weird view of the world, I thought because we were doing the shows, and we were who we were, that we had the upper hand.”
The episode went viral in part because it was so rare. In the heavily consolidated music industry today, virtually no artists at Smith’s level act as whistle-blowers. And Smith is still disappointed at the public silence that greeted him from other artists.
“People are terrified of upsetting Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” he said. “It’s really bizarre, actually, because the power of the artist, it’s the ultimate power.”
It also became a flashpoint in the long-building complaints over Live Nation’s extensive power in the concert business, which is now the focus of an antitrust suit filed by the Justice Department. The government has accused Live Nation of being an illegal monopoly whose business stifles competition and drives up prices for consumers.
In a statement, Ticketmaster said: “To the Cure’s credit, their ticket price was so much lower than typical that even the smallest fees set by venues didn’t make sense. We stepped in to help fans by refunding fees. And since then, we’ve actively monitored fees on lower priced tickets. When flags go off, some venues reduce fees, some leave them as is, and in some cases Ticketmaster has stepped in to cover a portion of the fees.”
The company also noted that most of its services fees are paid to venues. On the Cure’s tour, many of those venues were owned or operated by Live Nation.
The tour ended up being the Cure’s most successful ever, selling about $37.5 million in tickets in North America (it included legs in Europe and South America as well). Smith is also proud of the merchandise sales; by offering T-shirts for $25 instead of $50, he said, the Cure sold twice as many.
Yet he scoffs at a suggestion that his campaign was a victory. He called the episode a mere “skirmish,” and said that Ticketmaster’s refund did not fundamentally change anything about a system driven to maximize profit at the expense of fans.
“Live Nation were perceived to have caved in,” he said. “But their decision was made because it looked good. It was optics.” He added, with exasperation, “In the grand scheme of things, it’s like peanuts.”
Still, by challenging the system, Smith did inspire many artists to consider making changes to how they tour, said Kevin Erickson, the executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, an advocacy group.
“Robert did something incredible here,” Erickson said. “It has emboldened a whole lot of artists that he’s influenced, and they are talking more about these things, even if these are not conversations that have yet risen to the level of media coverage.”
Smith made clear that he had no regrets.
“In a small way, by understanding how we do what we do,” Smith said, “when we actually walk out onstage and I become that person who sings, I feel really happy about how we’ve got there.”