The Cure : NME Interview part 2. on the NME.com

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10/29/2008 10:53 AM (GMT-04:00)
boyinorbit65 boyinorbit65 Joined: 10/28/2008 Posts: 0 Location: london	NME Interview part 2. on the NME.com http://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=58&p=5205&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more5205 Following on from this week's (October 27) NME magazine cover feature on The Cure, here's more exclusive content from Robert Smith's only interview of 2008. To see the rest of the in-depth feature and interview, grab the new issue of NME, on sale now. continued... How do you feel about being declared Godlike Genius? "I've probably gone through a curve where at one point I would have given a much more po-faced answer about the nature of genius, it's discovering something that no one has ever discovered before and having the mental capacity to see things in an entirely different light. I still deep down believe that but I think in music if you can create something that's very simple that sticks with someone else and it emotionally moves them it's genius in its own way. Few people manage to do it. Lots and lots and lots of people try but very few people manage to do it.” Have there been any moment when you’ve thought you’ve written something of true genius? "Anyone who thinks they're creating art for consumption has no idea of its worth. I've had this argument most notably with David Bowie actually. When I very first met him to do an interview with XFM the conversation turned around to art and its meaning culturally, and he believed that art was solely determined by the consumer and in fact anything could be art. It was a very modern art approach to art. This was way back in '94 or something like that. I was drinking and I was enraged by this idea. I still think it's totally wrong. As an artist you invest the meaning into your work. Whether anyone else gets it is fucking immaterial. For me, what I do, I don't care about what happens to it after that, I still don't, I never have. But I've always realised that it's validated by the experience of other people in as much as it becomes bigger than itself by the fact that other people want it, but it still retains its quality for me in what's gone into it and how I feel about it. There are songs that we've done that I think are great songs that probably other people don't, but it doesn't upset me. Probably when I was younger I'd have been like 'Why doesn't anyone get what I get? Why are they listening to 'Friday…' and not listening to 'End'?'." How will the Big Gig compare to your usual shows? “When The Cure play now we often play up to three hours and we play pretty much everything. We're throwing in songs and you don't know whether they’re gonna like it or not, but it doesn't really matter because there's another 27 songs to follow so it's not crucial to the way the show is going to go. We'll do the same kind of thing, we’ll reflect what we've done over the years. On the 4 tour I think we’ve played 83 or 84 songs so far and it hasn't ended yet. I was trying to get it up to a hundred. Our repertoire is 100 songs, we know 100 songs, we probably know more actually now that Porl's back, because he knows a lot of stuff that we haven't played for a while. But as a band I always want a cool song list to be around about 100, which is taxing. I remember reading something about James Brown when I was young and how he was such a bastard to his band and I was thinking that’s fucking great, of course the band should know 100 songs. If you’ve got 100 songs why shouldn't you know them? That's what you do.” How do you feel when younger bands namecheck you as an influence? “There are some bands I suppose that namecheck The Cure and I think ‘Please don't’. Who am I proud of? Mogwai have been my favourite band for a long time, and when I first spoke to Stuart (Braithwaite) and he's gone ‘I love what you do as well’, that the acknowledgement from someone who you yourself admire that has nothing to do with how much I've done or how old I am or anything. If you just said ‘Thanks, but your band’s shit’ it would have been one of the few times that criticism would have hurt me. If someone who you admire says that what you're doing is rubbish it does hurt. It's nice when you hear something and you think ‘Wow, they like what we do’. When we did the MTV Icons show a few years back I was really surprised, they put a film together and we didn't know anything about it and the breadth of people on that clip who were up on the screen, people like Kirk (Hammett) from Metallica saying that they love The Cure, we were sitting there thinking 'Is this somehow ironic, are we missing the point?' Loads of people I had no idea liked us suddenly stepped forward. But why should I be surprised? I like lots and lots of different things, and I'd be quite happy to step forward for a lot of people and say what they do is great, it doesn't have to sound anything like us. So I suppose it's a conditioning, you think 'How can a rap artist possibly step forward and say they like The Cure?', but a lot of them do.” You've steadfastly refused to change your look over the years. “When I was younger I didn't mind as much shaving of the hair, which I did a couple of times. I remember the first time I did it publicly was when we did the film 'The Cure In Orange' in 1986, which at the time was a huge story because I’d just taken away the one thing we had. I was just becoming known for the way I looked and Tim Pope, who had done a lot of our videos up to that point, was making the film, it was his first big shoot with 10 cameras and I turned up and I had shaved my head the day before, and I turn up in a wig. We met in a bar and he kind of knew but went with it. He looked at me and said ‘What we going to do?’ So we came up with the beginning of the film which is me about to walk on stage and I pull the wig off and throw it to one side. We were the band with no image and then suddenly we were the band with the best image you’d ever seen and then ‘My God he's just thrown it away’. I don't want to be known for the way I look. When we started out I refused to have a picture anywhere. We didn't have our pictures taken in the early days, it was a reaction against even the punk thing, which was supposedly against anything else, they were still generating iconic figures. I thought 'It's fucked, the whole thing’. I don't want to be anyone. We were just kids from Crawley. It was a slight paradox because I don't like anyone, I don’t want anything to Quote

