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  The importance of iron works in the area increased dramatically during the 17th century, but it wasn’t until the extension of the railway line from London to Brighton, in 1848, that some life was breathed into this town and the population duly increased. But for many, Crawley was still a name seen on a sign from the window of a passing train, as you hurtled towards London or rattled down to the coast at Brighton. The town’s population did continue to increase, though, especially when nearby Gatwick Aerodrome was opened in 1938. During World War II, Crawley suffered some damage, much like any town of its size, when 24 homes were destroyed by aerial bombing. Once the rubble had been cleared and England started to regain its post-war bearings, MP Lewis Silkin announced that the area around Crawley, Three Bridges and Ifield had been chosen as one of the aforementioned New Towns.

  Fifteen years later, Robert Smith and his family – his father James Alexander Smith, mother Rita Mary (née Emmott) and siblings Richard, Margaret and baby Janet – moved from Smith’s birthplace of Blackpool, Lancashire, to this green and uninspiring town. They settled first in Horley in December 1962, at a house in Vicarage Lane where their next-door neighbour was the grandmother of Robert’s future Cure partner Lol Tolhurst (who at the time lived two streets away, in Southlands Avenue). They then shifted to Crawley in March 1966, so that Alex Smith could be closer to the base of his employer, Upjohns. By then, the population of the area was around 50,000, a rapid increase from the 9,000 who had lived there at the turn of the century. In the same year that the Smiths had come south, 1962, the additional neighbourhood of Furnace Green had been added to this so-called “New Town”. It was a rich irony that Alex Smith worked for pharmaceutical firm Upjohns, given his son’s Olympian drug consumption in the Eighties. Earlier, he’d served in the RAF, completing his training in Canada.

  Born on April 21, 1959, Robert James Smith was the third Smith offspring, preceded by his sister Margaret, who was born on February 27, 1950, and his brother Richard, who was born on July 12, 1946. Smith’s second sister, Janet, was born some 18 months after Robert, establishing a hefty gap in ages between the two elder and two younger Smith children. Smith insists that he was an unplanned child and that Janet was conceived primarily for his company. “My mum wasn’t supposed to have me,” he said in 1989. “That’s why there’s such a big age gap between us. And once they got me, they didn’t like the idea of having an only child, so they had my sister. Which is great, because I would have hated not having a younger sister.” Smith took full advantage of his new-found role as older brother, even discouraging Janet from speaking so he could act as interpreter. “I would say, ‘Oh, she wants ice cream,’ when in fact she was desperate to go to the toilet.”

  Speaking in 2000, Smith admits that while he only lived in the north for three years, it took him some time to shake off his Blackpool brogue, which led to the usual winding-up in the playground – sometimes worse. “I was born in Blackpool,” he recalled, “and the first few years of my life were spent up there. When I came down south, I actually had a broad northern accent and the piss was taken out of me mercilessly at school. That probably didn’t help me integrate.”

  In another, even earlier discussion of his childhood, Smith recalled that both his parents had held onto their northern intonation. “I used to have a northern accent because my mum and dad used to talk like that at home,” he said. “It always stuck out at school, which I never realised at the time. I thought everyone was saying ‘grass’ incorrectly. But I toned it down on purpose when I got into my teens. By then I think it might have been a bit pretentious to have affected a northern accent.”

  Smith clung to some strong memories of his time in Blackpool, which he felt explained his lifelong attraction for the seaside. “I’m sure that spending the first few years of your life by the sea means that you harbour a great love for the sea,” he once said. “Every time I have a holiday I always go to the sea.” Smith and his wife Mary, the first and only true love of his life, now reside in Bognor, which fulfils his long-held dream of living by the water. Smith figures his seaside life is simply an extension of his very early childhood in coastal Blackpool. “I wanted to wake up and hear the sea,” he admitted. “It’s bound to my childhood, to pure happiness, to innocence. I love the music and the perfume of the sea.”

