Robert Smith understands Chappell Roan‘s concerns about setting boundaries with fans. Speaking on the BBC podcast “Sidetracked,” the Cure frontman confirmed that obsessive fan behavior can feel “quite threatening.”
On the podcast, the hosts asked Smith for his thoughts on Roan’s rise to fame over 2024, including how she made headlines for pushing back on harassment and stalking by fans.
“It’s a complicated subject. I think what you’re doing as an artist, you want people to feel like they’re engaging with you,” Smith responded. “But it is a modern-world phenomenon that there’s a sense of entitlement that didn’t used to be there amongst fans.”
He explained that when the Cure first started “it was kind of enough that we did what we did.” Smith added, “I didn’t, as a consumer, I didn’t expect something more. It was enough to see Alex Harvey or to see David Bowie. I didn’t expect to hang out with them or get to know them, whereas now it seems almost like that is part of the deal.”
Smith continued, “As the Cure became more popular, we have obviously experienced quite a lot of obsessive fan behavior down the years. And it can feel quite threatening, honestly. If you have people sleeping outside your front door, it can get very weird. It never bothered me as much as people around me, but when it comes to your front door and people are there and they feel like somehow the cosmos has fated them [to be there]. You’re dealing with people who perhaps aren’t quite right all the time. You think, how do you respond to this? It’s impossible, really. You can’t be trained to do that.”
He added that being subjected to fame over a “relatively fast period of time,” like Roan, can make it more difficult. “Being famous, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, I can’t imagine many worse ways of living,” he said. “It’s horrible being gawked at all the time and prodded and poked and people expecting more of you.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Smith spoke about concert ticketing, something on which he has strong views, including the dynamic pricing put in place for the forthcoming Oasis reunion shows. “This was about fees when I engaged with Ticketmaster,” he acknowledged of his efforts to make ticketing more fair this year. “Dynamic pricing, it goes on across all different industries and it’s a con, basically.”
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