10/29/2008 10:53 AM (GMT-04:00)

boyinorbit65
Joined: 10/28/2008
Posts: 0

Location: london

NME Interview part 2. on the NME.com

http://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=58&p=5205&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more5205

Following on from this week's (October 27) NME magazine cover feature on The Cure, here's more exclusive content from Robert Smith's only interview of 2008.

To see the rest of the in-depth feature and interview, grab the new issue of NME, on sale now.

continued...

How do you feel about being declared Godlike Genius?

"I've probably gone through a curve where at one point I would have given a much more po-faced answer about the nature of genius, it's discovering something that no one has ever discovered before and having the mental capacity to see things in an entirely different light. I still deep down believe that but I think in music if you can create something that's very simple that sticks with someone else and it emotionally moves them it's genius in its own way. Few people manage to do it. Lots and lots and lots of people try but very few people manage to do it.”

Have there been any moment when you’ve thought you’ve written something of true genius?

"Anyone who thinks they're creating art for consumption has no idea of its worth. I've had this argument most notably with David Bowie actually. When I very first met him to do an interview with XFM the conversation turned around to art and its meaning culturally, and he believed that art was solely determined by the consumer and in fact anything could be art. It was a very modern art approach to art. This was way back in '94 or something like that. I was drinking and I was enraged by this idea. I still think it's totally wrong. As an artist you invest the meaning into your work. Whether anyone else gets it is fucking immaterial. For me, what I do, I don't care about what happens to it after that, I still don't, I never have. But I've always realised that it's validated by the experience of other people in as much as it becomes bigger than itself by the fact that other people want it, but it still retains its quality for me in what's gone into it and how I feel about it. There are songs that we've done that I think are great songs that probably other people don't, but it doesn't upset me. Probably when I was younger I'd have been like 'Why doesn't anyone get what I get? Why are they listening to 'Friday…' and not listening to 'End'?'."

How will the Big Gig compare to your usual shows?

“When The Cure play now we often play up to three hours and we play pretty much everything. We're throwing in songs and you don't know whether they’re gonna like it or not, but it doesn't really matter because there's another 27 songs to follow so it's not crucial to the way the show is going to go. We'll do the same kind of thing, we’ll reflect what we've done over the years. On the 4 tour I think we’ve played 83 or 84 songs so far and it hasn't ended yet. I was trying to get it up to a hundred. Our repertoire is 100 songs, we know 100 songs, we probably know more actually now that Porl's back, because he knows a lot of stuff that we haven't played for a while. But as a band I always want a cool song list to be around about 100, which is taxing. I remember reading something about James Brown when I was young and how he was such a bastard to his band and I was thinking that’s fucking great, of course the band should know 100 songs. If you’ve got 100 songs why shouldn't you know them? That's what you do.”

