Tim Pope has said that I will finish The Cure just to punish myself. I think that's the only area where Pope doesn't have a grasp on what we do. The Cure will stop because it takes too much effort to keep it going. That balance between wanting to do something and having to keep reaffirming our own existence, all the effort that involves. l keep coming back to the idea that The Cure is there for me because it's good fun. If it wasn't fun, it wouldn't be there.
"I don't use it the way Jim Kerr seems to need Simple Minds, to reach the intangible or something. If I'm doing an interview with a French paper, I can do by Jim Kerr bit for an hour or so. But that's pretending. I don't need that at all. You know why we're such a good group.
Because we don't try. It's all happened despite ourselves a lot of the time. Most people I see look as though they would do anything to expand their fame. It's a horrible thing to be. I can look like a complete bastard and I can look completely absurd, but there's still something else there. People who like The Cure seem to appreciate that. If that ever went, it would be dreadful."
It's seven years since my first meeting with Robert Smith and there's a pervading sense of deja vu in the air. Back in 1982, he was crawling from the wreckage of "Pornography", sick and exhausted, wearily announcing that The Cure had reached the end. "I don't want us to carry on like this," he told me. "I don't want The Cure to become a relic. I don't see any way on after a record like this." This time, there's no sickness and little exhaustion in evidence but, once again, Smith is explaining that his group are about to call a halt. This time I don't believe him. This time, it seems as though he's simply testing himself, thoughtfully playing around with the scope of his own resistance. Smith is scribbling his promises in the sand, knowing that the tide is coming in. Once the promise is erased, he'll be free to play again. This is Robert Smith's hiding game. He relishes the self-deception. He forces the role and, momentarily, is caught in it. Until the next time he needs to prod The Cure into action.
We're supping a beer on the roof of the BBC studio in White City where The Cure have spent most of the day preparing for a "Top Of The Pops" appearance. They find themselves sandwiched between Diana Ross and Debbie Gibson. We keep bumping into Diana in the BBC corridors and a curious relationship is built up. Every time we pass, Simon Gallup greets her with a hearty bark. The way one would greet a newspaper vendor on the way to work in the morning. Diana is obviously bemused and finally wonders who these odd people are. "We are The Cure," Simon announces with authority, as though he's part of an eccentric English tribe. Diana smiles, as though she'd already decided as much.
It proves to be a trying day for The Cure. After all the waiting, the endless rehearsals, they are ready to do the business. As they stroll into the studio, the BBC producer decides that Robert's slurred make-up is too much for the nation's pop kids to bear. Refusing to compromise, they march back to their dressing-room. Five minutes later, an apologetic Beeb official saunters in to tell them that it will be all right after all. Later, once his anger has subsided, Robert is attempting to see the positive side of the situation. "At least we still threaten people," he laughs. "That has to be a good thing."
THE CURE have been absent for two years. After the polychromatic "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" album, a pause was inevitable. Just as inevitable was some inward shift in the group. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Laurence Tolhurst, a close friend of Robert's since 1972, who vaporised this time.
"The last album was too easy to make," Robert explains. "We could have made three albums this year. After 'Kiss Me', I wondered what we could possibly do next. For six months after that record, we were involved in all kinds of promotional stuff - like going to Japan for 10 days to talk to complete idiots. I couldn't go through all that again: I knew that, by the next time I kicked it into life again, there would be none of that. I knew that I needed to feel more urgent about things. I just realized how confused I was. l knew I could be looked after. It's difficult for me to feel uncomfortable about things. But I would never feel comfortable if I started to grow up in the group. The main thing that the 'Kiss Me' album achieved was that people were at last forced to acknowledge us. It meant that the records which were ignored the first time around would finally be listened to. It takes a long time but it makes things even more worthwhile."
He points out that this was happening a lot in America. "The Head On The Door" had stayed in the US charts for 38 weeks, but it was "Kiss Me" that made them something more than a big cult act over there. Having discovered The Cure at this point, a large number of new fans suddenly realized the group had a sizable back catalogue and felt compelled to investigate, finding a rather different group to the one they had stumbled across. But back they went. To the nervous, hesitant beginnings of "Three Imaginary Boys", a record which offered precious little evidence of the imaginative flair to come. It seems rather ironic now that Robert Smith started out life in The Cure as a lampstand.
"I still hate that album," he seethes. "It's just cack. I couldn't see how anyone wanted it."
He has always insisted that I 980's "Seventeen Seconds" is The Cure's most important, if not their finest, album. It suggested that The Cure was not going to be a ritual gesture, that it was always going to be shuddering to a halt before starting up again in unexpected ways.
"It broke the group away from any stranglehold that Chris Parry of Fiction might have had over it," he now says about "Seventeen Seconds". "It actually gave me the self-confidence to do what I wanted. "You see, the linear thing dissolves with the longevity of the group. I actually have to pay less attention to what we've done, the more we do. I was very aware of our last record whereas I can't possibly be aware of our last 10 records. It's a kind of truism. It's true that I don't think of The Cure as a single group. The group that made 'Seventeen Seconds' wasn't the group that made 'Three Imaginary Boys', even at that early stage. I realized that the people involved and my attitude to those people affected what I was doing as much as anything."
