Robert Smith

I don't want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45-minute shows of greatest hits. That would be awful for our legacy.

Performing doesn't come that naturally to me, even though I've done it for years.

I'm not really obsessed with death.

It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa.

The problem as you get older is, from my perspective, after a certain amount of songs, you tend to start writing something and then you stop and say, 'Wait, I think I've written that before.'

You don't always have to sing dark things to be thoughtful.

The idea of reinvention has always seemed bizarre to me.

Perhaps not as badly applied and not as obvious, but for thousands of years, people have worn makeup on stage.

Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.

I'm happy quite a lot of the time. I've done far more than I ever thought I would have, so I'd be very hard-pressed to walk around miserable.

For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.

You can't allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don't consider what you do to have any value at all, and that's nonsense.

Living, it's awful for me.

I would be more familiar with Janet Jackson than I was with the Teardrop Explodes or Joy Division, because I didn't want to listen to my competitors for fear of nicking ideas off them.

Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free, and when you're nine or 10, your life is entirely dominated by adults. So he represented this thing that I wanted to be. Hendrix was the first person who made me think it might be good to be a singer and a guitarist - before that I wanted to be a footballer.

I still frequent my parents' house. I go there to escape, back to the bedroom that I grew up in. Just to sit there and feel small.

When you're in a young band for the first time, geographically you're in the same place and you tend to go out and socialize. You play more shows, you spend more time together. You're a unit. As you grow older, inevitably you develop a life outside the band. I think it would be tragic if you didn't.

There were only two times in my life when I've actually felt down about things and gotten myself into a full mental mess. One of the times was in 1982. I had a horrible time for a few months and felt pretty desperate. Then again in 1984, for various reasons, not all of them within my control. Since then, I just wander in and out of black moods.

You put on eyeliner, and people start screaming at you. How strange, and how marvellous.

I just play Cure music, whatever that is.