How do you feel when younger bands namecheck you as an influence?

“There are some bands I suppose that namecheck The Cure and I think ‘Please don't’. Who am I proud of? Mogwai have been my favourite band for a long time, and when I first spoke to Stuart (Braithwaite) and he's gone ‘I love what you do as well’, that the acknowledgement from someone who you yourself admire that has nothing to do with how much I've done or how old I am or anything. If you just said ‘Thanks, but your band’s shit’ it would have been one of the few times that criticism would have hurt me. If someone who you admire says that what you're doing is rubbish it does hurt. It's nice when you hear something and you think ‘Wow, they like what we do’. When we did the MTV Icons show a few years back I was really surprised, they put a film together and we didn't know anything about it and the breadth of people on that clip who were up on the screen, people like Kirk (Hammett) from Metallica saying that they love The Cure, we were sitting there thinking 'Is this somehow ironic, are we missing the point?' Loads of people I had no idea liked us suddenly stepped forward. But why should I be surprised? I like lots and lots of different things, and I'd be quite happy to step forward for a lot of people and say what they do is great, it doesn't have to sound anything like us. So I suppose it's a conditioning, you think 'How can a rap artist possibly step forward and say they like The Cure?', but a lot of them do.”

You've steadfastly refused to change your look over the years.

“When I was younger I didn't mind as much shaving of the hair, which I did a couple of times. I remember the first time I did it publicly was when we did the film 'The Cure In Orange' in 1986, which at the time was a huge story because I’d just taken away the one thing we had. I was just becoming known for the way I looked and Tim Pope, who had done a lot of our videos up to that point, was making the film, it was his first big shoot with 10 cameras and I turned up and I had shaved my head the day before, and I turn up in a wig. We met in a bar and he kind of knew but went with it. He looked at me and said ‘What we going to do?’ So we came up with the beginning of the film which is me about to walk on stage and I pull the wig off and throw it to one side. We were the band with no image and then suddenly we were the band with the best image you’d ever seen and then ‘My God he's just thrown it away’. I don't want to be known for the way I look. When we started out I refused to have a picture anywhere. We didn't have our pictures taken in the early days, it was a reaction against even the punk thing, which was supposedly against anything else, they were still generating iconic figures. I thought 'It's fucked, the whole thing’. I don't want to be anyone. We were just kids from Crawley. It was a slight paradox because I don't like anyone, I don’t want anything to

