The Cure for Success? Quit : At the height of his band’s success, Robert Smith decides to pack it all in

Robert Smith, the leader of the dark-hued English pop band the Cure, started keeping a list about eight years ago of things to watch out for in his personality.

“It gets longer,” Smith said recently. “It’s things to be wary of, really. If things have meant something to me at a certain point, I just make a note of them, and if they lose their value to me then I have to figure out why. It’s like a kind of anchor.

“I have people around me who I’ve known for years, and it’s worrying me that they’re saying that my attitudes toward certain things are beginning to change.

“I don’t think it’s very healthy. A natural change in reaction to circumstances is one thing. To change abnormally to a set of abnormal circumstances is another thing entirely, and that’s what’s happening to me. I just don’t like it.”

What has the 30-year-old English rock anti-hero so agitated is the very thing most pop acts aspire to: hit records, big bucks and big crowds--big enough to make the Cure the headliner at 49,000-capacity Dodger Stadium, where the band plays Friday with Love and Rockets, the Pixies and Shelleyan Orphan. It’s a bill whose cumulative Angst level could make the ball park an even gloomier place than it is during a Dodger game.

For most bands, a booking like this would be the ultimate validation. For a hyper-sensitive maverick like Smith, it’s a signal to call it quits.

“It’s reached a stage where I personally can’t cope with it, so I’ve decided this is the last time we’re gonna tour,” he said, speaking by phone from his parents’ home in the London suburb of Crawley one day before boarding the Queen Elizabeth II for the voyage to New York.

“It’s no big deal. I just don’t feel comfortable anymore with the kind of attention that I’m getting. It’s purely the numbers of people that want a bit of the Cure or want a bit of me.

“It reached the stage in Europe where I was unable to go out for a walk. We were in some of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and I couldn’t go out without having an entourage. . . . I tried a disguise and it didn’t work. I had no makeup and my hair

flat and a hat on, but people recognized me, and when I asked them how they knew it was me they said it was my shoes, so the second time I did it I changed my shoes, and I was still recognized.

“I think it’s a combination of the size of the shoes and the way that I shuffle. I’d even have to change my walk. It’s very absurd, isn’t it, to think to go out you have to actually act, you have to adopt a whole different character?

“The constant attention is completely unnatural. It’s really nice meeting people after a concert. Still, it’s very weird to be at the center of a group of 30 people all listening to what you’re saying. When that group turns into 300 people it goes on from weird. Some people revel in it, and I don’t.

Smith’s decision to dismantle the Cure at the peak of its popularity is typical of the against-the-grain mentality that’s governed the band since its inception in 1976.

Despite the impulsive stylistic shifts and perverse career decisions (Smith broke up the band for a while and joined Siouxsie & the Banshees), the Cure steadily built its following.

Or perhaps it’s because of that impulsiveness.

“Even if people don’t like the popularity we’ve achieved or some of the more poppy stuff we’ve done,” Smith noted, “they’ve still stuck with us because they appreciate the attitude that’s involved, and the idea that we just do what we want. People respect that.

“We tried to have our music accepted without becoming personalities, and we carried it off for many more years than I ever imagined we’d be able to.”

Eventually, though, Smith was enshrined as one of the defining personalities of ‘80s British rock: a bird’s nest-haired harlequin with black-ringed eyes and red lips, delivering erotic reveries and contemplations on mortality in a piping, little-boy voice.

“Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me,” released in 1987, was the Cure’s big American breakthrough, selling a million-plus. In contrast to that sprawling double album’s wild diversity, the new “Disintegration” is pure, concentrated Gothic grandeur, 70-plus minutes of lush, Cinerama-scale soundscapes.

“We embarked on a piece of work that has basically one atmosphere, one mood through the entire record,” Smith explained.

“I wanted the Cure to be involved in a project that had a certain amount of intensity, because I felt that we were lacking that on the last few records. We weeded out a lot of the stuff that would have given it more variety because I wanted it to be quite a difficult record.

“As it turned out I don’t think it is actually that difficult to listen to.”

Apparently not. The album has sold a million since its release in May, setting the stage for the Cure’s swan-song tour and its three stadium experiments.

Although the Cure is usually filed in the gloom-drenched wing of rock, its brand of bleakness is a rather benign one, buoyed by a rhythmic playfulness, a melodic brightness and the vulnerability of Smith’s vocals.

Still, there’s no denying the allure of the dark realms Smith explores, and the Cure has spawned a cult of true believers who clearly take it as something more than passing entertainment. Accordingly, the band has drawn fire for transforming wholesome youngsters into brooding neurotics.

“I don’t really think we have that effect on anyone,” Smith said. “I would tend to think that it was the other way around, that people are attracted to some of the stuff that we do because they feel a certain way.

“If you feel alienated from people around you it’s because no one tries to understand you. And people seek solace in the company of other people who are of a like mind, whether that’s through the medium of music or something else. I lose myself in music because I can’t be bothered explaining what I feel to anyone else around me.”

Smith can recall wearing a striped T-shirt as a youth to show his allegiance to English rock elder Alex Harvey, so he understands the motivation of today’s Cure clones.

“There is like an archetypal Cure fan, almost like a caricature of a Cure fan, dressed in a certain way. We’ve asked them. We say, ‘Why do you look this way?’ And in fact they do it because it’s like being in a gang, and if you see someone else dressed a certain way on a street corner you know that you can go up and start talking to that person.

“So it’s a kind of identity. It’s not actually trying to look like me or look like the Cure. It’s almost like a badge. That’s always going on. That’s why there’s different subcultures. We’re just a focal point for the way people feel. We don’t actually make people feel a certain way.

“So Cure fans look a certain way. I think people grow out of that need for a common identity. . . . To me, the notion of dressing a certain way to go to work is more pitiable than dressing a certain way because you want to go and talk with someone.”