Robert Smith

In March 2023, when The Cure put tickets for their American tour on sale, Robert Smith went on Twitter to say that Ticketmaster's fees made him sick and that he was going to ask how they were justified. The next day he announced he had got some of the money refunded: ten dollars to anyone who had bought the cheapest ticket, five to everyone else. The band had already imposed its conditions beforehand: no dynamic pricing, no platinum tickets, non-transferable tickets so that touts could not resell them. The average price came to $68.57.

A sixty-three-year-old man, hair like a tangle of spiders and red lipstick smeared on purpose, fighting the biggest company in the business over ten dollars. That is the character. And to understand why millions of people care so much, you have to go a long way further back.

Two faces on the same record

Robert Smith was born in Blackpool on 21 April 1959 and founded The Cure in 1976. Since then he is the only thing that has never changed in the band: he writes, he sings, he is the face. With his look alone — the pallor, the hair, the deliberately smudged make-up — he invented the appearance of a whole subculture, and did it almost by accident, as a reluctant rock star who never seemed to enjoy the role.

But what makes him singular is not the look. It is that he held two opposite things at once, and never chose.

The Cure could be the most desolate band on Earth. Pornography, from 1982, sounds like somebody coming apart inside with no interest in hiding it. Disintegration, from 1989, is a cathedral of grief and remains their masterpiece. And the same band, sometimes on the same record, wrote the brightest pop you can imagine: "Friday I'm in Love", "Just Like Heaven", "The Lovecats", "Boys Don't Cry".

The easy reading is that they were two bands. I think the opposite: that is where the honesty is. That is what a real inner life looks like. Nobody is sad all the time or happy all the time; you are melancholy and ridiculous on the same Tuesday. Smith refused to resolve that contradiction because resolving it would have been a lie. He gave sadness dignity and joy permission, in the same voice, apologising for neither.

The simple song inside the darkest record

And there is a detail that turns all that darkness inside out.

Smith met Mary Poole at fourteen, in a school drama class. He never left her side again. They married in 1988 and are still together. And on Disintegration, the most desolate record he ever made, the one bright, simple, undefended song — "Lovesong" — he wrote for Mary as a gift.

What he said about it is my favourite thing in this whole profile: that it is "an open show of emotion, not trying to be clever", and that it took him ten years to reach the point of feeling comfortable singing a love song that direct. Ten years. The poet of despair needed a decade of practice to allow himself to write something plain.

That is why his sadness was never a pose. A man who spends his life with his teenage sweetheart and takes ten years to dare say it out loud is not performing depression. He is being, exactly, who he is.

Why he is loved so much down here

To the kids who were the odd ones out — the too melancholy, the too intense, the ones who fitted nowhere — Robert Smith said with his whole body that you could be like that and be beautiful, and not be alone. Whole generations found a home in The Cure, and nowhere more than in Latin America, where they are loved with a devotion that surprises even the band: full stadiums in Chile, Mexico and Argentina, singing every word back.

It is no accident. It is the same phenomenon that makes Latin America love Depeche Mode as nowhere else in the world: English music, cold and sad, received on this continent with a warmth its authors did not expect. Here melancholy is not lived as a defect to be cured but as something you share, and The Cure arrived with exactly the right soundtrack for it.

The old subject, now for real

In November 2024, after sixteen years without an album, The Cure came back with Songs of a Lost World. And this time the loss was not literary: Smith had buried his brother. The album is about that, and "Endsong" grew out of his memory of watching the Apollo 11 landing with his father in 1969.

There is a detail that humanises it. The record was going to be darker still, and it was Mary — the same Mary — who told him nobody would listen to it that way. He took her advice. It went to number one in Britain, the first since 1992, with 93 out of 100 on Metacritic and a Grammy for best alternative album.

The man who had sung about grief for forty-eight years finally had to sing it from the inside, and it turned out he was still, exactly, the right person for the job. He had not been rehearsing: he had been waiting.

Robert Smith is alive, still touring, still making the sad and the strange feel at home. His gift was not the melancholy but the permission: he proved it is not a flaw to be hidden, but something you can make beautiful, dance to, and sing in a stadium with forty thousand other people who feel the same. If you ever cried to "Pictures of You", or "Friday I'm in Love" lit up a grey week, or you painted your eyes black and felt for once that somebody understood, Robert Smith was already with you. He built a house for the sad and left the door open.

Sources

Robert James Smith was born on 21 April 1959 in Blackpool, England. He is the co-founder, singer, guitarist, principal songwriter and only continuous member of The Cure, formed in 1976. His image — tangled hair, smeared red lipstick, pallor — became emblematic of the goth subculture. The band alternated bleak albums ("Pornography", 1982; "Disintegration", 1989) with luminous pop singles ("Friday I'm in Love", "Just Like Heaven", "The Lovecats", "Boys Don't Cry"). Smith has been married to Mary Theresa Poole since 1988. Of "Lovesong", included on "Disintegration", he said it is "an open show of emotion, not trying to be clever" and that it took him ten years to feel comfortable singing a love song that direct. In March 2023, during the on-sale for the North American tour, Smith publicly criticised Ticketmaster's fees; the next day he announced the company would refund part of the charges (ten dollars to buyers of the cheapest tickets and five to the rest). The band had refused dynamic pricing and platinum tickets and made tickets non-transferable; the average ticket price was $68.57. "Songs of a Lost World" was released on 1 November 2024, sixteen years after "4:13 Dream" (2008); it deals with the death of Smith's brother, and "Endsong" was inspired by his memory of watching Apollo 11 with his father in 1969. It reached number one in the United Kingdom — the first since "Wish" (1992) — scored 93 out of 100 on Metacritic and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. According to published accounts, Mary Poole pointed out that the original, darker version would find no listeners. He remains active. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia and press coverage.