Robert Smith has credited his late brother for encouraging him to pursue The Cure full-time, instead of enrolling in further education.
The frontman recently appeared on Radio X for a track-by-track run-through of the band’s first album in 16 years ‘Songs Of A Lost World’, which was released on November 1.
Smith penned the track ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ about his brother’s death, and previously said that doing so had “helped [him] enormously”.
Speaking to Radio X‘s John Kennedy about the song, the musician and vocalist – who formed The Cure in 1976 – explained: “My brother gave me the idea that I could do whatever I wanted.
“It’s like, you know, my dad was also very supportive, but far more traditional. He wanted me to finish my education and then be in a band, if that’s what I still wanted to do.”
Smith continued: “And I used to, you know, initially try to get him to see that that isn’t how the world works. You can’t come out the other end of university and then decide to be in a band. You do it, you know, or you don’t do it.”
He went on to remember how his brother “took [his] side, and I think it was him actually cajoling my dad, because I think otherwise that would have been a problem, because they let me stay at home whilst I got it out of my system”.
“But I never got it out of my system,” Smith added. “I think that maybe, with hindsight, my dad thought that the sooner we fail, the sooner he gets me back to the idea of a formal education.”
You can watch the full conversation in the video above.
Opening up about ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ in a previous interview, Smith explained: “I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died. It went all around the houses and I went everywhere with this song to sum up how I felt. In the end, it turned into a reasonably bleak little vignette.
“[…] It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”
NME described the emotional song as an “album highlight” in a glowing five-star review of ‘…Lost World’ – while calling the album on the whole “a masterful reflection on loss”.
It read: “It musters everything [Smith] and the band have in the tank to breathe with that deep, dull ache that lingers when you lose someone closest to you: ‘Something wicked this way comes / To steal away my brother’s life.’”
Back in 2019, Smith said that losing his mother, father and brother had inspired the “darkness” of The Cure’s new album (then titled ‘Live From The Moon’).
More recently, he explained: “When you’re younger, you romanticise [death], even without knowing it. Then it starts happening to your immediate family and friends and suddenly it’s a different thing.
“It’s something that I struggled with lyrically: how to put this into the songs? I feel like I am a different person than I was when we last made an album. I wanted that to come through.”
Meanwhile, Smith has recently talked about how quitting smoking was the “most important” decision he made in preserving his voice. He’s also revealed that he has “written a really catchy pop song” that could be a Christmas single.
Earlier this month, the frontman shared details of two more Cure albums – one of which is set to be a “companion piece” to ‘…Lost World’, while the third takes a different approach.
Smith then teased in his Radio X interview that he was “already finishing” the band’s next full-length record, and hinted at a summer 2025 release. “It’s not as dark in some ways,” he said, “although it actually has probably the saddest song of all of them on it.”
‘Songs Of A Lost World’ has landed at Number Six on NME‘s 50 best albums of 2024 list. Lead single ‘Alone’ also reached Number 19 on our 50 best songs of the year run-down.
Last week, The Cure released a live album of their one-off London Troxy show – where they played their latest LP in full, aired fan favourites and greatest hits, and celebrated their seminal second album ‘Seventeen Seconds’.
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