Robert Smith Biography Quotes 26 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Robert James Smith was born on April 21, 1959, in Blackpool, Lancashire, and raised in Crawley, West Sussex, a postwar New Town whose ordered streets and commuter logic could feel like a provocation to anyone drawn to the strange and the ecstatic. The third of four children in a working-to-lower-middle-class family, he grew up amid 1960s British pop, radio singalongs, and the ordinariness of provincial England - the very ordinariness his later work would transfigure into romance, dread, and vertigo.

Crawley gave him two lifelong coordinates: a tight circle of school friends who would become his musical comrades, and a sense of being both inside and outside the story of English life. Smith learned early to guard his private self, cultivating a withdrawn humor and an almost theatrical self-presentation that functioned as armor. That tension - between the urge to disappear and the urge to declare feeling at full volume - became the emotional engine of his songs.

Education and Formative Influences

Smith attended St. Wilfrid's Comprehensive School in Crawley, where he met future Cure members including Michael Dempsey and Laurence "Lol" Tolhurst. He learned guitar young and absorbed an unusually wide palette: the melodic discipline of The Beatles, the art-school provocation of glam, the severed-nerves minimalism of punk, and the spacious melancholy that would soon be labeled post-punk. Briefly employed in the late 1970s (including office work) while playing in local bands, he gravitated toward music as a total life - not a career ladder but a way of thinking, dressing, and enduring.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

In 1978 The Cure emerged from earlier iterations (Easy Cure) and quickly became one of the defining English bands of the era, with Smith as vocalist, guitarist, and primary writer. Early singles and albums such as "Boys Don't Cry" (1979), Three Imaginary Boys (1979), Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981), and Pornography (1982) traced a stark arc from lean pop to cathedral-like despair; the 1982 period, marked by exhaustion and excess, nearly broke the group. Smith pivoted rather than collapsed, releasing the playful "Let's Go to Bed" (1982) and "The Lovecats" (1983), then balancing pop radiance and gothic grandeur across The Head on the Door (1985) and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987) before the imperial run of Disintegration (1989) and Wish (1992). Through constant lineup changes (including Tolhurst's departure and the stabilizing presence of Simon Gallup on bass), Smith held the band together as both architect and weather system, later continuing with Bloodflowers (2000), 4:13 Dream (2008), and the long-gestating Songs of a Lost World era of new material performed live before its eventual release.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Smith's art is built on a paradox: he makes confession sound like myth, and myth feel like a diary entry. The Cure's signature is not one mood but a controlled swing between extremes - brightness that feels chemically pure, and darkness that feels honest rather than decorative. He treats songs as living organisms, suspicious of nostalgia and proprietary pride, insisting, "I hardly ever listen to any of our old stuff now. Once the songs have been recorded and put on to vinyl they become someone else's entertainment, not mine". That det