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10/29/2008 10:56 AM (GMT-04:00)
boyinorbit65 boyinorbit65 Joined: 10/28/2008 Posts: 0 Location: london	Part 2 ...do with anyone, but we're doing this so I need to connect with other people who also don't want anything to do with anyone. It's one of those young things where you don't think too much about the paradox but you kind of know what you're getting at. The alienation of it, you're trying to reach out to other people who feel alienated.” Do you still get many Robert Smith clones hanging about? “Less often nowadays. But at the most recent thing in Rome there an extraordinary amount of Robert Smith-alikes, much more than there have been in the last few years. This might be a worrying resurgence of them. Every summer they come round to where I live and there's a regular stream of people. I live on the beach just outside of Brighton - I don't live on the beach, my house backs onto the beach, of all the places I could fucking live and be private! 'What are you doing on my beach?' And they all turn up and they all make sure they look like the archetype, but there’s less and less of them. There was resurgence this year in America - I noticed that some of the shows of younger boys and girls starting to dress up a bit. It's nice, I like it, I've never thought of it as them wanting to look like me, it's always that representation.” You've recently allowed your music to be used in advertising in America after years of refusal – why? “Anyone who knows The Cure knows that the only reason I had to agree to those adverts was because we were about to be out of contract with Polydor and I had to. If I was going to retain control over our back catalogue my trade-off was giving the one song to use for an advert with no vocals, that was it, so we gave them 'In Between Days' for Punto and Fiat and 'Pictures Of You' for HP in America. There was no singing and no-one knew it was us, and that was fine. There was no campaign around it, nothing came off of it, we didn't re-release ‘In Between Days’. I'm so against music in adverts, it fucking killed me even agreeing to that, but it was the only way. The money generated from those adverts went into buying me control on our back catalogue, otherwise it would have been like mortgaging the band. It sounds cynical, and it was at the time, but I suppose if I'm being really honest my ear was bent a little bit by a younger generation saying no one cares, no one cares, everyone does it, it doesn't matter any more, you're living in the past. Now I read that if you advertise this or use your music for that or you’re advertising the iPhone that's fine because everybody does it, but it's not, I still don't think it is, I think it is wrong.” The Cure are almost unique in being a deeply emotional band with a shameless pop edge – how did that combination come about? “I knew every word to every Beatles song and every Rolling Stones song through the '60s, and Captain Beefheart and Cream. This was what was blasting out when I was pretending to be going to sleep. So when I started with a group and thought ‘We’re gonna start writing our own songs’ I didn’t want to be a punk band, I wanted to be a band that encompassed all the stuff that I thought was good. If I had a song and thought 'I want to sound like Nick Drake on this song' I didn’t think ‘Well, is that right?’ because Nick Drake was what made me feel a certain way so if I could get that into a song… When we started my favourite punk bands were the bands that made the more accessible, melodic music. I wanted the band to always have a dimension to it that was not to do with the modern world. So the emotional stuff and the pop stuff always went hand in hand, I never saw any problem with it. The Beatles are a good example. They progressed into it, but once they did they didn’t have an either/or. They had both. They had the best tunes, but also the most outrageously experimental psychedelic stuff that you could imagine. They were it. Captain Beefheart’s ‘Safe As Milk’, I used to love the way it used stereo and the way it went across in headphones, the phase stuff, I’d listen to it over and over again. And Hendrix, the same thing – ‘Axis: Bold As Love’ has got some great pop songs on it, but essentially it’s a psychedelic guitar album that you listen to from beginning to end and think you’d love to be in that world, I’d love to be Jimi Hendrix. All these things combined, for me there was never a problem between ‘Do you want to be a dark band or do you want to be a pop band?’ We kind of went on our own way depending on how I felt.” Didn’t you have a run-in with Morrissey back in the '80s? “Unfortunately he was asked a question about people called Smith. It was me, Patti Smith and someone else called Smith who was famous at that time, who he would shoot. One would have expected at the time, him being a non-meat eating vegetarian pacifistic sort of guy, to say ‘I choose to shoot myself’ or ‘I choose to shoot no-one’ but he said ‘I’d line them all up and I’d shoot them all’. When I was told that at the time I kind of took umbrage, ‘That’s fucking nice, cunt’. I felt it was a bit unnecessary. I’d never said or done anything. So that engendered one of those tedious feuds. I’ve never met him, I’m not even sure we’ve been in the same room. I’m sure it’s the same for him, he got really aggravated at my response. I was very over the top but I felt justifiably so, having just been shot in print. It was one of those things, a mini Blur/Oasis thing. I don’t think I played along with it enough for it to become anything more. It kind of got resurrected from time to time, I think on his fansite it got reinvigorated and there have been various attempts to reignite it, but I think he’s actually said something really nice about us recently, about the fact that I’m a little bit wayward. Honestly I’ve never really had a problem. I felt it was unfair that he would shoot me. If you asked him again he might choose to shoot himself rather than me and Auntie Patti and whoever else it was.” Did you ever have any bad trips while taking all that LSD to write 'Disintegration'? “No, actually, I have never had a bad trip, never. It does set you off though, you take other drugs at the wrong time at the wrong moment and it does set me off again. Some of my younger nephews and nieces say ‘Come on uncle Robert, have a bit of this’. And I'm like ‘Oh yeah, alright’ and then I’m like ‘Fuck!’ I'm sitting there an hour later and they’re going ‘Are you alrig Quote

10/29/2008 10:56 AM (GMT-04:00)

boyinorbit65

boyinorbit65
Joined: 10/28/2008
Posts: 0
Location: london

Part 2

...do with anyone, but we're doing this so I need to connect with other people who also don't want anything to do with anyone. It's one of those young things where you don't think too much about the paradox but you kind of know what you're getting at. The alienation of it, you're trying to reach out to other people who feel alienated.”

