When Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry met the Cure’s Robert Smith
The musicians discuss collaborating on the Glaswegians’ new single, what’s great about rock — and what needs to change
Pictures of you: Robert Smith of the Cure sang with Lauren Mayberry on How Not to Drown from Chvrches’ new album, Screen Violence C FLANIGAN; GREG CHOW/SHUTTERSTOCK
Last week, rather thrillingly, I had a long and delightfully discursive FaceTime chat with Robert Smith of the Cure and Lauren Mayberry, the singer in Chvrches. Not an interview anyone really expected, but then their collaboration — on Chvrches’ recent single How Not to Drown — was a shock too. Mayberry, 33, originally from Scotland, is in Los Angeles, where she lives, appearing on video in front of a yellow flower. Smith, 62, from Crawley in West Sussex, is on the south coast, with, yes, his scraggly dark hair and eyeliner, curtains drawn to keep daylight out. The Cure turned 40 three years ago: has he got any advice for how to keep Chvrches — who are ten — going for that long?
“We’ll be dead!” Mayberry says, laughing. “We started too late.” “That’s what I thought,” Smith chips in. “Not that you’d be dead,” he clarifies quickly. “But there is no secret. It’s very easy for me to say now, but at a very young age I thought I’d rather fail on my own terms than succeed on someone else’s, and I still feel like that. It doesn’t guarantee longevity, but whatever time you have is of value and that’s more important than having a long career and thinking it was rubbish.”
How Not to Drown is from the chart-topping electro-indie trio’s forthcoming fourth album, Screen Violence. “It is weird to talk about you in front of you, Robert,” Mayberry says. “But the fact that you sang a song with us and didn’t send it back circled in red pen saying, ‘Terrible metaphor’? Well, we’re very pleased.” Mayberry says that her boyfriend jokes that all of her favourite singers can’t sing, to which Smith flinches. “What?” he exclaims. “Put him on!” When Smith says that he has been listening to Chvrches, it appears to ever so slightly blow Mayberry’s mind. When she was in her teens she would take a bus to Stirling to browse CDs by the Cure. “It’s definitely not lost on me that you’re still in love with music,” she says, beaming.
Hitting the right note: Chvrches collaborated with the Cure’s Robert Smith
Their collaboration is a jagged and pummelling blast of bass and synth, with lyrics about Mayberry feeling overwhelmed: suitable for when most of us feel, well, overwhelmed. “Somebody around the band said radio stations aren’t going to play songs that are depressing because everyone’s already depressed,” Mayberry says. “I thought, ‘God. You’re not going to like the album then.’ But I also thought it was a load of crap. I wasn’t listening to any party bangers last year.”
“If you talk to someone and you’ve got a problem, you don’t expect them to tell you jokes,” Smith says, in agreement. He has a wonderful knack for a blunt conclusive statement. “There are moments you really don’t need to laugh, and what I’ve always tried to do with my band is, when I feel like I’m going to do happy stuff, I do happy stuff. It’s just about how I feel at different times of my life. I’ve never thought of what I do as a career and think it would be incredibly difficult to be an artist that had to fit into a genre. When you’re young and growing up you think, ‘I hope I never turn into that person.’ That’s really been my main driving force — I had this image of who I don’t want to be; I had no idea who I wanted to be.”
When Chvrches write their songs, bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty create sounds for Mayberry to write stories over. Smith is fascinated by this way of working, fitting words to somebody else’s tunes. He compares it to Tin Pan Alley.
Has his own writing process changed? “It’s slowed down!” he says and laughs loudly. The Cure have made 13 albums, including maudlin masterpieces Pornography and Disintegration, and huge chart hits Friday I’m in Love and Close to Me. There is a 14th record in the works, but then that has been the case for years.
Robert Smith: “I think the modern world has gone down a really weird detour” AMY HARRIS/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
“I must admit,” he says, with sadness, “I’ve struggled more with finishing the words to these new Cure recordings than at any other point. We recorded 20-odd songs and I wrote nothing. I mean, I wrote a lot, but at the end I looked at it and thought, ‘This is rubbish.’ The difficulty is I’ve become such a harsh critic of myself I think, ‘Who’s going to be interested in that?’ It is really that bad. I was listening, thinking this is the best music this band has made and my words are drivel.
“Last year I just gave up. I thought, ‘I can’t do it. They can all be instrumentals.’ And this year I sort of came back to it. Last year was difficult for a number of reasons, not least the pandemic, but what I wrote this year I have enjoyed.”