By 1981, The Cure had won themselves the reputation of being the gloomiest band around. "Faith" was a tremendously solemn album and made one wonder how much further the group could go along this road. 1982's "Pornography" would take them to the limit. They suffocated on their own despair and self-loathing and emerged a new Cure, disentangled and enlightened.
"I'd reached a spiritual low point around that time," Smith recalls. "Inevitably there followed a physical decline. I couldn't be bothered anymore. It took quite a few different things to bring me out again. Mary was the biggest motivating force. There's a great advantage in knowing someone for so long, being the same age and from the same background. You know what the other person means and what they're going through. The disadvantage is that they can't offer much comfort. They can't tell you that everything is going to be all right because you both know, deep down, that it probably won't be all right. At the same time, it was good having someone I didn't have to pretend to. t had no reason to be anything other than what I was.
"But that album will always stand out. After 'Pornography', it didn't bother me. I let it all go. I knew we could do it and I knew how much trouble it would cause."
He does not recall "Let's Go To Bed" or "The Walk" with any fondness and admits that this was the only time when he contrived to make the group popular. By 1983, with "The Love Cats", they had mastered the art of the memorable pop single, launching a series that would include "The Caterpillar", "In Between Days", 'Close To Me" and "Why Can't I Be You", some of the most brilliantly playful pop records of the Eighties. "The Top" was a muddled disappointment, largely compromised, Smith explains, by the savage physical deterioration that was still taking place inside him.
"That album is all in the wrong tempo,' he smiles. 'It makes me laugh when I listen to it now. It might have ' been a weird transition, but I didn't have much choice. I didn't have the mental strength to communicate what I wanted to anyone else. I couldn't be bothered to tell anyone what key a song was in or what bassline to play. So I did it on my own. I was ill for months between 'Pornography' and 'The Top', but it didn't bother me at l didn't feel sorry for myself. That's what I wanted to feel like. I wanted to feel completely useless. It was an escape-route at the time. It was the easy way out.
l985's"-The Head On The Door" romped through the emptiness of Smith's imaginary spaces, infatuated with dreams, lies and love. The infamous Mad Bob phase where he too seemed to feel the need to reinvent himself. It made for great theater, but Smith emerged bruised and confused. Once again, he was trapped within his own dramas.
' I became like a kind of freak-show. But the only way out of something like that is to live it. I know that having this sense of longevity allows me to smile. Smash Hits will say, 'Robert Smith is back and he's no saner!' But there's nothing in there to say why I'm odd anyway. It's just a convenient term. It's tired and old now. Eventually, it will drop off me like another skin. At the time it was fucking awful. The only time I think of myself as weird is when I'm having my photo taken and I think of myself writing a song like 'The Same Deep Water As You' six months before. One of them has got to be true. I know there's nothing real or true about having my photo taken. The singing part is true. I play along with the other part as much as anyone does, but I despise people who don't realize they're playing.
"In 1985, the actual decision for me to go and meet Simon and ask him to rejoin the group was the most positive thing I'd done for ages with regards to The Cure. Once he'd agreed, I knew I could pick up where I'd left off with 'Pornography'. I could then use what was in the group to uplift people, rather than just moaning about things. The things that forced me to make an album like 'Pornography' are still there. I could still write 'Pornography'. There are songs on 'Disintegration' that are trying to deal with the same things, even if they're not a direct continuation. These things just won't go away...
"DISINTEGRATION" is the record The Cure might have made after "Pornography" if they had not completely degenerated and dissolved. When I mention to Cure mentor, Chris "Bill" Parry, that the new album is remarkably subdued, he argues that it is ultimately rejoicing. Parry, who has conveniently replaced Tolhurst as the group's scapegoat and fall-guy, explains that The Cure have more experience to draw on now. That they can go down while managing to uplift the listener.
After the quixotic "The Head On The Door" and the awesome stretch of "Kiss Me", the new album might, on first hearing, suggest a backward turn, to the drowsy angst of "Faith", where Smith was up to his knotted forehead in the temporality of love, desire and life, spread out on the torture-rack, considering the center of his own failure.
With "Disintegration", Smith has immersed himself once more in the spectacle of his own suffering. You need not go searching for a line like, "hand in hand is the only way to land", or, "I should feel like a polar bear". If the songs of the last four years have been snatched from his dreams and imaginings, "Disintegration" moves back into the real world of loneliness, isolation, uncertainty, regret, failing love, faithlessness and the memory of bliss. Only on "Love Song" does Smith sound as though he has reason to cheer. Surely, there's nothing as hopeless as "The Funeral Party" or "The Drowning Man", but "Prayers For Rain" and "The Same Deep Water As You" come perilously close.
Even by Cure standards, it's an extremely unlikely turn.