  Smith’s recollections of Blackpool are so powerfully connected to the innocence of his childhood that he’s since found it almost impossible to return. He just doesn’t want the illusion shattered. “I have such strong memories of it: the promenade, the beach, the smell, it’s a magical memory, that evocative time of innocence and wonder. My earliest memories are sitting on the beach at Blackpool and I know if I went back, it would be horrible. I know what Blackpool’s like – it’s nothing like I imagined it as a child.”

  Smith’s father Alex owned a Super-8 camera and even before the Smiths went south, he would film his family, especially baby Robert, fooling about on the beach. In a 2001 interview, Smith would reveal to Placebo singer (and major Cure fan) Brian Molko another of his earliest memories. “There are a lot of films where I can be seen running like a crazy man, with some donkeys in the background. I remember seeing my sister eat worms – and to be honest, I dug them up and she ate them. I was about three and she was two. And my mother punished me. It must be one of the few times I was hit. I also remember the smell of the donkeys.”

  Invention, myth-making and straight-out piss-taking on the part of Robert Smith – often due to the repetitive nature of endless interviews – has resulted in a particularly murky rendering of his pre-Cure life story. He has variously referred to there being a history of drunkenness in the Smith family, a trait he’s done his best to uphold over the past 30 years. Smith has even partly blamed the up-all-night approach of his parents – who still occasionally tour with the band and are usually the last pair standing – for his well-documented fondness of a toxic lifestyle. He’s often referred to an Uncle Robert (one of the inspirations for The Cure’s 1989 hit, ‘Lullaby’), who appeared to have all the dirty-old-man qualities of Uncle Ernie, so creepily portrayed by Keith Moon in Ken Russell’s film Tommy.

  Smith was raised in a staunchly Roman Catholic environment, which resulted in his questioning of God and existence in 1981’s intensely dour Faith album. Smith insists that he and his mother once took a trek to the Vatican City, where he met the Pope: “Not the present one, about three Popes ago,” he said. “I was in St Peter’s and there was a Mass and he was carried in on a chair and I grabbed hold of his hand.” As recently as 2003, he told a French television audience that being raised in a Catholic family “is a good recipe for being turned into furniture the rest of your life”. However, Smith continued to attend Sunday services in the Friary, in Crawley, with his partner Mary, as late as 1980 and possibly beyond – only the blue ribbons in his spiked hair separating him from the other worshippers. (This, of course, he would deny, insisting that “the last time I was taken to church was when I was about eight”.)

  In keeping with their faith, Sunday was regarded as a special day in the Smith home and it’s a tradition he has continued to maintain, more out of habit than devotion to all things Catholic. “The sense of Sunday being a special day, and the tradition of having the family around, has always remained with me,” he said in 2004. But Smith’s recollections of the Sundays of his youth are, he admits, “quite … dismal”. “There was certain music on the radio, the same dinner, a huge argument between my brother, who was intensely communist, and my father, who had just been bumped up into the hierarchy [of the firm Upjohns] …”

  The Smith household might have been lively but it wasn’t violent: according to Smith, his father only once raised a hand in anger in his direction. “At the age of 12, I told my parents I wouldn’t be having any kids,” Smith revealed. “That was the only time my father slapped me.” Interestingly, Smith has stuck to his 1971 vow of no children, despite having been married since 1988.

  Generally, life at home for Robert Smit
h was as good if not better than most of his Crawley peers and pals. His parents were relatively lenient; his brother Richard (aka ‘The Guru’) smoked pot and his sisters loved rock’n’roll: what more could he want? “I was always treated as an equal by my family,” Smith once said. “I had a really good family life. School almost seemed to be the opposite. I couldn’t understand how the rigidity of school is designed to put you off reading and wanting to know anything. So I got very bitter in my teens.”

  Smith maintained this cynicism and uncertainty about life’s real meaning, which has permeated much of the darker side of The Cure’s music. Again, at times, he has indirectly blamed parts of his upbringing – especially his Catholic school education – for his questioning, restless nature. “I do not have faith in anything except for what I can see with my own eyes and lay my fingers on,” he has said. “But I know that some people have a very strong faith and I envy them. In the back of my mind I would love to have such faith. But then I wonder if they aren’t just fooling themselves?

