Robert James Smith (born April 21, 1959) is an English singer, musician, and lyricist who is best known as the frontman and principal songwriter of the influential English rock band The Cure and has been called a “rock anti-hero”.

Smith was originally inspired to become a musician by listening to his sister’s Beatles Help! album, “the melody of the Buzzcocks and Elvis Costello”, the “completely free” vibe he felt watching Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie (who proved “you could define your own genre and not worry about what anyone else is doing”) and Alex Harvey.

Originally just “the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs”, Smith eventually took over vocals after he realized “I hated my voice, but I didn’t hate it more than I hated everyone else’s voice.” His distinctive sound and look, combined with his versatile and poignant songwriting, have made him “one of the most iconic rock stars of all time”. He is often also labeled a goth icon – something he rejects again and again. He told Rolling Stone in 2019:

I was doing (the new wave song) ‘Let’s Go to Bed’ when goth started. So we’d done ‘Pornography’ and ‘Hanging Garden’, and there’s a look and a kind of a vibe and an atmosphere, yeah. But was I responsible for goth? No. And if I was, I’d be very happy. But I wasn’t … I’m aware we played a part in it, and I think that we’re part of the history of goth, without question, but like a footnote … When people say it to me, you’re goth, I say you either have never heard us play or you have no idea what goth is. One of those two has to be true because we’re not a goth band … It’s like we passed through that phase and I did a few things that sounded like we were a part of it, and then we moved on to something else.

Since 1989, Smith has been the sole remaining founding member of the band. In the over 40 years that The Cure has been performing, they’ve sold over 27 million records and have performed to packed arenas around the world many times. In 1991, The Cure won the Brit Award for Best British Group. In 2005, Smith won a prestigious Ivor Novello Award (Honoring Excellence in Music Writing). In 2009, Tim Burton presented The Cure with NME’s Godlike Geniuses Award. And in 2019, The Cure was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

As early as the late 1980s and as recently as the early 2000s, Smith has mentioned wanting to release a solo album, but as of 2018, aside from a cover of Wendy Waldman’s “Pirate Ships”, his solo recordings have yet to be released. In addition to The Cure, Smith has also notably been a member of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Glove.

While his stage persona and dark lyricism lead people to believe Smith is a perpetually sad and depressed person, he actually is not:

The songs, lyrically, reflect only a part of my personality. They don’t really give away what I’m like as a person. The 90 percent of me that isn’t in the songs is just dead boring. It doesn’t inspire me to write. The part that does is genuinely when I’m feeling melancholy or nostalgic or just plain sad, as much as anyone else.

Similarly, when Video Rock Stars told Smith he’s perceived to be ‘miserable’, he responded with:

I just can’t write happy songs. That doesn’t mean I’m not happy. Because I am, a lot of the time. I spend more time smiling than I do crying.