ROBERT SMITH
All spidery substance and no “empty flash”, The Cure frontman makes the guitar sound like no one else.
When The Cure broke big with 1989’s Disintegration, and the world turned its attention to Robert Smith, the frontman’s guitar playing was always doomed to be a footnote. For wags it was all about the hair, the slap and the moan; for casual fans, it was the songs and the synths. By comparison, the sinister, spidery lines spun by Smith with a Fender Jazzmaster (or often a six-string bass) were a best-kept secret – although hugely influential to those that knew. When Smith played guitar, as Billy Corgan once put it: “The air gets heavier.”
Growing up in West Sussex, Smith’s formative influences weren’t as leftfield as his outlier image suggested. He had taken (then dropped) classical guitar lessons, and has cited everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Rory Gallagher as touchstones. But the fact that he turned up at Morgan Studios in London to record The Cure’s 1979 debut album Three Imaginary Boys carrying a £20 Woolworth’s electric announced his refusal to play the archetypal guitar hero. (He eventually bowed to pressure from management and bought a Jazzmaster, but transplanted the cheaper guitar’s pickup.) “I used to abhor guitar solos,” Smith told Guitar Player in 1992. “I didn’t like the whole wanky idea of stepping to the front and saying: ‘Look at me!’”
Right from the start, his playing in The Cure was the opposite of empty flash. Revisit the Middle Eastern trills that open debut single Killing An Arab, for example, or the doomy string bends that perfectly mirror One Hundred Years’ opening gambit ‘It doesn’t matter if we all die’. Even in the late 80s, as The Cure fell reluctantly into the mainstream, Smith remained a guitar player with a bolder plan, whether de-tuning his top string for a DIY chorus effect, or defying musty blues shapes with the haunted-house intro of Lullaby and the crystalline descending lick that opens Just Like Heaven – still two of the most icily brilliant singles to trouble the UK charts. “I’m not technically a good player,” he told The Hit. “But at least I don’t sound like anyone else.” HY
Listen to this: Just Like Heaven (The Cure, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987)