Musical Influences
Robert Smith has credited his older siblings Richard and Margaret with exposing him to rock music such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones when he was six years old. He has said that his early songwriting "was influenced by early Beatles - the sense of a three-minute guitar-pop song", and early in his career The Cure's second single Boys Don't Cry was compared by British music paper Record Mirror to "John Lennon at 12 or 13". Alex and Rita Smith encouraged their children's musical development, as Smith told French magazine Les Inrockuptibles: "my parents were lending us their stuff; my mum made me listen to a lot of classical music to enable me to have a larger vision of music". When Robert was eight years old in 1967, Richard played him Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix, who became hugely influential. Of this period, Robert Smith later went on to say:
| “ | My brother was also crazy about Captain Beefheart, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, so much so that when I was 7 or 8, to the despair of my parents, I became some kinda little devil fed on psychedelic rock. | ” |
Smith was ten years old in 1969 when he first began listening to Nick Drake's album Five Leaves Left:
| “ | Nick Drake's on the other side of the coin to Jimi Hendrix. He was very quiet and withdrawn ... I think also that because he had an untimely death like Jimi Hendrix, he was never able to compromise his early work. He was never able to put a foot wrong. It's a morbid romanticism, but there is something attractive about that. | ” |
It was not long afterwards that Robert Smith attended his first rock concert - Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival. At the age of thirteen in 1972, Smith first saw David Bowie on television, performing Starman on Top of the Pops. He later recalled:
| “ | ...every person in Britain who saw that performance, it's stuck with them. It's like Kennedy being shot for another generation. You just remember that night watching David Bowie on TV. It really was a formative, seminal experience. | ” |
Smith said that the first LP he ever purchased with his pocket-money was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. According to Apter, Bowie also paved the way for Smith's love of Glam rock bands such as Slade, Sweet and T. Rex, and during the same period, Robert also became a fan of Roxy Music. Rita and Alex maintained their supportive attitude: "My mum and dad ... were encouraging us to talk the records we liked", said Smith. "I remember staggering talks about Slade and Gary Glitter."
Smith said that he was fifteen when he first heard Alex Harvey, and that The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was the first and only group he ever really followed.
| “ | He was probably my only real idol. I travelled around the country to see them ... People talk about Iggy Pop as the original punk but certainly in Britain the forerunner of the punk movement was Alex Harvey ... I remembered the power of that live performance and I've tried to have that in my mind since I started up my own group. | ” |
Smith soon became influenced by the emergence of the UK punk scene of 1977, and has cited The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers, Elvis Costello, The Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees as important influences on his own music from this period. He described the release of Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols as
| “ | ...the last time something major happened to me and changed me ... it was the best summer of my life. I remember listening to "Anarchy" for the very first time at a party and thinking "this is it!" You knew straight away, you either loved it or hated it, and it polarised an entire nation for that summer. | ” |
Elsewhere Smith said that "the Stranglers were my favourite punk band" and that
| “ | Elvis Costello was a cut above the whole lot of them. The way he used words and the way the songs were put together ... gave me something to aspire to. | ” |
Of both Siouxsie and The Buzzcocks' influence on his early output, Smith has said:
| “ | The two groups that I aspired to be like were the Banshees and The Buzzcocks ... I really liked The Buzzcocks' melodies, while the great thing about the Banshees was that they had this great wall of noise, which I'd never heard before. My ambition was to try to marry the two. | ” |
The Melody Maker's Ian Birch recognised the Banshees' influence on Smith's band early on, comparing The Cure's 1978 debut single Killing An Arab favourably to Siouxsie's Hong Kong Garden (released a few short months earlier). Along with the Banshees, early Cure gigs from 1978-1979 supporting post-punk bands such as Wire and Joy Division also influenced Robert Smith's shift in musical direction from The Cure's 1979 album Three Imaginary Boys to 1980's sophomore effort Seventeen Seconds. Smith said that, in the early days of The Cure
| “ | I wanted to be like Wire or the Banshees. These were the people I emulated on a very immediate level. They were the generation immediately preceding me, literally by a year. They had a certain kind of power to them that transcended punk. | ” |
Playing support for Wire (at Kent University in October 1978) gave Smith the idea "to follow a different course, to hold out against the punk wave ... Wire pointed out another direction to me."
Read more about this topic: Robert Smith (musician)
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