Hong Kong Ham

This morning, Robert Smith from The Cure called me. “Hi, it’s Robert,” he said. “Sorry, I’m late.” Where he was, in a London studio, it was 4:15am. Being a nocturnal creature, he was just coming to the end of a day’s work.

Smith is working on another album with a new Cure line-up. This one’s been a year in the making — with a notable delay while Smith helped produce the DVD Festival 2005 — and when it comes out the other end, it’ll likely be accompanied by a special edition double-album of solo work by Smith.

I won’t say too much about the content of the interview until it’s published in the South China Morning Post (and, hopefully, as a separate story in a New Zealand publication). But I will say a little about the experience. Later, I hope to post a transcript of the bulk of the interview on this blog.

For a start, I was lucky. This was only the second interview he’d done all year, and he was probably only going to give one other: to a newspaper in Singapore. He’d given up on interviews, he said, because he’d found that he had just started going into auto-pilot. So, if he’s true to his word, this interview would have been one of his last. At least for a while.

Robert — or, as I would never call him to his face, Smitty — struck me as a very down-to-earth and amiable guy. Intelligent, softly spoken, thoughtful, and talkative. He says, “I think” and “kind of” and “I guess” a lot, which I reckon is a sign of modesty — it’s as if he’s qualifying the profundity of what he is saying by making it clear that it’s just what he thinks, as if he weren’t someone as important in pop culture as he so clearly is. Not that what he said was always profound; but it was better than the average tripe often spouted from the mouths of more self-serving musicians.

I talked to him about his tour — it’ll be his first time in Hong Kong for more than 12 hours — and the impending album. I talked to him about a time he drunkenly interviewed, and perhaps insulted, David Bowie on an underground London radio station. I talked to him about the petitioners in New Zealand who lured The Cure to play a show there. I talked to him about an hilarious yet disturbing 1990 talk-back radio show in which an evangelical host convinced a 13-year-old girl, a Cure fan, that theirs is the music of “negativism, nihilism, and nothingism” that was responsible for her arguments with her mother (Smith’s response: “I think all evangelicals are nutcases”). I talked to him about the trouble he’s having writing songs, and I talked to him about playing for charity.

It was a good interview, and I’m hoping to turn it into a good story. So stayed tuned.

Because it’s Friday, here’s one of The Cure’s cheesier songs. At the very least, it ought to put you in a good mood. The week’s coming to an end, after all.