Robert Smith on writing about the death of his brother on ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’: “It’s helped me enormously”

"I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died"

Robert Smith of The Cure has opened up about writing of his brother’s death in their track ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye‘,  featuring in their upcoming album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’.

In a new and long-ranging interview filmed by the band for fans in conversation with Matt Everitt (shared via unlocking their ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ website), Smith has shared that writing about his brother’s death in his music helped him “enormously”.

Speaking about how he approached addressing such a personal and emotional topic on ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’, he explained to Everitt that he decided to tackle it in a simple, narrative way. “I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died,” he said. “It went all around the houses and I went everywhere with this song to sum up how I felt. In the end, it turned into a reasonably bleak little vignette.

“I wrote the song about it, and the music itself was what I wanted to breathe. I didn’t want the words to dominate the song, in a way that the music can become a backdrop to what you’re singing. In this, I think the music is more important than what I’m singing in a way. It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”

While writing the song, Smith said he had input from others about trying to get the tone correct when describing his brother’s death. “Trying to achieve the right balance between the outpouring I had after the event, and just trying to take the right part of that and put it into a song,” he said. “Some of the versions of that were so overwrought. I thought they were great, then I’d play them to people and they’d say, ‘That’s too much, you can’t play that’. I realised I couldn’t. Doing that song live, sometimes it would really break me up and it was really difficult to not go over the top.”

He went on to speak about death, and loss and how he tries to convey human perceptions of being alive into his music. “When you’re younger, you romanticise [death], even without knowing it,” he said. “Then it starts happening to your immediate family and friends and suddenly it’s a different thing. It’s something that I struggled with lyrically: how to put this into the songs? I feel like I am different person than I was when we last made an album. I wanted that to come through.”

In addition to speaking about the death of his brother, Smith also addressed his age and the history of The Cure’s music. He said: “I turn 65 this year; it’s like, ‘For fuck’s sake, I’m 65!’ I want to be aware of that and reflect it in the songs. I want to reflect that I am where I am, and the things that matter to me now aren’t the things that mattered to me 20 years ago.

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“In some way, it constrains me – but in a good way. It stops me from straying too far. I want the songs to mean something, whereas before I wasn’t that bothered. There have been big periods of The Cure’s history where some of the songs mattered and some of them didn’t. On this album they all matter.”

‘Songs Of A Lost World‘ will be the band’s first album since 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream‘, and comes out on November 1. The band debuted ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ at a show in Kraków, Poland, in October. 

In the interview with Everitt, Smith also revealed that the band have another new album in the works that’s “virtually finished”, with a third record in the pipeline too. He also shared the band’s plans for a full world tour in 2025, likely stretching into their upcoming 50th anniversary as a band.

Speaking about The Cure’s plans for a full world tour, the frontman said he’d be aiming to complete one of the LPs before hitting the road again in 2025.

“We’ll start up again next year,” said Smith. “Seriously, I have to finish the second album. We were going to play festivals next year, but then I decided that we weren’t going to play anything next summer. The next time we go out on stage will be autumn next year.

“But then we’ll probably be playing quite regularly through until the next anniversary – the 2028 anniversary! It’s looming on the horizon. The 2018 one, I started to think about in late 2016, thinking, ‘I’ve got a year and a half, it’s easy!’ And yet I still didn’t manage to get there in time. Now, I’m starting to think, ‘2028, I must get things in order’; so [that’s] the documentary film and things like that.”

NME gave ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ five stars in a review, calling ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ a highlight of the project. It reads: Then, album highlight ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ lays waste with an emotional H-bomb. “As lightning splits the sky apart, I’m whispering his name / He has to wake up,” pleads Smith. It musters everything he and the band have in the tank to breathe with that deep, dull ache that lingers when you lose someone closest to you: “Something wicked this way comes / To steal away my brother’s life.”