The Cure may still be touring and to universal acclaim, but Robert Smith is still tinkering with what he believes is the band’s greatest weakness. Though The Cure hardly looks as though they have any weaknesses as they tour Europe with huge setlists featuring their greatest hits, Smith once outlined what he wishes he could change about the band.
Speaking to Damien Love about the group’s return in the 1990s, Smith outlined that he had been trying to figure out why the band did not fit into British culture. The Cure has been around since the late 1970s and has offered some all-time great releases. But their spot as a defining British band doesn’t seem to be secure, and Smith has tried to figure out why the band has been cast aside by some members of the public. While the group is enjoying a successful stretch of headline shows, it doesn’t appear to have always been the case for the band.
Smith said: “But it’s weird, like I said about going round America, the perception of the group there is different from state to state, everyone’s got a different take on what we’re supposed to be about. It’s just in Britain, everything is so much faster and so much more fad-led, and obviously we don’t fit in. But then we never have. So I’ve had many years of being unfashionable.
“I mean, I know what I like about the group, and I know why I like being in the group, so that’s all that’s important to me, really. If someone else decides that they think what we do is invalid, they can have their opinion, but they’re not going to make me think, ‘Oh crumbs. They’re right. I’ve been misled all these years….’
Smith went on to suggest that the band had not suffered as a result of this judgement but it had made him look inward and highlighted the weaknesses of the band as a performing unit. While it would be Brits who believe the band are a little “unfashionable”, Smith would say the problems for the band run much deeper than that.
He said: “I can see the shortcomings of the group much more than anyone else. I know our weaknesses, and I know our strengths, but we’ve never been a fashionable band, and we never will be. It’s like people saying Wild Mood Swings is not a ’96 album, like Disintegration was an ’89 album, or Kiss Me was an ’87 album… there’s no such thing for me.
“It’s so small-minded in a way, which is probably why it doesn’t affect me, because you just see that what’s fashionable in a certain city in Britain isn’t fashionable in Texas or Sydney. And I’ve always perceived the group as, not in a pretentious way, but meaning as much to people wherever they are in the world. It’s not a British perspective – you don’t have to be culturally au fait with what goes on where I live to understand what we’re singing about.”
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