In Autumn 1988, a domestic fire destroyed Robert Smith’s home in Sussex.

Love and loss, frosty and glacial – Smith’s high watermark I frazzled numbness. But as MOJO’s Top 30 emphasises, the world of his band is already bursting with wonders. Smith announced in 2022 that a new Cure album, Songs Of A Lost World, was imminent. Tears, tunes and boxes of lipstick-flavour chocolates – Robert Smith dispenses them all, sweet and sour, like Willy Wonka with a baritone guitar. A post-punk Monet, Robert Smith has worked with a consistent palette for more than 40 years – but thanks to the rigour and intricacy of his craft, there’s always something new to catch your eye.īecause The Cure’s song canon is as varied as any in pop, comparable with Smith’s hero David Bowie for creative handbrake turns, a sonic landscape that permits DayGlo fantasy and monochrome gloom, the euphoric and the infernal, The Love Cats (“So wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty!”) and One Hundred Years (“It doesn’t matter if we all die!”).

Yes, it says: you can do whatever you want, all the time, in your own time, and people will fill football stadiums to vindicate you. From playing songs of suburban alienation in English church halls to symphonising the mysteries of life across the world’s most prestigious stages, the odyssey of The Cure spans six decades and defies rock’n’roll logic.

Chords tell me why neil young