Nobody likes a moaner, or so goes the conventional wisdom. But by 1990, more than a decade into his career and fresh off of his band’s biggest-ever tour, moan was all Robert Smith could seem to do. The Cure’s popularity had become unmanageable; that 1989 tour had taken them to Springsteen levels of fame, and they found themselves playing dark, cavernous songs in dark, cavernous venues like Giants Stadium. They sold out Dodger Stadium with openers Pixies and Love and Rockets—“a bill whose cumulative angst could make the ball park an even gloomier place than it is during a Dodger game,” the Los Angeles Times quipped. And while it’s true that the album they were touring was, conservatively speaking, one of the most depressing hit records of all time, Smith knew his band was more dynamic than they appeared; they had, after all, recently scored a hit with the perky “Just Like Heaven,” and the post-disco posse cut “Hot Hot Hot!!!” suggested they had many more evolutions in store.
But the flicker of their reputation’s candlelight could only illuminate a small facet of who the Cure were and what they had accomplished, something Smith tried to point out to every journalist he encountered. “The Smiths were always wallowing,” he complained to The Independent. “We only wallow infrequently.” By the end of the ’80s, he was exhausted, burnt out, a husk of himself. He frequently said that he would never tour again, that he would be putting out a solo record, that he would do whatever it took to leave fame behind. He might have flirted with the idea of dissolving the band and re-joining the Banshees, as he’d done earlier in the decade. When someone wrote to the Cure’s newsletter in 1990 and asked what he’d rename his group if he had the chance, he answered, “The Curse.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
So there was plenty for Smith to be upset about. And with all due respect to Morrissey, Robert Smith was perhaps his era’s greatest moaner. In defiance of conventional wisdom, people loved him for it. Sadness, gloom, despair—the more popular the Cure became, the more their darkest fascinations became synonymous with their music, no matter how much Smith gabbed about his love for his wife or how many gushy love songs he wrote for her.
It’s hard to blame anyone for fixating on Smith’s moroseness. Even at his most tender, Robert Smith often sounded like a ghost who’s just realized he’s a ghost. Like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, he seemed to wander alone through a palace of spent decadence, picking up old photographs only for them to turn to dust in his hands. Even the Cure’s love songs—like, for instance, “Lovesong”—feel like they’re set on the last good day on Earth. Rolling Stone’s Michael Azerrad called him “rock’s premier prophet of gloom.” Melody Maker called the Cure “the sandmen we deserve, pitiful generation that we are”; they meant it as a compliment. Some in the British music press cheekily called the singer “Cap’n Bob,” attempting to deflate the dreariness of his image by poking holes in it.
