‘Jupiter Crash’: The Cure song about a “failed sexual encounter”
Led by the ghoulish yet charismatic frontman Robert Smith, The Cure corralled an early following as the post-punk outfit behind such classics as ‘A Forest’, ‘Primary’ and ‘The Hanging Garden’. These early tracks appeared on the albums retrospectively referred to as the ‘Dark Trilogy’: Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. Although immensely popular, this first chapter only makes up part of The Cure’s DNA.
Following 1983’s Pornography, tensions rode high within the band, eventually enforcing a hiatus, during which Smith temporarily joined Siouxsie and the Banshees. “We immersed ourselves in the more sordid side of life, and it did have a very detrimental effect on everyone in the group,” Smith reflected on Pornography in a 2004 feature with Rolling Stone.
“We got ahold of some very disturbing films and imagery to kind of put us in the mood,” he adds. “Afterwards, I thought, ‘Was it really worth it?’ We were only in our really early twenties, and it shocked us more than I realised – how base people could be, how evil people could be.”
During The Cure’s hiatus in the early 1980s, Smith and drummer Lol Tolhurst recorded several interim tracks for a compilation album and follow-up to Pornography titled Japanese Whispers. Far from the morose material in the ‘Dark Trilogy’, this LP welcomed more upbeat radio-friendly tracks, including the popular singles, ‘Let’s Go to Bed’, ‘The Walk’ and ‘The Love Cats’.
“When I took ‘Let’s Go to Bed’ to Fiction and played it to them, it was like silence,” Smith recalled. “They looked at me, like, ‘This is it. He’s really lost it.’ They said, ‘You can’t be serious. Your fans are gonna hate it.’ I understood that, but I wanted to get rid of all that. I didn’t want that side of life anymore; I wanted to do something that’s really kind of cheerful. I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work. No one’s ever gonna buy into this. It’s so ludicrous that I’m gonna go from goth idol to pop star in three easy lessons.'”
Ultimately, The Cure’s migration to more commercially leaning material paid off handsomely and was sustained through the late 1980s and into the ’90s. Successful albums like Head on the Door and Disintegration exhibited this fine balance between the band’s inherent darkness and commercial viability.
This formula often derived its success from a juxtaposition in tone between lyrical themes and the instrumentals. This formula was employed throughout the 1996 album Wild Mood Swings, which contained a discerning range of songs, from the jangle-pop single ‘Mint Car’ to the celestial ‘Jupiter Crash’.
The latter is a soaring mid-album cut inspired by the Shoemaker-Levy comet. When the comet was discovered in 1993, it had just brushed Jupiter’s outer atmosphere and smashed into several large fragments. In July 1994, the comet fragments finally crashed into Jupiter, making for some jaw-dropping astronomical photography. The rare spectacle received a lot of attention in the press at the time and captured Smith’s imagination.
Smith decided to write ‘Jupiter Crash’ as a metaphorical allusion to bedroom dissatisfaction. “About the comet crash a couple of years ago,” Smith said of the song in a 1996 interview with MTV. “As an analogy for a failed sexual encounter. And how you kind of build people up. Everyone expected the comet kind of hit Jupiter, and Jupiter was gonna explode. Unless you have a pretty powerful telescope, you couldn’t see anything at all. That sort of sense, there’s a big build-up, and the next day, people were saying, ‘That was rubbish.’ It wasn’t rubbish, it was incredible. It wasn’t what you expected. That was the analogy.”
Listen to ‘Jupiter Crash’ and see images of the Shoemaker-Levy impact below.
