Cure

Robert Smith has never hidden the debt the Cure owe to the artists who preceded and accompanied their evolution. From David Bowie, Nick Drake and Jimi Hendrix all the way to the Psychedelic Furs, his influences span different eras and languages. In their early days, the band would often reinterpret songs by their own idols from the Sixties and Seventies, even including a cover of "Foxy Lady" on their debut album "Three Imaginary Boys". Among them all, Bowie held a special place. Smith has called him the only person who ever truly made him feel in the presence of a star: "It happened just once, when David Bowie asked me to play at the concert for his birthday at Madison Square Garden. When I got up on stage to rehearse 'Quicksand' with him, it felt like I was dreaming. When he started playing guitar, I thought: 'This man has been my hero since I was a teenager, and now it's just the two of us on this huge stage. How did this happen?'"

Smith, however, never looked only to the past. During the Eighties, the Cure progressively broadened their post-punk style, turning it into music capable of reaching a mass audience without losing its unease and depth. Meanwhile, the English musician kept absorbing influences from new alternative scenes, remaining particularly drawn to the atmospheres of shoegaze, its heavy use of distortion, and its ability to dissolve melodies and instruments into a cloud of sound.
The decisive encounter with Ride came in 1991, when the Oxford band opened for the Cure at the Great British Weekend. Although they belonged to different generations, the two groups discovered a strong affinity. The Cure had been an important reference point for Ride, but the influence ended up working in the opposite direction too. The track that won Smith over most was "Vapour Trail", the closing song on Ride's debut album "Nowhere", released in 1990 and now regarded as one of the essential records of shoegaze. In the 2014 documentary "Beautiful Noise", dedicated to the genre and its key figures, the Cure frontman expressed his enthusiasm in no uncertain terms: "'Vapour Trail' has one of the best fifteen-second intros of all time."

The song opens with a distant, blurred riff, almost like the memory of a summer now out of reach. The drums come in as the guitars begin to layer on top of one another, and, a beat before you'd expect it, the vocal emerges from the sonic haze. It takes only a few seconds for the track to completely change shape: it's precisely this ability to instantly alter one's sense of space that has made its introduction so memorable.
Smith's admiration also translated into action. In 2015, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of "Nowhere", the Cure frontman crafted two reworkings of "Vapour Trail", titled "Vapour Mix" and "Trail Mix". The remixes were released to accompany the album's commemorative reissue, though they weren't included on the new edition itself.

The mark left by Ride on the Cure's music can also be traced in some of their later work. The clearest example is "The Hungry Ghost", featured on the 2008 album "4:13 Dream": placing its intro side by side with that of "Vapour Trail" reveals similarities in the guitar tones and the way the atmosphere is built. It isn't a copy, but rather the trace left by a song that, for Robert Smith, contains one of the most dazzling intros in the history of rock.

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23/08/2026