Stereo Warning: The Cure: Robert Smith interview

Here's part two of the Robert Smith interview. Stay tuned for part three tomorrow, this thing is loooong!

How’s the recording going?
As usual I’m holding it up, because I can’t get the words how I want them. I find myself stopping short and thinking I’ve done this before better, so it’s hard to find subject matter that really matters to me, things that I really want to sing. I just don’t want to make a record because we’re in a group. That flies in the face of what I’ve always wanted The Cure to be. It frustrates the others a lot I think but there’s not much anyone can do about it. The last four Cure albums have really stalled on my lyric writing. I think it’s worthwhile because they end up better than they otherwise would have been. I never worry about writer’s block, I figure if I don’t have anything to write about I shouldn’t be writing.

What does the record sound like? Does it resemble any of your past work?
It’s incredibly varied at the moment. Everyone’s contributed so there are some very different styles. It could be a mix of all the different styles or it could focus much more on a down beat or it could be incredibly energetic and upbeat. I tend to favor the first option, I like the idea of kind of starting and traveling and ending up somewhere else rather than being a mood piece like “Bloodflowers.” I like the idea of it being more in the style of the “Kiss Me” album with different things happening. But the art of that is to get it to all hang together which is quite difficult as well.

We didn’t demo this album. It’s the first time we hadn’t done band demos since the early 80s. It’s a bit of a leap in the dark but I wanted to capture the band just playing. I loved the way Russ Robinson recorded us for the last album, the demos for that were sensational, but we lost something when we worked out the songs went back in and rerecorded it based on what I’ve written. I wanted to let the band play and then write to what we played, which is why I’m finding it a little bit hard. I used to steer the band into a direction based on what I wanted the song to say. This time I’m giving the band a couple of vocal pointers and some titles and some words and then we’re playing and then I try to fit the song to that. It’s more enjoyable because it’s a way around of doing it. It doesn’t sound like “Pornography” though, it doesn’t have that relentlessness that some of those early albums had. It has more color, a lot more style.

The album will be what would normally be demos, but it sounds fantastic. We spent one day per song. We’d learn the song in the afternoon. When we’re comfortable, we take a break then we come back and we run through it until we think we’ve got a take. Exactly like last album, the difference this time around being that we’re not going to go back and rerecord it. The reason why demos often sound good and exciting is because it kind of teeters on the edge. Everyone’s concentrating and trying very hard to get it right. Often when you come back and rerecord there’s a bit of a comfort zone, there are no mistakes or glitches, they always get rid of them in the end. This time around we’re not gonna get rid of those. Listening to the live stuff from last year with Porl playing drew me to this idea because I thought we played 60+ songs and there was no way we could’ve rehearsed that many songs to get them all perfect and we just went with how we felt on stage about that particular performance. Some of them have what one might call mistakes in them but they sound great and that pushed me to this idea of not trying to refine everything all the time. That’s something I do a bit too much I think.

Check back tomorrow for part 3 of this interview.

Tags: the cure robert smith