Do you still get many Robert Smith clones hanging about?

“Less often nowadays. But at the most recent thing in Rome there an extraordinary amount of Robert Smith-alikes, much more than there have been in the last few years. This might be a worrying resurgence of them. Every summer they come round to where I live and there's a regular stream of people. I live on the beach just outside of Brighton - I don't live on the beach, my house backs onto the beach, of all the places I could fucking live and be private! 'What are you doing on my beach?' And they all turn up and they all make sure they look like the archetype, but there’s less and less of them. There was resurgence this year in America - I noticed that some of the shows of younger boys and girls starting to dress up a bit. It's nice, I like it, I've never thought of it as them wanting to look like me, it's always that representation.”

You've recently allowed your music to be used in advertising in America after years of refusal – why?

“Anyone who knows The Cure knows that the only reason I had to agree to those adverts was because we were about to be out of contract with Polydor and I had to. If I was going to retain control over our back catalogue my trade-off was giving the one song to use for an advert with no vocals, that was it, so we gave them 'In Between Days' for Punto and Fiat and 'Pictures Of You' for HP in America. There was no singing and no-one knew it was us, and that was fine. There was no campaign around it, nothing came off of it, we didn't re-release ‘In Between Days’. I'm so against music in adverts, it fucking killed me even agreeing to that, but it was the only way. The money generated from those adverts went into buying me control on our back catalogue, otherwise it would have been like mortgaging the band. It sounds cynical, and it was at the time, but I suppose if I'm being really honest my ear was bent a little bit by a younger generation saying no one cares, no one cares, everyone does it, it doesn't matter any more, you're living in the past. Now I read that if you advertise this or use your music for that or you’re advertising the iPhone that's fine because everybody does it, but it's not, I still don't think it is, I think it is wrong.”

The Cure are almost unique in being a deeply emotional band with a shameless pop edge – how did that combination come about?

“I knew every word to every Beatles song and every Rolling Stones song through the '60s, and Captain Beefheart and Cream. This was what was blasting out when I was pretending to be going to sleep. So when I started with a group and thought ‘We’re gonna start writing our own songs’ I didn’t want to be a punk band, I wanted to be a band that encompassed all the stuff that I thought was good. If I had a song and thought 'I want to sound like Nick Drake on this song' I didn’t think ‘Well, is that right?’ because Nick Drake was what made me feel a certain way so if I could get that into a song… When we started my favourite punk bands were the bands that made the more accessible, melodic music. I wanted the band to always have a dimension to it that was not to do with the modern world. So the emotional stuff and the pop stuff always went hand in hand, I never saw any problem with it. The Beatles are a good example. They progressed into it, but once they did they didn’t have an either/or. They had both. They had the best tunes, but also the most outrageously experimental psychedelic stuff that you could imagine. They were it. Captain Beefheart’s ‘Safe As Milk’, I used to love the way it used stereo and the way it went across in headphones, the phase stuff, I’d listen to it over and over again. And Hendrix, the same thing – ‘Axis: Bold As Love’ has got some great pop songs on it, but essentially it’s a psychedelic guitar album that you listen to from beginning to end and think you’d love to be in that world, I’d love to be Jimi Hendrix. All these things combined, for me there was never a problem between ‘Do you want to be a dark band or do you want to be a pop band?’ We kind of went on our own way depending on how I felt.”

Didn’t you have a run-in with Morrissey back in the '80s?

