The “most difficult” Cure song Robert Smith ever had to write
It’s easy, in the case of a band like The Cure, to celebrate them for their sound, their fashion, and overall eccentric outlook on life.
And while all of this is undeniably true, it does do a disservice to the guise Robert Smith has adopted many times over the years as a wordsmith: perhaps never the most overstated, the most profound, or the most effervescent, but the one whose simple poetry strikes to the core of what a song should really mean.
In some cases, the lyrics were already laid bare for him – all he had to do was recite the days of the week, and he practically had half a hit written in itself – but in others, the pen wasn’t so free-flowing in its path to world-beating greatness. On one such particular occasion, the fog of writer’s block was so thick and impenetrable that Smith didn’t think he could see a way through. Then he called on Charles Baudelaire.
Well, not literally – that would have been quite miraculous given the French poet died over a century before Smith got into the crux of his own prolific period. But even still, the mere act of reading his poem ‘The Eyes of the Poor’ lit a spark of memory under the Cure frontman for something very close to him.
“Oh! You want to know why I hate you today. It will undoubtedly be less easy for you to understand than it will be for me to explain, for you are, I believe, the most beautiful example of feminine impermeability one could ever encounter,” Baudelaire began, but as he was following the words, it struck Smith as highly similar to something already written by his own fair hand.
“I’d actually written a song like that… about how you think that you really know someone, and you really love someone, and suddenly discover that they can react to something you find very important, and they react in a totally different way, and you can’t believe that it’s the same person. I had a set of words that had that sort of idea in it,” he explained upon the release of the resultant track, ‘How Beautiful You Are’, in 1987.
The nifty thing in this situation is that Smith’s cloud of writer’s block was lifted not through any great idea of his own, but the fact that the words were already written for him by Baudelaire, and all he had to do was nick and reuse them for his own rock purposes. That might be putting it bluntly, but when you consider that the song opens with the same line of “so you would like to know why I hate you today,” it’s clear to see that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
But even still, you can’t just take a warbling poem word for word and expect it to translate straight into a chart-topper. “That was about the most difficult song to write because I wanted to get it just right, so that it sounded like a song rather than just a literary exercise,” Smith recalled, making it clear that, despite how it looks, plagiarism is actually no mean feat.
Tongue-in-cheek jibes aside, Smith was meeting his lyrical match in Baudelaire and charging into territory that many would be frankly too scared to even consider. Combining the canons of classic literature with rock music might be enough to send the snobs into a spiral and the sonic diehards running a mile. But somehow, with Smith at the helm and despite all the challenges, The Cure still came out on top.
