"When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs"
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It lands like a shrug, but it’s a whole origin story compressed into one self-deprecating grin. Robert Smith frames The Cure’s beginning not as destiny but as accident: a band assembled around the wrong job title, a creative engine fueled by nerves, booze, and the awkward courage of being the guy with the strange material. “I wasn’t the singer” rejects the mythology of the born frontman; “drunk rhythm guitarist” makes the pre-fame self both unglamorous and oddly credible. Rhythm guitar is the utility role, the glue. Pair that with “weird songs,” and you get the core Cure contradiction: the most emotionally maximal music emerging from someone insisting he wasn’t even the main character yet.
The subtext is about authorship and permission. Smith isn’t bragging about chaos; he’s underlining how scenes work. In late-70s post-punk Britain, you didn’t need a conservatory pedigree, you needed a point of view and the nerve to impose it. Calling the songs “weird” is also a sly defense mechanism: it disarms critics before they arrive, while quietly asserting singularity. Those songs weren’t weird in the throwaway sense; they were strange in the way that made teenagers feel seen.
There’s intent, too, in foregrounding messiness. It pushes back against the polished retrospective that turns bands into brands. Smith’s version keeps the scrappy truth: the voice that eventually defined a generation started as an unintended consequence of being the one who wrote the material no one else could quite inhabit.
The subtext is about authorship and permission. Smith isn’t bragging about chaos; he’s underlining how scenes work. In late-70s post-punk Britain, you didn’t need a conservatory pedigree, you needed a point of view and the nerve to impose it. Calling the songs “weird” is also a sly defense mechanism: it disarms critics before they arrive, while quietly asserting singularity. Those songs weren’t weird in the throwaway sense; they were strange in the way that made teenagers feel seen.
There’s intent, too, in foregrounding messiness. It pushes back against the polished retrospective that turns bands into brands. Smith’s version keeps the scrappy truth: the voice that eventually defined a generation started as an unintended consequence of being the one who wrote the material no one else could quite inhabit.
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| Topic | Music |
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