The Cure offer a dose of uncommon rock By Tom Coombe Robert Smith is happy. Is that really so hard to believe? Let's get the usual tiresome descriptions out of the way: "bleak," "Goth," "depressed," "gloomy," "black clothing," "wild hair" and "lipstick." Now, that feels better. No one is arguing that The Cure's 45-year-old lead singer has turned into Ned Flanders this far into his career, which began in the late 1970s with the attention-getting songs "Killing an Arab," "Boys Don't Cry" and "Jumping Someone Else's Train" and the album "Three Imaginary Boys." And to be sure, The Cure has put out some dark, dark music -- the band's slow, gloomy dirges in the early 1980s paved the way for a generation of Goth-rockers. But on this humid night in mid-July, Smith, calling from his home in England, sounds polite, pleasant and apologetic for phoning 20 minutes late (although this allows Smith to talk for 15 minutes longer than his publicist had allowed). Three days after this interview, Smith and his bandmates hit the road with seven other acts to begin Curiosa, a day-long festival-type concert that will cross the country through August, stopping Sunday at the Tweeter Center in Camden, N.J. They are touring behind a new album, a self-titled record that debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard chart seven weeks ago. Critics have called "The Cure" one of the band's strongest works in years. It's yet another "comeback" album for The Cure, a band that seemingly has threatened to retire more than The Who and David Bowie combined. The group recorded a concert DVD a few years ago, and "that was going to be
the end of the band, that was the unspoken assumption," Smith says, although he didn't add whether that assumption was correct. During this period, they were contacted by Slipknot and Limp Bizkit producer Ross Robinson, who made the new record "accessible, to a point," says Smith, although he admits "accessible" is a relative term. "I'm sure there's a huge slate of people who'd find what we do objectionable," he says. On this new album, it's easy to see where both terms could apply. It runs the emotional spectrum from anguished -- Smith sounds as if he's being stabbed on "Lost" -- to exuberant, as on the album's first single, "The End of the World," and the even more single-worthy "Taking Off." Then there's "Us or Them," which Smith characterizes as a response to the "onslaught of western media...the idea that you have to be afraid," and a general lack of tolerance in the post-9-11 world. "The notion of tolerance has been disregarded, it's been discarded," he says. And while the words "George," "W." and "Bush" never pass Smith's lips, it's not hard to see the song as a critique of the current U.S. administration; the title seems to reference some of Bush's speeches in the days following 9-11. It's an angry and sometimes profane song, the ugly flipside to another political outing by a British rocker: Morrissey's gentler-but-still-barbed "America Is Not the World." Smith says "Us Or Them" is the first Cure song in a long time to "reference the real world," something the band avoids doing for two reasons. One, Smith thinks music tends to make a poor forum for political debate. "It usually doesn't work, to be honest. It sounds hollow." Second, singing about current events dates the song. Smith wants the music to serve as a form of escapism for the audience, just as it is for him.
There's probably no chance of "Us Or Them" causing any kind of Linda Ronstadt-in-Vegas style outbursts from the audience, because Smith doesn't introduce the song. He wants listeners to lose themselves, just as he does onstage. "I allow myself to be completely unbridled." It's a feeling he discovered as a teenager. "I wanted to be David Bowie when I was 13, 14, 15 years old," Smith says, although he didn't sing in front of people until he was 16. "Once I did, I couldn't stop." Curiosa hits the nation's amphitheaters at roughly the same time the Lollapalooza tour had been scheduled to land. Earlier this month, organizers announced the cancellation of Lollapalooza because of poor ticket sales. Smith says he feels no pressure to succeed where Lollapalooza has failed. But he is confident in the line-up the band has picked for this tour. "The one thing we didn't want to do is get 25 "names' and stick them on a poster," he says. One of the drawbacks of this year's Lollapalooza slate, Smith observes, was that acts that could draw significant crowds on their own -- Wilco, the Pixies, PJ Harvey -- were only tapped to appear at some shows. Curiosa has the same line-up throughout the tour -- The Cure, Interpol, The Rapture and Mogwai perform on the main stage at all dates. The second stage changes as the tour goes on. In Camden, it will feature Thursday, Muse, Melissa Auf Der Maur and Cooper Temple Clause. According to Smith, The Cure chose its tour mates using a simple template -"Every band is a great live band" -- although Smith says he would have liked the line-up to include New York garage/punk trio Yeah Yeah Yeahs and neonew-wave band The Killers. Whether the Cure plans to "retire" at the end of this tour is up in the air, although Smith did talk about returning to the solo album he has worked on for several years.
"I'm ever hopeful," he says. "I'm not in any hurry."