It does not take a huge leap of the imagination to come to the conclusion that The Cure and The Smiths shared a lot of fans as both groups made their big breakthroughs in the early 80s. Songs built around themes of alienation, the feeling of being part of a devoted cult crew, outsiderdom, and the added bonus of some really excellent music, theirs were causes ripe for cross-pollination.
Unfortunately, though, that feeling did not extend to the artists themselves, specifically the band’s frontmen. For, throughout the 80s and beyond, The Cure’s Robert Smith and The Smiths' Morrissey embarked on a hugely entertaining feud that neither party seemed to be able to let go.
No prizes for guessing who started it. Premium wind-up merchant and sometime-singer Morrissey was being interviewed by The Face in 1984 when he was asked a question who he’d shoot first out of Smiths Robert and Mark E. if he had a gun.
“I’d line them up so that one bullet penetrated both simultaneously,” he said, generously. “Robert Smith is a whingebag. It’s rather curious that he began wearing beads at the emergence of The Smiths and has been photographed with flowers. I expect he’s quite supportive of what we do, but I’ve never liked The Cure.”
With that, there was the thunk of a gauntlet hitting the ground, possibly landing on a pavement in Crawley, right outside Robert Smith’s house. Now, quite aside from the fact that Morrissey seemed to think Robert Smith had begun taking sartorial influence from him (honestly, has anyone ever in history ever thought, ‘Ooh yeah, kohl-eyed big-haired goth king Robert Smith obviously stole his look from that fey indie chap in The Smiths!’) and the fact that he was attempting to trademark being photographed with flowers in the vicinity, Morrissey might have underestimated his target here.
He might have assumed that, with his morose songs full of emotional turmoil and existential crises, Robert Smith was a delicate flower who could be easily bullied. But one of the funniest and most un-Cure things about The Cure is that Robert Smith is actually a bit of a beer-swilling lad. He was not going to take this jibe lying down.
One of his key comebacks arrived roughly around the same time as the second Smiths record Meat Is Murder. “If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I’ll eat meat - that’s how much I hate Morrissey,” he stated.
And so began a back-and-forth that continued long after The Smiths had split up and into Morrissey’s solo career, by which point The Cure had become one of the biggest bands in the world. If that was something that bothered Morrissey, he didn’t show it. He said Smith was “a fat clown in make-up weeping over a guitar”. Oh sorry, he did show it.
But the feeling remained entirely mutual. During a Spanish TV interview, the host mistakenly (or maybe more unmistakenly) batched The Cure and The Smiths together as bands who made gloomy music for the gloomy masses. Smith was quick to cut off the association. “This is an unfortunate comparison because I dislike them immensely,” he said.” I just don’t like him, I think he’s really arrogant. He’s like a professional intellectual, the worst type of person.”
NME was the usual platform of choice for their ongoing spat. One week, Morrissey would describe The Cure as “a new dimension of crap” and the next Smith would reply with, “At least we've only added a new dimension in crap, not built a career out of it.”
This was a premium and hilariously silly ding-dong.
Smith was still at it in 1993, when he couldn’t help but divulge his feelings for Mozza in an interview with Spin. "I have never liked Morrissey and I still don't,” he declared. “I think it's hilarious, actually, what things I've heard about him, what he's really like, and his public persona is so different. He's such an actor. There's one particular photo of Morrissey in his swimming trunks sitting by the pool in Los Angeles. I bet that one hasn't been approved!"
Over the years, the brouhaha simmered to the point that all seemed done and dusted. Smith reflected on it in an interview in 2008 and the feeling was that he had moved on. “I’ve never met him, I’m not even sure we’ve been in the same room,” he said. "I’m sure it’s the same for him; he got really aggravated at my response. I was very over the top but I felt justifiably so, having just been shot in print. It was one of those things, a mini Blur/Oasis thing. I don’t think I played along with it enough for it to become anything more.”
As for Morrissey, he said more recently, “I said some terrible things about him 35 years ago, but I didn’t mean them, I was just being very Grange Hill.”
And so, one of the great head-to-heads of British music, the indie controversialist vs the alt-rock goth don, came to an amenable end. Hard to say who won, really - although one is in one of the world’s most-loved bands, can play huge venues around the world and everyone loves them...and the other is Morrissey.
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