What do you do when you’re feeling stagnated and realising more and more that maybe the recording booth isn’t really the place where grand inspiration is born? In Robert Smith’s experience, the answer for The Cure was to make some calls.
It was the end of the 1980s and the band were getting big. With each new release, The Cure seemed to foster more and more attention as they straddled the dark world of post-punk and goth, but also seemed able to deliver that energy with an underlying pop sensibility to make it hook. Their last record, The Head on the Door, had been the latest success, boosting their fame to a global level. But as we know well by now, with fame comes pressure.
With pressure often comes creative difficulty. With too many voices, it’s hard to get any level of clarity on what you’re trying to achieve. It becomes easy to go limp in the face of other people’s opinions and loosen control, ultimately leading to a finished product that simply doesn’t feel right.
The band were beginning to know that feeling well, and so in 1987, they decided to do something different. For the making of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, they shut themselves off. “We recorded it in complete isolation,” Smith recalled, “We didn’t allow anyone to hear anything until we’d finished it – no one at all, not even our families.”
They took it seriously, as Smith said, “It was a very unreal situation—ten weeks of being completely cut off from the world, with no outside stimulus at all. We had no television, we had no transport to get to the nearest town, which was five miles away, and all the food was sent in a van in the morning.” But once the songs were written and things were coming together, he knew the process needed to change.
That moment came when Smith entered the vocal booth. This was the part he always found hardest. Despite being the frontman and being revered as one of rock’s finest and most unique vocalists, something about laying down his part made him nervous. In the spirit of the album and the purpose of shifting their entire way of doing things, he decided to lean into that.
“About halfway through, all the girls came down to join us,” Smith explained. “I asked Mary to sit in the studio when I was singing some of the songs, and it was very strange actually singing to her, which I’d never done before,” he remembered. Going from being utterly on their own, the band changed it up to bring their wives and girlfriends out.
Smith took it one step further and asked his life-long partner, Mary, to literally sit there and watch him sing, purposefully making himself even more anxious and even more determined to do well to try and impress the woman he loved. To make it even more intense, he had her sit there while he recorded songs like ‘Just Like Heaven’, a truly adoring and personal love song directed at her, both lyrically and now literally during the performance.
This wasn’t the first time. “The only other time she’d been in the studio was on Pornography – she sat in a chair and stared at me when I was singing ‘Siamese Twins,’ I think,” he said.
Somewhere along the way, he’d discovered this to be a new trick. If he wanted a great performance from himself, he basically had to make himself nervous or anxious. He had to emulate the way that stage fright often kicks in as pure adrenaline or a determination to prove himself. To have Mary there, the woman he admired most, put him on edge in a way that made him focused on succeeding.
“So it was very weird to have Mary sitting there watching me. And the rest of the group came in and stared at me when I was singing ‘Shiver And Shake,’ to make me feel uncomfortable so I could sing with an edge,” he said, discovering the ultimate cheat code for a great vocal take.
