“I have all the records”: Robert Smith names the perfect book for music fans

When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, it raised a lot of questions around whether lyrics could be counted as literature in the first place. While the prize had previously gone to prose writers, poets and playwrights before, Dylan became the first singer to be honoured with the prestigious title.

His work has often been compared to Shakespeare, Homer, Dante and plenty of other greats, but he is not the only musician with literary ambitions. Leonard Cohen was a poet and a novelist before he became a singer and even Randy Newman once said, “I had read books and I didn’t know why we [songwriters] shouldn’t have the same latitude that short story writers have”.

Robert Smith of The Cure is another writer with a sophisticated and literary way with words. Part of the allure of The Cure is the balance between the beauty and poetry of the words and the gothic ruggedness of the music.

During a 2003 interview with the French magazine Rock & Folk, Smith opened up on his own favourite books – with a wide-ranging list that included titles as contrasting as philosophy from Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) and Albert Camus (The Outsider) to romantic poetry from Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rambaud to the CS Lewis classic The Chronicles of Narnia – which shone a light on the inspiration for some of his own writing.

Of the words that had a direct impact on his writing, Smith singled out The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, adding of the Czech writer that “his influence on my writing is huge, as on ‘A Letter to Elise,’ directly inspired by his ‘Letters to Felice’”, and John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which he called “pure poetry, fabulous, a must for an English grammar school pupil and very influential on romantic writers. The style is strong, incredible. It strongly influenced ‘Pornography’”.

Another book of poetry that made Smiths list, and one that will be a surprise to no one who is familiar with The Cure, was Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and Selected Other Poems.

And while the majority of his selections were classic works and texts, Smith did make room for one slightly more contemporary release, too. Calling Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity a “classic for music maniacs”, Smith added that it was both “brilliant” and “perfect” and that “I have all the records mentioned in it!”.

And so it seems that not only is Robert Smith’s bookshelf teeming with classic literature, but his record shelves are, too, as the albums mentioned include such releases as Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Get Happy!! and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.

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