For over four decades, the man with the smeared lipstick and the tangled crown of black hair has stood as rock’s most enduring enigma, a figure who turned existential dread into stadium-sized catharsis. Today, in a rare and candid video reflection, Robert Smith of The Cure has finally pulled back the curtain on the sonic architecture of his own soul, naming the seven albums that served as his blueprint for transforming pain into poetry and despair into danceable art. The revelation, delivered with his characteristic blend of self-deprecation and fierce artistic pride, offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of a musician who has spent a lifetime making sadness sound like salvation.
The confession arrives not as a formal press release, but as a deeply personal monologue, a journey back to a teenager in Sussex who discovered that being different was not merely possible, but powerful. Smith’s list is a masterclass in eclectic taste, a testament to a man who absorbed everything from glam rock’s theatrical excess to folk poetry’s quiet devastation. Yet, the most striking element of his commentary is not the list itself, but the context he provides for his own work, particularly when addressing the legacy of The Cure’s own ambitious double album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.
“Most double albums in the past have been generally bad because people can’t seem to write enough good material for a double album,” Smith stated, offering a blunt critique of the format’s history before defending his own contribution to it. “I’m pleased with it as a something that we that was done like seven years ago. It’s it’s a really good album.
But as long as people are aware that it was made seven years ago.”
That caveat—the insistence on temporal context—is quintessential Smith. He is a man perpetually out of step with the present, yet eerily prescient about the future. His journey begins in 1972 with David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
For a young, alienated Smith, it was a transmission from another planet, a permission slip to reject the boring masculinity of the era and embrace full-throttle theatricality. “Bowie wasn’t just a musician. He was a shape-shifter,” Smith reflects, his voice carrying the weight of a revelation that never faded.
The album proved that rock stars could be aliens and poets, broadcasting from the fringes, balancing beauty with danger in songs catchy enough for the radio yet weird enough to feel like secret discoveries. When “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” closed with its devastating emotional crescendo, Smith learned a lesson he would carry for life: spectacle and sincerity could coexist, and image was inseparable from the music itself.
From the glitter-soaked glam of Bowie, Smith’s journey takes a sharp turn into the raw, untamed power of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. Here, Smith found a different kind of liberation. “Where guitars didn’t just play notes.
They wept, screamed, and whispered,” he observes, describing the album as a masterclass in creating entire sonic worlds through reverb and melancholy. Hendrix taught him to treat the studio as an instrument itself, to understand that a few perfect notes played with sensitivity meant more than a thousand fast ones. This philosophy of restraint and texture would become a hallmark of The Cure’s sound, the shimmering, watery guitar lines that define tracks like “A Forest” or “Pictures of You” owing a direct debt to Hendrix’s pioneering use of the recording space as a canvas.
The list then pivots to the underground, to the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut, an album that taught Smith the value of artistic bravery. With its uncomfortable six-minute descent into addiction on “Heroin” and its exploration of feeling completely alone at a party on “I’m Waiting for the Man,” the Velvets proved that rock could be art that made you feel something real, even when that something hurt. It was a validation of the darker corners of the human psyche, a sonic acknowledgment that alienation was a valid subject for pop music.
Smith’s obsession with anxiety as a musical texture deepened with the inclusion of The Doors’ Strange Days. He cites its hypnotic keyboards and Jim Morrison’s documentation of teenage alienation as a pivotal influence, an album that offered no answers, only honest confusion about a world that didn’t make sense.
By 1978, the landscape had shifted, and Smith found a direct template for The Cure’s early sound in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ debut, The Scream. The scratchy guitars and tribal drums of that record showed Smith that punk could be dark and artistic, a visceral reaction to the world that didn’t have to sacrifice intelligence for aggression. It was a sonic bridge between the raw energy of the punk movement and the gothic melancholy that Smith would soon pioneer.
However, the most surprising entries on the list are the quiet ones. The Beatles’ Revolver is cited not for its psychedelic experimentation, but for the devastating quiet of “For No One,” where Paul McCartney made heartbreak feel intimate and profound. Smith learned that sadness didn’t always need volume; sometimes, a simple piano line and a fragile vocal could cut deeper than any scream.
The final piece of the puzzle is Leonard Cohen’s 1967 debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen. For Smith, this album is the ultimate proof that vulnerability is a superpower. “Whispered despair landing harder than any scream,” he says, describing Cohen’s poetry set to the simplest arrangements.
It was a lesson in economy and honesty, proving that you didn’t need to shout to communicate pain. This influence is perhaps the most profound, echoing through The Cure’s entire discography, from the sparse, acoustic-driven Faith to the lush, baroque pop of Disintegration. Cohen taught Smith that the most powerful communication is often the most personal, the most fragile, the most human.
In the end, Smith’s list is more than just a collection of favorite records; it is a map of his own artistic DNA. It reveals a man who has never chased cool, but rather chased feeling, who built a career on the alchemy of turning personal despair into universal anthems. As he looks back on a catalog that includes Seventeen Seconds, Pornography, and the monumental Disintegration, one can see the threads connecting Hendrix’s sonic experimentation to Bowie’s theatricality, and Cohen’s poetic vulnerability to the Banshees’ dark aggression.
The Cure’s sound, often imitated but never duplicated, is a synthesis of these disparate influences, a unique alloy forged in the crucible of a teenager’s bedroom in Sussex. Smith’s revelation is a gift to fans and music historians alike, a rare moment of clarity from an artist who has always preferred to let the music speak for itself. It confirms what many have long suspected: that the man who made sadness sound like salvation was, from the very beginning, listening to the ghosts and the dreamers, and learning how to make their whispers roar.
