Robert Smith

For other people named Robert Smith, see Robert Smith (disambiguation).

Robert James Smith (born April 21, 1959 in Blackpool, England), a guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, has been the lead singer of British post-punk band The Cure since its founding in 1976. NY Rock calls him "pop culture™s unkempt poster child of doom and gloom", and describes his songs as "somber introspection over lush, brooding guitars" ^[1]

Influenced by The Beatles, Nick Drake, Jimi Hendrix, Joy Division and David Bowie, he started playing guitar at the age of 12. Smith has played the 6 and 12-string guitars; 4 and 6 string bass guitars; double bass; keyboards; and violin.

1 Musical career
2 Discography
- 2.1 Band discography
- 2.2 Solo discography
3 Curiosa festival
4 Trivia
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Musical career

Robert Smith

[edit] Early years

See also the history of The Cure

Robert is the third of four children born to Alex and Rita Smith. His siblings are Richard, Margaret, and Janet. Janet is married to Porl Thompson, the lead guitarist of The Cure. Smith was raised Catholic and went to Notre Dame Middle School and St Wilfrid's Comprehensive School in Crawley as a teenager. 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. Smith was an accomplished student who maintained high marks, but his primary focus quickly became his music. As a teenager, he began to challenge what he felt was arbitrary authority, such as by wearing a full-length fur coat to school and by holding a benefit concert for a homosexual instructor who had been fired.

[edit] Role in The Cure

Smith has written or co-written the bulk of The Cure's music and lyrics in a career spanning 30 years. When the Cure first formed, Smith began singing because the group couldn't find a suitable vocalist. During the late 1970s and into the 80s, Smith composed some of The Cure's songs on a Hammond organ, and recorded a complete demo of the song 10:15 Saturday Night.

Smith is the only member of the band who remained in the group from the beginning, even producing some of the music alone, such as the single Let's Go to Bed. Smith's versatility extended to the recording studio, where he has co-produced most of the band's material.

[edit] Stage persona and image

Robert Smith on the cover of NME

Smith is recognizable for his deliberately smeared red lipstick and messy black hair that some have compared to a large spider, a look that began around the time of the 1981 Faith album. According to Steven Severin, he first used Siouxsie Sioux's lipstick while he was high on opium. Smith's theatrical appearance, which included lipstick around his eyes (e.g., during the Pornography tour) may have contributed to the frequent classification of The Cure as a goth band.

Following the dissolution of the band after the Pornography tour, Smith made a radical change musically, and eventually developed a new stage appearance - a shaved head (this can be seen in Orange France, released on video). Smith never returned to the dark image he portrayed in Pornography, despite revisiting the mask theme during 1986 for a poster. The mask aesthetic was changed from alienating and threatening to jazzy and colorful for The Head on the Door album.

Although Smith's public persona emphasizes a depressed image, 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."^[2]

[edit] Vocal styles

Smith's distinctive vocal sound is one of the 10 most recognized voices in The US and the UK, according to a study in the early 1990s. In the band's earliest period, Smith used a soft vocal style on the demos of 10:15 Saturday Night and Boys Don't Cry and the frenetic punk style of I Just Need Myself. Both of those styles were left behind as a third emerged during the production of Three Imaginary Boys. This new sound, which can be heard on most of the final versions of songs from that period, became the signature Smith sound, which he generally employed until Bloodflowers. Around that time, Smith said he wanted to improve his singing, the opposite of his goal in 1984; he remarked in Ten Imaginary Years that he tried to sing badly for The Top. Some fans did not consider his new Bloodflowers vocal style to be an improvement, and instead felt it was less compelling.

[edit] Songwriting styles

Smith's lyric-writing has shown a range of styles and themes over the years. The early years had literary paraphrase (the reference to Camus' novel L'Etranger in the song Killing an Arab), punk metafiction in the song So What, surrealism in the song Accuracy, social commentary in Jumping Someone Else's Train and Grinding Halt, straight-forward rock/pop (Boys Don't Cry, I'm Cold), callow punk rock (Object, See the Children, I Want to Be Old, I Just Need Myself) and poetic mood pieces (Another Day and Fire in Cairo). In subsequent decades, Smith explored more poetic moods.

Seventeen Seconds, with the exception of Play For Today, and Smith's 1981 and 1982 output show his more poetic, moody approach to songwriting. Smith changed to a pop songwriting mode after the Pornography album and a brief stint at writing at his Hammond that resulted in the morose songs Just One Kiss and Lament. The result was the single Let's Go to Bed, which was a satirical take on the mediocrity of conventional pop and also meant to undermine the goth label the band had received.

Even Smith's seemingly upbeat tracks often contain a dark or fatalistic element, such as the single In Between Days, which constrasts a bouncy upbeat pop-rock beginning with lyrics whose first lines include the rhyme die and cry. Just Like Heaven is one of Smith's favourite The Cure pop songs and is also a favorite of many critics: " found myself alone alone alone above the raging sea / that stole the only girl I loved / and drowned her deep inside of me." Less conventional writing can be found particularly in the years 80-82, where Smith rarely rhymed, used increasing abstraction, and wrote little directly about love.

In an interview in 2000, Smith said that "...there is one particular kind of music, an atmospheric type of music, that I enjoy making with the Cure. I enjoy it a lot more than any other kind of sound. ^[3]. When Smith was asked about the 'sound' of his songwriting, Smith said that he did not "...think there is such a thing as a typical Cure sound. I think there are various Cure sounds from different periods and different line-ups."^[4]

[edit] Collaborations

He has also been involved in other musical projects, including a stint with Siouxsie & the Banshees and a side-project with Steven Severin called The Glove. He has also contributed to a number of independent projects and performances, among them the B-side of the Faith cassette, which is a 30-minute instrumental track from a movie project, Carnage Visors. In October 2004, he stood in as one of three guest presenters for John Peel on BBC Radio 1, a week before Peel's death.

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.

[edit] Discography

[edit] Band discography

â†’ See The Cure discography from 1976 (start) to present

â†’ See The Glove discography in 1983 (only album)

â†’ See Siouxsie & the Banshees discography: 1983-1984

[edit] Solo discography

For over two decades, Smith has suggested that he may do a solo album. Some of Smith's solo writing may end up in The Cure, with tracks such 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 [¦]" ^[2]

In 2001, Smith was going to disband The Cure and work on his solo album, but was convinced otherwise by producer Ross Robinson. Robinson urged Smith to make another Cure album, and Smith obliged, titled the band's 2004 release The Cure.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Trivia

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Smith voiced himself in an episode of South Park in which he defeats Barbra Streisand in a battle. The main characters praise him. South Park creator Trey Parker is a fan of The Cure (see Mecha-Streisand).
Fat Bob, a character in the Web Comic Nice Hair may be based on 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 are Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton.
In the Mighty Boosh episode "Nanageddon" his tears are mentioned as an ingredient for the most powerful hairspray known to man (Gothjuice)
Robert Smith has criticized Morrissey (lead singer of The Smiths), stating that "if Morrissey says don't eat meat, then I'll eat meat because I hate Morrissey." But as of recent years, he seems to have made up with Morrissey.^[5]