Robert Smith is known the world over as the frontman of The Cure. He was not always the group’s singer, though. He started out as their pianist, and it took years before he even attempted to perform lead vocals for the group. When he did, it did not go very well. “I sang the wrong song!” he revealed in a 2024 interview with Absolute Radio.
His journey from the back of the stage to the frontman spot took several years, and that story is synonymous with the journey towards the formation of The Cure, that band’s formative years, and their numerous line-up changes which gradually gave changes of dynamics within in the band which quietly pushed Smith towards the microphone.
The founding members of the Cure were school friends at Notre Dame Middle School in Crawley. They first performed in public at an end-of-year show in April 1973, as members of a one-off school band called Obelisk. That band consisted of Robert Smith on piano, Michael Dempsey on guitar, Lol Tolhurst on percussion, Marc Ceccagno on lead guitar, and Alan Hill on bass.
In January 1976, while at St Wilfrid’s Comprehensive School, they had morphed into a five-piece rock band called Malice. Smith had moved to guitar alongside Ceccagno, Dempsey had moved on to bass, and two unnamed school friends completed the line-up. They rehearsed David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Alex Harvey songs in a local church hall. By late April 1976, Ceccagno and the other two members had left. Lol Tolhurst rejoined the band on drums, with Martin Creasy (vocals) and Porl Thompson (guitar) completing the lineup that played all three of Malice’s only documented live shows during December 1976.
In January 1977, Creasy also left the band. The remaining members were increasingly influenced by the emergence of punk rock and renamed themselves Easy Cure after a song written by Tolhurst.
After winning a talent competition, Easy Cure signed a recording contract with German record label Ariola-Hansa on 18 May 1977. Peter O’Toole (no relation to the actor) was the band’s new vocalist for several months around this time, but he left in September 1977 to live on a kibbutz in Israel.
The band auditioned several vocalists that month before Smith just assumed the role – temporary at first, then the situation just stuck. The new four-piece of Dempsey, Smith, Thompson, and Tolhurst recorded their first demos (as of yet unreleased) as Easy Cure for Hansa at SAV Studios in London in October and November 1977, before eventually simplifying their name to The Cure.
Robert Smith’s live debut as a vocalist happened around the same time, in the late autumn of 1977. The group was still known as Easy Cure, but the live debut was anything but easy. In his December 2024 interview with Absolute Radio’s Danielle Perry, Smith looked back on taking the stage as a frontman for the first time, still suitably embarrassed by what happened.
“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. You know, honestly, at school, I never did anything on stage,” he said.
“I was always doing wardrobe stuff. And even when we did our first shows…I sang one song at our first show, just to see what it felt like, and I sang the wrong song.”
The band had rehearsed both David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix songs in rehearsal. Smith launched into a David Bowie song. The song he was supposed to sing, however, was one of Jimi Hendrix’s biggest hits. “I played and sang Suffragette City, and everyone else was doing Foxy Lady,” he recalled. “And I was so drunk, I didn’t even know. I thought, ‘That was good.’ And everyone’s like, ‘You played the wrong song.'”
“I never felt like I was cut out to be a singer, and I kind of grew into it because I fell out with everyone else that occupied that position until I became the de facto singer,” he added.
“That’s why, the early albums, the early mixes, I’m really low down in the mix.”
“But 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 until we find someone who can sing.’ So I sang the first album and then discovered that people liked what I was doing.”
As embarrassing as the Bowie/Hendrix mix-up had been, the experience did not discourage Robert Smith from actually giving Foxy Lady a proper go later on. That first line-up of The Cure recorded the Jimi Hendrix cover in 1979 and included on their debut album Three Imaginary Boys.
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