Robert Smith downplays his 'spiralling soap opera feud' with Morrissey

14 June 2021, 14:17

Robert Smith has downplayed a so-called feud with Morrissey that still gets plenty of internet attention.

The pair are long thought to have bad blood, with Smith's apparent dislike of Morrissey often being raised online by fans whenever either man is in the news.

But in an outtake of an interview in The Sunday Times posted on Twitter, journalist Jonathan Dean revealed that The Cure singer thinks the whole spat has been overblown.

"With Morrissey, I got a flurry of stuff," he said. "And I thought, 'What does it matter?'.

"They [The Smiths and The Cure] were competition for a very brief period. But more than that, I didn't connect with it.

"I didn't dislike them on a personal level – I didn't know them. It never really got to me and then in later years it was this set up and I thought why?

"And so since then I've realised how easily these things can spiral because people want it to be something. They're desperate for it to be some sort of soap opera."

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Smith and Morrissey have been feuding since the early 1980s, when Morrissey called Smith a "whingebag" and described The Cure as "a new dimension to the word 'crap'", with Smith responding that the then-Smiths frontman was "a precious, miserable bastard".

In the published interview, Smith also talked up the band's upcoming music, calling it "very emotional" and "ten years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff".

He hinted that it could be the band's final album, saying: "I can't think we'll ever do anything else. I definitely can't do this again."

The Cure's released their last studio album 4:13 Dream way back in 2008, but have continually toured since then, with headlining shows at Reading and Leeds Festivals in 2012, Meltdown in 2018 and Glastonbury Festival in 2019.