  “I got into quite a lot of trouble [at school] through wanting to change things. I was on this crusade. And I got frequently suspended [only once, actually], which I thought was ludicrous. I would always conduct my arguments in a very civilised manner and the recourse teachers saw was to put me on suspension.”

  At the age of 11, Smith had taken an entrance exam to a public boys’ school, but threatened to run away from home if his parents forced him to attend. “My dad thought it would be good for my education, but my mum appreciated that I actually wanted to mix with girls. She thought that growing up in a house where I’ve got two sisters, it would be abnormal to suddenly send me to an all-male environment.”

  What is known of Smith and his pre-Cure obsessions – many being the typical domain of any middle-class English child growing up in the Sixties – would help explain many of his later musical and creative themes, hang-ups and obsessions.

  As depicted so graphically by director Tim Pope in the band’s 1989 video for ‘Lullaby’, spiders are not Robert Smith’s favourite insects. They’ve been freaking him out since he was a child. “Spiders are one of the phobias I’ve not been able to overcome,” he confessed years down the line. “When I was young, I was really scared of spiders – and they always used to be in my bed. They weren’t actually there, but I imagined they were. Fat spiders with thin, long legs that look like they’re going to burst make me go really weird.”

  Smith spent much of his childhood in a home that was “not exactly tastefully decorated”. The house was adorned with what he would remember as “weird-patterned wallpaper and weird-patterned carpet that didn’t match”. Smith would stare intensely at these patterns, inducing an almost hallucinatory state of mind. “I’d always see faces coming out of the patterns,” he once said, “like ghosts emerging from the carpet and wallpaper.” A very young Smith would go to bed with a dim light nearby; as he tried to drift off to sleep, he’d imagine shapes and images. “Things would come out of the wall. Some of them were friendly shapes but sometimes I’d see a light at the corner of the wardrobe and I was sure there was something behind it. Except once. There was a funny-looking man in a mackintosh whispering in Polish. That might have been a dream, come to think of it.”

  In 1964, aged five, Smith’s out-of-control imagination led him to believe that the family home had an unwelcome visitor who was visible only to him. He was convinced there was someone living in the house in a secret room. “I knew they were there, but I also knew I wouldn’t be able to see them, even if I found the room. I’d hear creaking and think it was a person on the stairs. I’d rush out of the bedroom to catch them and there would be no one there. They were too fast for me.”

  Even before then, aged three in 1962, Smith’s illusions of Santa Claus were forever shattered when he spotted Saint Nick rolling down the street on the back of a lorry. “I was crushed. There was no way Father Christmas would be sitting in that stupid fucking lorry. I never recovered from that.” Smith, instead, would mark Christmas by watching Mary Poppins, a tradition he maintained into adulthood. He would always be reduced to a blubbery mess by film’s end. “I remember being taken to see it by my mum and I came out thinking it was completely real. I was thinking, ‘Fucking hell, why haven’t I met anyone like Mary Poppins? Why can’t my mum slide up banisters?’” Smith’s mother eventually had to break the news to him that it was a fantasy, which, Smith says, crushed him almost as much as the sight of Santa on a lorry.

  Robert Smith immersed himself in the type of early heroes and heroines who were the stuff of standard childhood reading. His cartoon heroes included Dennis the Menace, “obviously a huge influence on me”. Smith had been reading the Beano comics and books since he was three years old. (Even today, his mother continues to buy Smith The Beano Book every year.) The attraction of someone billed as “The World’s Wildest Boy” obviously had an irresistible pull for someone like Smith with trouble in mind. He admitted to envying the Menace for having his pet cat Gnasher because, as a child, Smith was never fortunate enough to own a cat or dog “that was blindly devoted to me”. Smith once attended a fancy-dress party as Dennis the Menace, decked out in a red– and black-striped jumper knitted by his mother Rita. “I found this cat on the way,” he recalled, “and I walked in with the cat, pretending it was Gnasher.* Nobody believed me. In fact, everyone thought I was fucking stupid.” Smith responded by throwing the cat out of a nearby window. The startled animal landed on its back, thereby ruining Smith’s belief “that cats land on their feet all the time”.

