But Costello always seemed that bit cleverer. "Living in Crawley, you really didn't have to go out of your way to get beaten up so I couldn't see the point in putting a safety pin through my nose.
"I was enamoured by the melody of the Buzzcocks and Elvis Costello, not the anarchy of the Sex Pistols," he says. Smith's original idea for the Cure was to play perfect three-minute pop songs, despite coming out of the aggression and chaos of punk. I listen to Help! and I'm filled with hope that the world could be a better place." The melodies on these tunes are so fantastic, and the imagination that goes into these songs is just unreal. "It made me realise that there was another world going on beyond my immediate environment. "My sister used to play it in her bedroom, and I would sit on the stairs, listening to it through the door," he says. The first record that touched him was Help! by the Beatles, which came out when he was five. Smith has aimed for the intensity that all his favourite music has. It's strange because that's not my nature at all, and it wasn't even fun. We slept very little during the recording, there was a lot of drugs involved, and the stage shows that followed were just brawls between us and the audience. "I wrote all the songs in a windmill over one weekend.
"My attitude was: it's all rubbish, we're rubbish, so let's go out with a bang," says Smith. Pornography, the darkest of all Cure albums, was intended as a swansong. With Bloodflowers, because of my age, I can't recreate that intensity, but I think it has a lyricism that makes it compare favourably to the other two." The first two records had something that was there by virtue of the intensity we put into the studio, and they both resulted in putting me into a delayed state of shock. "I wanted Bloodflowers to be the third part of a trilogy. "Pornography and Disintegration are always the fans' top two albums, and mine as well," says Smith. In November 2002 the band played three of their most acclaimed albums - Pornography (1982), Disintegration (1989), and Bloodflowers (2000) - in their entirety at the Berlin Tempodrom, and the film of that concert is now being released on DVD.
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