Robert Smith

Background

Robert Smith was born on April 21, 1959. He is the third of four children of James Alexander Smith and Rita Mary. He was born in Blackpool and was raised as a Catholic. His family moved to Horley when he was three years old and to Crawley three years later. Smith has two older siblings, Richard and Margaret, and a younger sister, Janet. He attended Notre Dame Middle School from 1970 to 1972 and then St. Wilfrid’s Comprehensive High School from 1972 to 1977. He was notorious for regularly getting into trouble while in school. Shortly before Christmas in 1976, Smith was expelled from St. Wilfrid’s because he was an “undesirable influence.” He has given several conflicting accounts of his expulsion, however, he was certainly re-accepted in 1977 when he completed his sixth form.

The first band he was in was called the Crawley Goat Band, and it came into existence when he was 14. The band consisted of himself, his brother Richard and his friends, and his sister Janet. However, Smith and his friends, Michael Dempsey, Marc Ceccagno, Alan Hill, and Laurence Tolhurst had a one-off performance in middle school when he was 13. Except for Hill, they moved on to St. Wilfrid’s and continued playing music. They toyed with a couple of names including Brat’s Club and Malice, and finally became Easy Cure with several substitutions to the band members. The band’s name was finally condensed to The Cure, their final name. They released several albums including, “Three Imaginary Boys,” “Seventeen Seconds,” “Pornography,” and “Faith.” By 1982, The Cure was reduced to a duo — Smith and Tolhurst. Smith was a guest performer in many shows and collaborated with Simon Gallup, the bassist of The Magpies in 1979.

He met Mary Theresa Poole in drama class at St. Wilfrid’s and married her in August 1988. The duo doesn’t have any offspring, a decision they came to earlier in their lives. They have 25 nieces and nephews in total. Poole formerly worked as a model and then as a nurse with intellectually disabled children. She quit in the mid-1980s, however, to spend more time with her husband as The Cure became more successful.