“THERE ARE SO MANY MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THIS BAND…”
“THERE is no such thing as a ‘definitive’ history of The Cure,” laughs Robert Smith. “There are facts and figures, but each one of us has completely different memories about what’s happened. We were talking about a show from last week and each one of us had a completely different version of events. None of them are invalid. Obviously to me, there’s only one true story and that’s mine!”
The story of The Cure is entering its latest, remarkable chapter. It has already been a long, strange trip from the pubs of Crawley to becoming one of British rock’s most enduring and fascinating musical institutions – accompanied on that journey by an uncanny bestiary of love cats, cannibal spiders and hungry ghosts. Now Smith is finally readying himself with the business of ‘Live From The Moon’ – the working title, that is, of the band’s first new album of studio material in over a decade. The record has reportedly been shaped by the trauma of Smith losing his mother, father and brother in recent years. Comparing it to the band’s notoriously extreme 1982 opus, Pornography, Smith describes the new material as “merciless”.
First, though, there are more immediate matters to attend to. For the last year, The Cure have been enjoying an extended period of 40th-anniversary celebrations. These began with Smith curating 2018’s Meltdown Festival at London’s Southbank – with The Cure delivering a special “Curætion-25” show – followed by a show at Hyde Park last summer in front of 65,000 fans. These festivities culminated with a triumphant headline appearance at this year’s Glastonbury festival – a mammoth celebration of the band’s singular legacy, full of unexpected joy and even levity, where Smith could be witnessed jiggling unselfconsciously across the stage during “Why Can’t I Be You?”, inviting the crowd to indulge him in a prolonged jazzy scat during “The Caterpillar” and giggling arm-in-arm with the rest of the band during a closing “Boys Don’t Cry”.
“EVERYONE GETS
