Robert Smith as a contemporary hero
A mensch in eyeliner
They say don’t meet your heroes, but there’s little chance of me doing that anyway, as with due respect of my heroes are not based in the world of Brussels-based agricultural lobbying. Perhaps in part because of my general professional obscurity, my constant feeling that I need to improve my lot, I’ve always had heroes, people I look up to, people I think who are doing life right.
Quietly, in recent years, a new one has been emerging: Robert Smith, bandleader of The Cure. I like the band, obviously, who doesn’t; during the pandemic, their album ‘Disintegration’ became a great source of comfort to me, a sort of big hug of bracing sadness, the musical equivalent of a walk along the English coast in winter. The Cure seem to me one of those bands like Yo La Tengo or Low who absolutely reliably give you that thing that they do – let’s say swooning gothic melancholy – better than everyone else and that, if you’re in the mood for it, works as reliably as liquor.
Recently, tho, there’s been an accumulation of details about Smith’s life which have made him seem oddly heroic in my view. In his own quiet way, Robert Smith seems to be proving quite the mensch.
The most obvious evidence for this was the recent imbroglio over dynamic pricing, meaning when digital algorithms increase ticket prices in face of demand. Smith was one of the rare acts who made it clear that they weren’t having it. The singer is evidently conscious that the band, unlike many legacy acts, actually has younger fans, and wants to make the concerts as accessible as possible for them; this move also prevents the group's crowds being made up of the sea of bearded fiftysomethings who supply the key demographic for paying musical consumers these days. Ater all, if you can’t go and see The Cure when you’re 24, when can you?
It’s not beyond the call of duty, and not worth making an excessive fuss of, but it is impressive if you consider the amount of people probably prepared to blow smoke up Smith’s arse about this and anything else. To still be in touch to that extent with the economic reality of your fans says something very good 45 years into a music career, and evidences a certain punk sensibility retained.
Smith seems to demonstrate a certain adherence to principle in his personal life too. In 1988, he married his childhood sweetheart Mary Poole and they’re still together. Apparently happily too. Indeed, the photo of them on their wedding day which begins this piece - I hope you don't mind me sharing it, Rob - is a reliable source of romantic inspiration for me. Looking at this happy made-up couple never quite fails to cheer me up. Add to that incidental details, such as that Smith wrote Disintegration’s deft ‘Lovesong’ as a wedding gift for his wife, and their union acquires an air of the downright wholesome.
The charm is aided, I think, by Smith’s lack of kids, and his fairly forthright justification of that. In his words:
I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else. Living, it's awful for me. I can't on one hand argue the futility of life and the pointlessness of existence and have a family. It doesn't sit comfortably. ... I enjoy myself hugely, but you know, it's despite myself, really. - Smith in a Guardian interview from 2011
The key sentence here is ‘arguing the futility of life’ and then having a family, because some people absolutely do this. They sit on a kind of comfy cushion of pessimism and at the same time acquire all the markers of a bourgeois existence. No! Don’t just don pessimism as a fashionable pose. Existential despair isn’t just teenagers acting up; it comes from somewhere, from a feeling about life. At the very least own the inconsistency of taking a dim view of human life and its possibilities but nonetheless viewing it as essential to pass that life on to another generation.
I can completely get optimists, religious people, people with a strong sense of the inherent goodness of life who want to have families. What I don’t get is people who view procreation as a grim duty; it baffles me, for example, that notoriously gloomy Austrian film director Michel Haneke has a kid. Imagine the bedtime stories. For his part, Robert Smith has followed through his own logic and stayed true, for good or ill, to a certain vision of the world and the human place in it.
There’s lots of further things to like about how Smith goes about his business – his attempt to break the record for longest show, for example, his funny rejoinders, or The Cure recently announcing their new album with a poster at the pub where they played their first gig. He was completely on the money about Queen. And he’s a QPR fan, which likely explains much of the existential despair. Weirdly, the word I’d use for the way Smith gets the eyeliner and frizzy hair on year after year is dignity – a man presenting himself to the world in the only way that he can.
I’m sure he has problems; turning up pissed and apparently telling David Bowie he hadn’t made a good record since 1992 isn’t the most elegant of moves. In the video to ‘The Walk’ Smith pulls slanty eyes at the mention of a ‘Japanese baby’. It’s a long career and the praise in this piece, like any written about a rock star, is given the morals of the music industry a bit of a hostage to fortune. But as a man myself entering (at best) the back half of life, there’s something almost admirable about the way Smith has stuck to his guns, his combination of being down to earth and still putting on his old Goth warpaint at 65. And happily enough, based on what’s come out of the new album, staying creatively sharp too.
Robert James Smith. Even the name has a sort of Frank Capra, everyman-battling-the system quality; a scion of middle-class Sussex whose dreams have taken him further than he might have deemed possible. Someone familiar with the unfashionable virtue of not selling out. Just a humble man in kohl eyeliner taking on the world; here’s to many more years of the Old Goth Stager being exactly himself.