The Cure singer Robert Smith has weighed in on the debate surrounding Chappell Roan’s comments on fan intrusion.

It’s been a perennial talking point this year – do fans go too far in their worship? Has the internet demolished some all-important lines between artist and onlooker?

Chappell Roan certainly thought so, and has spoken previously about the inhibitions placed on her purely through being a successful pop artist.

The Cure’s Robert Smith has navigated almost 50 years of success, and the subject cropped up in his latest long-form interview. The singer sat down with BBC Sounds podcast Sidetracked with Annie and Nick, and he mused on recent album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ – voted one of 2024’s ten best albums by this very title.

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Asked about Chappell Roan’s comments, Robert Smith was broadly sympathetic but was careful to explore the nuance of the argument.

“It’s a tricky one because it’s a complicated subject. I think what you’re doing as an artist – you want people to feel like they think they’re engaging with you, but it is a modern world phenomenon that there is a sense of entitlement that didn’t used to be there amongst fans when we started out. It was kind of enough that we did what we did and that people didn’t really expect much. I didn’t as a consumer -I didn’t expect something more. It was enough to kind of to see Alex Harvey or to see David Bowie. I didn’t expect to like hang out with them or to really to get to know them whereas now it seems almost like that is part of the deal and as The Cure became more popular I mean we obviously have experienced quite a lot of obsessive fan behaviour down the years and it can feel quite threatening you know honestly if you have people sleeping outside your front door or like, it can get very weird and it never bothered me as much as it bothered people around me. But when it comes to your front door, it’s like, and people are there, and they feel like they’re somehow, that the cosmos has fated them to, you know, and you’re like, you’re dealing with people who perhaps aren’t quite, you know, right a lot of the time.”

“And so you think like, well, how do you respond to this? Because it’s impossible, really, you can’t be trained to respond. And I think that if you’re elevated to a position of celebrity or success over a reasonably fast period of time, it’s more difficult to deal with things because you have no, I mean, you’ve got no grounding in how to deal with like the lower level. It took us years and years and years of like touring and going around the world and doing stuff until by the time we got started to properly famous, I kind of knew how to respond. I’d already developed that as part of who I was.  But being famous, and if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, I can’t imagine many worse ways of living, ’cause it’s horrible being gawked at all the time, like prodded and poked and people expecting more of you all the time. It’s a very strange thing.” 

Are The Cure set to release another album in 2025? A “companion” record has been mooted, but is as yet unconfirmed.

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