Simon Price on Ireland’s affinity and affection for The Cure and bringing his definitive A-Z guide to this beloved band to Belfast

“There were times when I thought ‘I never want to listen to The Cure again’,” admits Simon Price of the three years it took him to painstakingly research and compile Curepedia, his definitive A-Z guide to Robert Smith’s iconic alternative rock act. “Fortunately, I’ve come out the other side of that, but yeah, I was going insane. Apart from anything else, Robert Smith’s head was in a dark place a lot of the time. “It was the same with writing about Richey Edwards from the Manics [for his acclaimed 1999 Manic Street Preachers biography, Everything], you know? “You’re trying to sort of empathise and put yourself in the place of somebody who’s going through some really dark times, and that can have a knock-on effect on your own mental state, for sure. “So, it wasn’t always fun - but, on the other hand, it was a privilege to be paid as my job to sit down and listen to Cure records. You know, there are worse ways of making a living.” Read more: New Rolling Stones album to feature Paul McCartney and The Cure’s Robert Smith Music journalist and Curepedia author, Simon Price. PICTURE: Santiago Franco Schicke Published in 2013 and then revised and updated two years later, Curepedia presents readers with - as its title suggests - an encyclopedic guide to the veteran band, touching on their music, members, influences, collaborators, critics, cultural connections, cover versions and much more besides. Readers will immediately get the tone of this 600 page tome by perusing its opening entry, a dissection of The Cure’s classic 1980 gothpop single, A Forest. Across four-and-a-bit pages - an entirely justified allocation of space for one of the all-time greatest Cure tunes - Price details the song’s creative genesis, recording, release and evolution into a staple of their live set, (where it’s often be elongated to 10-plus mesmerising minutes), provides a musical dissection of its composition, and also places it in cultural context with an overview of how the folklore of the forest has impacted creative works from fairytale to film. It was a privilege to be paid to sit down and listen to Cure records. There are worse ways of making a living — Simon Price The Welsh writer also details his personal connection to the song, revealing that he didn’t quite hit it off with A Forest as a 12-year-old ska fan when he first encountered it while listening to the Sunday evening chart run-down in the spring of 1980 (it peaked at number 31). “I was too young to really get it,” admits the Barry-born, Brighton-based journalist and author, who will be bringing Curepedia to Belfast on June 5 for an in-conversation event followed by special tour edition of his long-running 80s/90s alternative and goth-centric club night, Spellbound. “I think I was still into The Specials and Madness and all that stuff. I could hear there was something strange and different about A Forest, but I wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Read more: The Cure to headline Belsonic with biggest Belfast show to date “I suppose it was when they started writing pop songs like The Caterpillar, The Walk and The Lovecats and started appearing on Top of The Pops and in Smash Hits that they lured me in. “I think that’s a really valuable thing that bands can do, if they meet you halfway - if they come and find you where you are. “When The Cure started making pop records, it was in some ways a roll of the dice to try and save their career, but it was also a way of reaching out to people who may have been intimidated to listen to a group like The Cure, and say, ‘No, come on in, there’s something here for you’. “They became a kind of gateway drug. You might find yourself buying their greatest hits album, Standing on The Beach [”Everybody had it - everybody," notes Price in its Curepedia entry], and that might be your way into finding out about all the other bands from that world, whether it’s Siouxie and The Banshees, of whom Robert was a member for a while, or Bauhaus, or whoever. Read more: Olivia Rodrigo performs The Cure songs with Robert Smith during Glastonbury set “From there, you might find out about the cult movies that inspired them, or the obscure literature and Victorian poetry - all the stuff that, if a teacher asked you to do it, you might not want to read. “You might not want to read Baudelaire or the books of Mervyn Peak or whatever, but suddenly, if Robert Smith has provided a way into it, it’s kind of cool. You’ve got a motive to do it, which is to understand your favourite band a bit more.” Curepedia can certainly help on that front too. While the book may well have been an off-putting chore for Price to write at times, it undoubtedly has the opposite effect for the reader: it makes you want to listen to The Cure, while also referring to his comprehensive guidebook for added insight and revelation into your favourite moments from their now 50-year-long career. It might even help you to finally get your head around more challenging moments, like their unrelentingly dark and gloriously gloomy 1982 masterpiece, Pornography. “Without being too pretentious or pompous about it, I hope that this book can provide ways of listening, or re-listening, to those records,” offers Price, who cut his music journalist teeth with a column for his local paper in Barry while still a teenager before graduating to the music weeklies in the 1990s. Robert Smith has led The Cure since 1976 (Yui Mok/PA) “The facts and the figures are carved in stone, but music journalism is also about analysis - it’s about ‘have you thought of it this way?’ “That’s what the great music writers always provided me when I was growing up by shining a different light on my favourite bands and my favourite records.” As well as adding a comprehensive new entry for the long-awaited 14th Cure album, Songs of A Lost World - “it’s a masterpiece, which means no-one can ever say ‘oh, The Cure jumped the shark 20 years ago’ again,” enthuses Price, which topped the charts when it was finally released in 2024 after a protracted 16-year-long gestation period that’s entertainingly detailed in the Curepedia entry Fourteenth Album (The Saga Of), the author also added a an entry dedicated to Robert Smith and co’s long and mutually loving relationship with Ireland. “The more time I spent in Ireland finding out about The Cure’s relationship with Ireland, [it became clear that], there’s something unique about it,” explains Price, of how touring Ireland with the book in 2013 impacted the updated edition. “When you look at their chart positions, for example, Cure records consistently do better in Ireland than they do in the UK. The Cure’s Robert Smith with the band’s Official Charts number one album award for Songs Of A Lost World “I go into some of the theories behind that, and I talked to some long-term Irish Cureheads - which is a term you only tend to hear in Ireland about it. “One person I interviewed suggested that it might be to do with Roman Catholicism, the fact that Robert came from an Irish family in Crawley and was brought up in the Catholic faith, and how that messed with his head to quite a large extent. “It was wrestling against the strictures of his religious upbringing which kind of informed the Faith album and quite a lot of their work, really. So I think that perhaps chimes with some Irish listeners. “And, of course, Robert even lived in Ireland [in Dalkey, outside Dublin] for a while in the late 80s. So all of that was really interesting.” If you’re looking for a way to get in the mood for seeing The Cure when they return to Ireland next month for sold-out shows in Belfast and Dublin, a bit of Cure chat with Simon Price followed by a good old gothic disco could be the way to go. File under ‘A’ for ‘appetiser’. Simon Price will be in conversation about The Cure and Curepedia on June 5 at The Empire, Belfast, followed by a Spellbound DJ set. Tickets via thebelfastempire.com . He will also be in conversation on June 14 at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, at 2pm. Tickets via paviliontheatre.ie The revised paperback edition of Curepedia was published in 2025