  Such characters as Noddy were big favourites with a very young Robert Smith. Noddy “fuzzy-felts” hung above the head of his bed, alongside pictures of Catwoman and Queens Park Rangers’ Stan Bowles.† “I sort of liked Noddy,” Smith said. “He seemed to have a brilliant life. He would jump in his stupid red motorcar with his friend, Big Ears, and something weird would always happen. The ideal life, in a way,” said Smith, a man also not averse to running away from his problems, especially in the early days of The Cure.

  Andy Pandy was another of Smith’s childhood pals. His favourite of the Andy Pandy stories was Watch With Mother. Smith was impressed that nothing could really go wrong in this vivid make-believe world. “Andy Pandy was always going to go to sleep in his basket with Teddy and the world was a happy place.” While Smith thought Andy Pandy’s companion Teddy to be “godlike”, he wasn’t so sure about rag doll Looby Loo. “She never did anything. Weird.”

  A more direct childhood influence on Smith’s later songwriting, strange as it may seem, was Peter Pan, the kid who refused to grow up. Before Smith developed a serious thing for Betty Boop – “the perfect woman” – he was deeply enamoured of the fairy Tinker Bell. “I kept wishing Tinker Bell would come alive and rescue me,” he said. But more importantly, Smith was smitten with Never-Never Land, a permanent escape from the real world. “The idea of Never-Never Land is awful because it’s the best idea in the world,” he said in 1989. “At least half the songs I’ve written are about Never-Never Land.” Years after this childhood obsession, Smith remained so fond of the story that he considered playing ‘You Can Fly’ at the end of concerts, as he and the band wandered off backstage.

  Another youthful obsession was Lewis Carroll’s timeless Alice In Wonderland, a story tailor-made for a man who spent much of his working life tapping into his incredibly colourful (and sometimes deeply morbid) imagination. “I love the idea of a little girl having these strange adventures in the realms of the imagination.” Smith – who would go on to describe his role in The Cure as that of a “benign dictator” – was also drawn to Alice In Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, mainly because she was so powerful. “The power to have someone’s head chopped off is brilliant,” he has admitted.

  Smith’s father Alex had dreams of his youngest son becoming a writer. There was little or no television-watching in the Smith house; Smith has said that his principal entertainment while growing up was “reading and records”. When Ro
bert was three, his father insisted that he read the newspaper and become acquainted with the world. Smith, however, preferred to lose himself in such books as C.S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles – hugely popular in the United Kingdom – a seven-volume series with deeply allegorical allusions to the Bible and the life of Jesus Christ that his father would read to him as bedtime stories.

  “I adored running away in those tales,” said Smith, “it was my only reassuring moment. I was just discovering the incredible power of literature: it provided consolation and evasion.”

  Another childhood moment that Smith would revisit regularly as The Cure’s worth increased was a strangely eerie occurrence in the Smith family hallway when he was six years old, not long after the family moved into their home at Crawley. There was an old, “really horrible” (Smith’s words) mirror located in the hallway, which Smith did his best to avoid. He was convinced that he’d caught an unfamiliar reflection in the mirror. “I used to hate that mirror. Every time I came downstairs I used to avoid looking at it.” (Even later in his life, Smith’s home was noticeably short on mirrors. Some things stayed with him, clearly.)

  Smith insists that his nickname at school – he first attended St Francis Primary School, then St Francis Junior School, where he was enrolled between 1966 and 1969 – was Sooty, “because I never spoke”. But before football and then music grabbed his attention, Smith displayed a notable theatrical flair, taking the role of Nanki-Poo in a junior school production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado that is still remembered by senior staff at St Francis almost 40 years on.