Smith hasn’t forgotten about those Cure albums, though. “Probably in about six weeks time I’ll be able to say when everything’s coming out and what we’re doing next year and everything … We were doing two albums and one of them’s very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn’t,” he said. “And they’re both very close to being done. I just have to decide who’s going to mix them. That’s really all I’ve got left to do.”
“I must admit,” he says, with sadness, “I’ve struggled more with finishing the words to these new Cure recordings than at any other point. We recorded 20-odd songs and I wrote nothing. I mean, I wrote a lot, but at the end I looked at it and thought, ‘This is rubbish.’ The difficulty is I’ve become such a harsh critic of myself I think, ‘Who’s going to be interested in that?’ It is really that bad. I was listening, thinking this is the best music this band has made and my words are drivel.
“Last year I just gave up. I thought, ‘I can’t do it. They can all be instrumentals.’ And this year I sort of came back to it. Last year was difficult for a number of reasons, not least the pandemic, but what I wrote this year I have enjoyed.”
Yet it is still a struggle. “You write a certain number of songs and, honestly, you repeat yourself,” he admits. “How many things are there to write about? Seven stories or something? You try to find different words for something and it steps out of your normal use of language and sounds terrible. I want to sing as I speak and my vocabulary is reasonably OK, so I thought, ‘I’ll put “undulating” in a song.’ That is one I tried. Then I think, ‘You’re not singing f***ing “undulating”!’ ”
“The new Cure stuff is very emotional,” he says. “It’s ten years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff. I can’t think we’ll ever do anything else.”