Don’t let me get too comfortable or else I’ll drift right off," warns Robert Smith from under several layers of hotel bedding. Why, you ask, is Bubbly Bobby bedded down anyway? Well, it’s not the flu or even severe jetlag, but an invitation from Star Hits that’s the cause.
It’s not all that hard to convince Robert to (ahem!) go to bed. Left to his own devices, he’d never get up until "well after noon" and only serious threats from the legendary Mary, his girlfriend of ten years can force him into seeing the light of morning. "Even that’s a pretty rare occurrence," he chuckles.
You’d think a guy whose get-up-and-go had got-up-and-went wouldn’t do much career-wise, but that’s where Robert Smith perks up. He once maintained membership in The Cure, a studio congregation called The Glove and Siouxsie and the Banshees all at the same time. "The stuff from that period sounds all jumbled up to me now, but I guess it was done by a pretty jumbled up person." His schedule’s gotten a bit less hectic since those days, but The Cure still manage to pop up in the oddest places.
"We just got back from Venice," he reminisces. "Which sounds more romantic than it actually was - we were doing a show after all. And before that we were in the south of France." And though they should be wrapping up a three week American jaunt right about now, Robert doesn’t try to hide his hatred for being on tour.
"It’s not so much the actual playing, which I quite enjoy. It’s the things like the crappy neutral colors they paint all hotel rooms, and lots of people using the word ‘fabulous’ all the time. I think they’re completely... DISfabulous!"
It seems flying creates problems, too. Besides not being able to unclog his ears, Robert nearly missed his flight due to some overzealous customs folk. "I’m obviously a surrogate Libyan terrorist," he smirks. "I got stopped and searched four times on my way from the entrance to the gate."
And how does he cope with the rigors of travel? You guessed it, sleeping - or pretending to sleep. "Those eye things (The Lone Ranger things you slip on to catch a few winks - Travelin’ Ed.) are great. People think you’re asleep no matter what! You can be sitting up moving around and the stewardess’ll still lean over to the person you’re with and ask ‘Shall I wake your friend for tea?’"
Tea isn’t Robert’s drink of the moment. He calls next door for a bottle of beer, and pours half of it into a nearby glass of orange juice. Er, looks delightful, Robert. "Try some," he gestures. "It’s really quite tasty. My dad makes beer, a home brew which we all drink. That’s responsible for the entire output of The Cure and he doesn’t even know it!"
So The Elder Smith is the one to "blame" for Standing On A Beach, the greatest hits album named after a line in the first Cure single "Killing An Arab." Robert admits taking pleasure in the album as a whole, but reckons "I’ve written some real dross, like ‘Let’s Go To Bed,’ but I didn’t like that when I wrote it either. I like performing it now actually - it’s like a little bit of cabaret."
He has equally harsh words for the peppy "The Lovecats": "We’ve only tried playing it live three times, and each time it’s been a complete disaster. I’d love to be in some piano bar at three in the morning and go (snaps his fingers) "And a-one and a-two...’"
Suddenly his lipsticked mouth splits into a huge yawn. Getting too comfy? "Well, at home I sleep on this little wooden bench, so this is so luxurious," he grins.
Ouch! With surroundings like that, you’d think he’d be glad to get away for a few months of mattresses and room service, but he claims he can’t sleep properly anywhere but his little hovel. It’s no wonder that he suffers from nightmares. "Infrequently," he adds. "But when I have them they’re really gruesome and they stick in my mind."
"When I was really young, I was hunting for scandal in one of my brother’s drawers and I found this tiny book of my brother’s drawers and I found this tiny book called The Victorian Book of Dreams. When you’re that young you don’t think about your dreams meaning anything, you just live with them. But this had these elaborate explanations of what it meant if you dreamt your teeth fell out. I thought that the author was someone in authority who knew all these things. I was scared that if I dreamed the wrong thing I was going to DIE!"
Curiosity didn’t kill this Lovecat, and it’s stuck with him to this day. "When we’re on tour now, we spend the early part of the day recounting all our dreams from the night before. The funny thing is in the delirium of a tour you can recount what you think is a dream, and it’ll be something you really did."
"You know what’s the most interesting thing?" he leans over and whispers. "People who can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I think everyone who gets committed just has trouble telling when their dreams end. I’m sure people who see me walking through airports must think I’m just a bad dream!"