"It's got a lot more in it than a record like 'Faith', Smith decides. "With 'Faith', it was like one song divided up into eight different songs. I suppose songs like 'Closedown' and 'Untitled' take up that thread, going back to the old things about age, sadness and disintegration itself. They give the record a bleaker mood overall. I think it's the kind of record you'd want , to listen to on your own.
"I know why the songs are like this. It's got a lot to do with just turning 30, getting married last summer, things that have nothing to do with anyone else really. I guess 'Kiss Me' was a summing up for the group, while this record is a personal summing up for me. I think it's as fur as I can go. I'm aware of repeating myself, going over familiar ground. I'll have to find another medium for myself. Boxing perhaps... "
Though he argues that it would have been too easy to have made another three albums like "Kiss Me" this year, isn't it also too easy to make a record like this ? "Well, H's not actually. It's not easy at all. For me to sing songs like this is extremely difficult. But it's not an ethic or anything. It's how I felt when I wrote these songs last year. f didn't feel particularly, um, good, at the time. The same things bother me and they always will. They are intrinsically tied to my own deterioration and they get more acute as I get older. They don't deaden. When I was young, l could think about things that bothered me in an abstract way. Now I don't. They're too real.
"I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to get this record right because my sense of perfectionism has increased as I've got older. It took nearly year for me to believe this record was right. If this is going to be the last Cure record, then it has to be the one that's best. I have to think like that. If I have taken these songs and made them as good as they can be, then how can I possibly think about what's next? You just become pulp if you think like that.
"It's a real shock to come to 'Top Of The Pops', thinking that I'm going to be facing people again. I wonder why I'm doing it. Horrible. I genuinely feel tike that. I find it quite frustrating that I'm sometimes so easy-going about this group and that I sometimes let it slip. But at least I let it slip upwards."
THE forthcoming solo album is, of course, a convenient way for Smith to feel comfortable with the idea that The Cure is at an end. For a while, he can stop the tide from coming in to erase his promises. "Actually, the real reason I want to do a solo album is that Tom Sheehan took a photograph of me three years ago the perfect photo of me, and I'm never going to use it unless I do a solo thing.
"A lot of the words for 'Disintegration' were written for a record I was going to make on my own. I took them to the rest of the group knowing that, if they were resistant to the idea of going back to The Cure of eight years ago, I would use them myself. I would have been quite happy to have made those songs on my own, but, at the same time, I wanted to do something that had a real depth of emotion to it. If the group hadn't thought it was right, that would have been fine. The Cure would have been left on the shelf somewhere until I'd got all this out of my system, so we could go back to something everyone was happy with. Deep down, they know I'm going to railroad over them anyway. I say that the solo album is a threat, but it's not really a threat at all.
"The songs on the solo record have been building up musically for a few years - piano, cello and guitar pieces. Very simple, minimalistic songs. What would our drummer, Boris, be doing? To me, it would be an imposition to take these pieces to the band. It wouldn't be The Cure then. What's the point of saying to Boris, 'There's no drums on this record but you're still in the group'. I've sung what I wanted to sing on 'Disintegration'. It's a Cure record and it's all the better for being a Cure record because there's no other input on it. That's what went wrong on 'The Top', where there was no outside criticism at all. I didn't even let anyone else into the studio. Can I be trusted on my own? Well, not really. But I realized I had to do a solo thing because there were all these bits that had been rejected by various Cures over the last five or six years, and I wanted to use them."
PERHAPS the closest anyone has got to a definition of Robert Smith can be found within the pages of Steve Sutherland's definitive "Ten Imaginary Years" biography. When director Tim Pope was asked about Robert, he replied, "Smith's a very paradoxical character. Everything he is, he isn't. He's very pretentious, but he isn't. He's always black, yet he's white. The Cure are the stupidest band you could ever work with, yet they're the brightest and most intelligent. They're the noisiest, but they are the quietest. Robert says he's like a child, but he isn't. He's too intelligent."
"I don't know then, do I?" laughs Robert. "I don't know what's occurring. It's like this... I know what I want more than I know what I don't want. I run The Cure like a negative dictatorship. I know what people can't do and what they can't be, but I'm open to what people want to do and what they want to be.
"Basically, I'm probably not the best judge of what we do. But I give my big sister Cure tapes and she plays them for her children. Her youngest boy is like the perfect Cure critic. He actually verbalizes things that I feel about what we are doing but can't put into words. When I'm on the cover of magazines, he walks around with them. He thinks it's really fascinating that I do what do while I'm almost as old as his mum. But he can't figure the two things out. This Robert Smith that makes a fool of himself on 'Top Of The Pops' and the one he knows. That's a bit like I feel really..."
WHEN the interview finally wraps itself up, it's one o'clock in the morning. Robert insists on driving me home and dropping me at my door. We stop off at Finsbury Park so he can grab a bag of chips.
"I've felt closer to The Cure in the past than I do at the moment," he tells me as we turn into my road. "I thought it was over after 'Kiss Me' when we had a very long lay-off. It gets to the point where it takes so much effort to get it going again. It would be easier to stop now than to keep it going."
The car slams to a halt. This is the end. Until the next time.
Thank you for the lift, Robert.