Robert Smith on the guitar hack behind the Cure’s appeal

By the time Robert Smith first stepped onstage with the Cure in the late 1970s, the band was already unlike anything else in Britain’s post-punk landscape. Angular and brooding, melodic yet mercurial, the Cure’s sound was built as much on mood as on notes.

And at the heart of it all was Smith’s electric guitar — raw, textural, and often deliberately “wrong.”

As he told Guitar Player in our September 1992 issue, it all has to do with how he hears music — not as technically perfect but as floating in a world where Earth’s physics don’t apply. It’s why he deliberately messes with the pitch of his guitar, sometimes by using modulation pedals, other times by adjusting the varispeed on a tape recorder, or — more likely, and more simply — by detuning his high E string “by a few cents” with his electronic tuner.