“Unfortunately he was asked a question about people called Smith. It was me, Patti Smith and someone else called Smith who was famous at that time, who he would shoot. One would have expected at the time, him being a non-meat eating vegetarian pacifistic sort of guy, to say ‘I choose to shoot myself’ or ‘I choose to shoot no-one’ but he said ‘I’d line them all up and I’d shoot them all’. When I was told that at the time I kind of took umbrage, ‘That’s fucking nice, cunt’. I felt it was a bit unnecessary. I’d never said or done anything. So that engendered one of those tedious feuds. I’ve never met him, I’m not even sure we’ve been in the same room. I’m sure it’s the same for him, he got really aggravated at my response. I was very over the top but I felt justifiably so, having just been shot in print. It was one of those things, a mini Blur/Oasis thing. I don’t think I played along with it enough for it to become anything more. It kind of got resurrected from time to time, I think on his fansite it got reinvigorated and there have been various attempts to reignite it, but I think he’s actually said something really nice about us recently, about the fact that I’m a little bit wayward. Honestly I’ve never really had a problem. I felt it was unfair that he would shoot me. If you asked him again he might choose to shoot himself rather than me and Auntie Patti and whoever else it was.”

Did you ever have any bad trips while taking all that LSD to write 'Disintegration'?

“No, actually, I have never had a bad trip, never. It does set you off though, you take other drugs at the wrong time at the wrong moment and it does set me off again. Some of my younger nephews and nieces say ‘Come on uncle Robert, have a bit of this’. And I'm like ‘Oh yeah, alright’ and then I’m like ‘Fuck!’ I'm sitting there an hour later and they’re going ‘Are you alrig

Quote

10/29/2008 11:09 AM (GMT-04:00)
IndyjonesTx IndyjonesTx Joined: 9/6/2004 Posts: 0 Location:	LOL Thanks, some great stuff....and getting a chuckle off the "Come on, Uncle Robert" Quote

10/29/2008 11:09 AM (GMT-04:00)

IndyjonesTx

IndyjonesTx
Joined: 9/6/2004
Posts: 0
Location:

LOL

Thanks, some great stuff....and getting a chuckle off the "Come on, Uncle Robert"

Quote

10/29/2008 11:29 AM (GMT-04:00)
glimmmy glimmmy Joined: 2/11/2007 Posts: 1349 Location:	Thanks Indy! For some reason I thought that what we read yesterday was all of it- which kind of sucked;) Quote

10/29/2008 11:29 AM (GMT-04:00)

glimmmy

glimmmy
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1349
Location:

Thanks Indy!

For some reason I thought that what we read yesterday was all of it- which kind of sucked;)

Quote

10/29/2008 11:40 AM (GMT-04:00)
glimmmy glimmmy Joined: 2/11/2007 Posts: 1349 Location:	whoopsie I mean: boyinorbit:) Quote

10/29/2008 11:40 AM (GMT-04:00)

glimmmy

glimmmy
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1349
Location:

whoopsie

I mean: boyinorbit:)

Quote

10/29/2008 11:46 AM (GMT-04:00)
shelliebeans23 shelliebeans23 Joined: 7/6/2004 Posts: 251 Location: FL, US	LOLs This was a great interview. I wish there are more dialogue from Robert instead of the author's poetic ramblings though... Quote

10/29/2008 11:46 AM (GMT-04:00)

shelliebeans23

shelliebeans23
Joined: 7/6/2004
Posts: 251
Location: FL, US

LOLs

This was a great interview. I wish there are more dialogue from Robert instead of the author's poetic ramblings though...

Quote

10/29/2008 12:20 PM (GMT-04:00)
glimmmy glimmmy Joined: 2/11/2007 Posts: 1349 Location:	& will there be even MORE?:) Quote

10/29/2008 12:20 PM (GMT-04:00)

glimmmy

glimmmy
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1349
Location:

&

will there be even MORE?:)

Quote

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