In a new interview with Absolute Radio, The Cure frontman Robert Smith admitted that he didn’t want to be a singer in the beginning.
“For whatever reason, when I sing, people connect with it. I have no idea why, and I don’t think any singer does. I was horrified when I ended up as the singer,” Smith admitted. “At school, I never did anything on stage. … I sang one song at our first show, just to see what it felt like – and I sang the wrong song.”
During their first show, Robert Smith unknowingly created a chaotic yet memorable moment. While the rest of the band launched into Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady,’ Smith performed David Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’ completely unaware. “I played and sang ‘Suffragette City’ and everyone else was doing ‘Foxy Lady.’ And I was so drunk, I didn’t even know. I thought, ‘That was good!’ And everyone’s like, ‘You played the wrong song!'”
While he became the frontman of The Cure in 1977, the singer feels that he was never cut out to be a singer. “I kind of grew into it because I fell out with everyone else that occupied that position until I became the de facto singer,” the singer explained. “That’s why, the early albums, the early mixes, I’m really low down in the mix.”
He added: “When I started singing, I didn’t think anyone would like what I sounded like. I didn’t, and so I thought no one else was going to. And so I thought, ‘This is going to be a really short career unless we find someone who can sing.’ So I sang the first album, and then discovered that people liked what I was doing.”
Moreover, the singer almost ended the band’s career after their show in 2018 at Hyde Park, London. The band had planned for it to be their final performance, but an invitation to play at Glastonbury changed their plans. Smith explained that his desire to stop wasn’t due to a lack of interest in performing live. Instead, he wanted to do different things with the remaining time in his career.
The Cure released their awaited album ‘Songs Of A Last World’ on November 1. The album was their first album since 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream.’
