The Cure decision that “fucking killed” Robert Smith
The Cure’s emotive ‘Pictures Of You’ arrived as the second song taken from the now-iconic Disintegration album, a love letter to nostalgia, melancholy, and memories. Lead singer Robert Smith had a profound connection with its message, basing its lovelorn lyrics on an essay by Myra Poleo, ‘The Dark Power of Ritual Pictures’. Poleo’s writing explored emotional ties, how a picture of times gone by can mentally drag you back to the moment it was taken.
In keeping with the borderline bleak look at how memories can almost devastate us, Disintegration marked the return of the band to their most modal and introspective, quite the departure from their previous, slightly more pop-oriented sound.
There is a lot of speculation surrounding the meaning of ‘Pictures of You’, ultimately stemming from Smith’s varying accounts of his inspiration. One came after Smith admitted he read Poleo’s essay about emotional ties to images and decided to destroy all his old pictures. He destroyed a lot of his most treasured personal pictures but later admitted he felt a great deal of remorse.
Another theory is also tied to photographs because Smith once said it was based on the time a fire started in his house, and one of the first things he looked for was his wallet – which held in it pictures of his wife, Mary Poole. The cover of the single is one of these photos, an intimate shot of Poole sitting with her back to the camera in a rare moment of invitation into Smith’s private life.
Whatever inspired it, ‘Pictures Of You’ is undoubtedly clouded by a devasting sense of loss. in 1989, Smith explained in an interview with Music Box TV it was about the idea of holding someone close. “It goes back a bit to a song like ‘How Beautiful You Are,’” he explained. “Sometimes you completely lose touch with what a person has turned into. You just want to hold onto what they were.”
But it wasn’t the crushing emotional weight of the song that got to Smith, but rather where his song would wind up appearing. He was staunchly against licensing any of The Cure’s songs for adverts, but in 2004, he rather begrudgingly allowed its use on a Hewlett-Packard advert promoting a digital camera. Smith looked at the decision as something of a necessary evil because, at the time, the band badly needed the funds to control their catalogue with the end of their deal with Polydor approaching.
He told the NME: “I’m so against music in adverts, it fucking killed me even agreeing to that, but it was the only way. The money generated from those adverts went into buying me control on our back catalogue, otherwise it would have been like mortgaging the band.”