Yet it is still a struggle. “You write a certain number of songs and, honestly, you repeat yourself,” he admits. “How many things are there to write about? Seven stories or something? You try to find different words for something and it steps out of your normal use of language and sounds terrible. I want to sing as I speak and my vocabulary is reasonably OK, so I thought, ‘I’ll put “undulating” in a song.’ That is one I tried. Then I think, ‘You’re not singing f***ing “undulating”!’ ”
Smith is hugely enjoyable company. At one point we reconnect because he is a bit muffled and he apologises for trying “£10 in-your-ear bluetooth things”. Rock stars are up there on stage, as icons. A fulfilment of our wildest desires. But there is very little more relatable than fiddling with cheap tech.
He just loves a chat, revealing humour and vulnerability. “The new Cure stuff is very emotional,” he says. “It’s ten years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff. I can’t think we’ll ever do anything else.” On Glastonbury, which the Cure headlined on the Sunday in 2019, at the last festival that took place, he quips: “Yeah, we closed Glastonbury!” Then he talks about a Miami festival years ago. “It was f***ing awful: 100,000 people chanting, ‘Tiesto.’ ” Tiesto is a DJ. When I ask if Smith’s new lyrics have anything to do with the weirdness of lockdown, he replies, “I don’t see anyone anyway!” before clarifying that he knows he had it easy. He had space. That was key to contentment, and Smith, the songwriting issue aside, now seems full of it — a happy man best known for era-defining sad songs.
There is another new Chvrches track called Good Girls, with the line: “Killing your idols is a chore/ And it’s such a f***ing bore.” It is about artists who do something reprehensible and is a subject Mayberry has spoken about before. On a panel once, she jokingly pleaded for “one nice straight white man in a band”.
Lauren Mayberry: “It’s up to each person whether you divorce the artist from the art” REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
“Well, Robert’s the unicorn,” she says, grinning. “The unicorn who has not done anything terrible in any of those newsworthy ways.” Smith looks sheepish. Mayberry had an argument in a pub once with a friend who wanted to continue listening to an unnamed singer after an indiscretion had been revealed. “It’s up to each person whether you divorce the artist from the art,” she says. “But I feel like we spend so much more time talking about a handful of disappointing males than anything else. People get more annoyed at people saying, ‘Isn’t he a rapist?’ than they do at the artist who broke their heart by doing such and such.”
Smith asks if she can divorce the art from an artist, and she says if someone is the lyricist, she finds it harder because it is their universe we are being invited into. “Who cares what the drummer’s up to!” Smith says with a laugh. “But then,” Mayberry adds, “it’s not up to people to live up to my standards.” It is a continuing discussion. “I find it difficult to divorce art from the artist,” Smith admits. “But the best way is just to avoid the internet. Pretty much everyone is going to let you down and it’s really difficult for people to come to terms with idols having feet of clay.” He pauses. “Unless they die?”
Mayberry and Smith navigate a very different world of pop music. From the early days of Chvrches, Mayberry has been very online — writing a powerful article about pop misogyny; using the internet to engage with fans and fight fires. Smith, on the other hand, has never had a smartphone. He talks about doing the job that he and Mayberry do pre-internet. On their first tour to New Zealand the Cure had a fight and their hotel room was trashed. It made the Daily Mail and Smith was told off by his parents when he got home.
“But you had to really do something newsworthy to make the newspapers,” he says. “There was a limited space so the threshold was high to make a headline. Now there is no threshold. It’s just everything. I think the modern world has gone down a really weird detour, to be honest. And at some point we will say, ‘We just took a wrong turning.’ People are just overwhelmed. I’ve realised that my life, in technological terms, is simple.” He pauses before talking about FaceTime. “This is really novel,” he continues. “This is my third time doing it and I hate it.” Mayberry, a screen-savvy millennial, apologises but Smith says it is OK. “It’s a communication device,” he admits. “But you can’t look at someone when talking to them. I’m finding it difficult, so I realise I fell off the merry-go-round. But I feel better for it.”
I finish by asking Smith if he knew that Mayberry once dressed up as him for Halloween. She cringes. I found a photo online. “You see. Social media is cruel!” Mayberry protests. Smith grins and suggests he pops a blonde wig on so he can have a Mayberry costume. “People asked if I was Edward Scissorhands,” she says.
I could have talked to these two for hours. What enormous fun and emotions. But she has an album to release and he an album to — finally — finish.
Screen Violence is out on Aug 27
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