<copy><![CDATA[However difficult it is to imagine, Robert Smith would, I’ll bet, be pretty handy in a fight. Yes, THAT Robert Smith, of the smudged scarlet lipstick, bird’s-nest hair, high, reedy singing voice and fey, even camp demeanour. For one thing, and unlike nearly all famous people, he’s actually taller in the flesh than he appears in photographs. More importantly, though, Smith is – and always has been, since he emerged from Crawley, south of London, 28 years ago to found the Cure – a walking juxtaposition. The author of some of the most sensitive, tortured and introspective songs committed to tape in the history of pop, Smith is also a beer-swilling and, at one time, drug-vacuuming geezer, with an imperishable small-town tribalism that means he’s still hanging around, and in some cases playing with, mates from his Sussex adolescence. His moodiness is legendary, his commitment to his muse blinkered and ruthless. So synonymous are the Cure with inter-band fall-outs, court cases and rapidly changing personnel that it comes as some surprise to realise the current line-up has been in place for in 10 years. Smith loathes the machinations of the music business, but appalled many fans with his recent decision – albeit one forced on him in a contractual stand-off – to license In Between Days for use in a Fiat Punto commercial. And he can write songs with lines as tender and yearning as “The happiest day I ever knew / In a sea of gold down next to you” (from a new album track, Before Three), yet say of Morrissey, another walking juxtaposition with whom Smith has a long, dishonourable and thoroughly entertaining history of spats: “Morrissey’s so depressing, if he doesn’t kill himself soon,<br>I probably will.” Given this background, you would hesitate to suggest Smith sounds happy on the Cure’s new, eponymously titled album. But one key development marks it out from its predecessors: the involvement of the producer Ross Robinson. A Cure fanatic whose track record includes successful stints at the controls for Korn, Slipknot and Limp Bizkit, Robinson treated the Goth veterans like rookies, filling the studio with charts on which he would mark each musician’s performance, including Smith’s, and not hesitating to have them record until dawn if he felt they could improve on a take.<br> The surge of energy you hear leaping from the speakers indicates this had a liberating effect, not least on Smith himself. “Usually I’m the one who has to make everybody do things again and again,” the singer commented recently, “but this time it’s like I’m a member of the band.” Any group that have been around as long as the Cure will always see a new album hailed as “their best work since...” (In Bowie’s case, the benchmark is always Scary Monsters, and the praise for the new work in question invariably deluded and hyperbolic). But the new Cure album finds the band sounding genuinely rejuvenated. It peels back in turn the layers of jadedness, overfamiliarity, even cynicism listeners can’t help but have developed over the years, enabling us to reconnect with the reactions, associations and excitement we first felt and which embedded the band in our affections. Opening with Smith chanting a lyric – “I can’t find myself in the head of the stranger in love” – whose air of detachment and alienation will be meat and drink to his army of doppelganger fans, the album closes with a 10-minute epic, The Promise. To true believers, the latter will be manna from pop heaven, though the song seems destined to mark the point in future live sets where the diehard moshers hold their cigarette lighters aloft, and the rest of the audience head for the loo or the bar. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Smith himself is aware of the song’s patience-stretching properties, for he slips in a small gem of a hidden track to conclude things: a pared-down grace note, its lulling guitar and piano lines supporting a deliciously double-edged lyric, “I’m going nowhere / Don’t look so scared”, that is part reassurance, part threat, part fatalism. What occurs between these two points is what makes the Cure’s new album so hair-raisingly good. Its central sequence of six intricate, self-doubting, imploring new songs – beginning with Before Three, taking in the pure Cure of The End of the World, the electro-tinged, romantic wrack-and-ruin of Anniversary, the blistering agitpop of Us or Them, the falsetto-flecked whimsy of I Don’t Know What’s Going on, and the quintessential Smith-isms of the skittering, flickering Never – would be impressive, even extraordinary, from a new band. Coming from a group nearing its 30th birthday, and fronted by a giant haystack with a liking for lippy and lager, it’s downright<br>miraculous.Click <a href="asfunction:Tardis.webPageOpen,http://www.thecure.com"><b>here</b></a> to visit the official Cure website. Buy for £12.99 or less, including postage and packaging, before July 26. Subject to availability.]]></copy>
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<quote><![CDATA[Robert Smith still inspires contrary<br>small-town boys everywhere. And Dan Cairns finds the Cure are back on familiar turf]]></quote>
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<caption><![CDATA[Smith: come and have a go if you think youΓÇÖre hard enough]]></caption>
<note><![CDATA[Rob O'Connor / Elektra]]></note>
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<caption><![CDATA[Picture of us: the CureΓÇÖs present line-up has been the same for 10 years, but it wasn't always so settled]]></caption>
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<quote><![CDATA[It peels back the jadedness, overfamiliarity and cynicism fans have developed over the years]]></quote>
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<caption><![CDATA[Way back when: Smith sported the same look in 1984]]></caption>
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<quote><![CDATA[The central sequence of six intricate, imploring songs would be extraordinary from a new band]]></quote>
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<caption><![CDATA[Close to you: Smith gets intimate with his microphone]]></caption>
