The Cure songs inspired by Robert Smith’s wife
For The Cure frontman Robert Smith, his wife has been a constant in his life before even forming the “sort of a sub-metal punk group” Malice in his teens.
According to an interview with Smash Hits in 1986, Smith and Mary Poole met at school during a drama class. The very definition of high school sweethearts, the young couple stayed together through The Cure’s founding, the rocky turmoil that surrounded the early post-punk era—’Charlotte Sometimes’ single cover is in fact a blurred and abstract photo of Mary at a Scottish castle in 1980— and by each other’s side as pop stardom and stadium headlining arrived, standing as one of the world’s biggest bands by the decade’s close.
With so many years together, it’s likely that Mary has indirectly shaped a significant amount of Smith’s songbook, making a definitive collation of songs inspired by her difficult to conclusively pin down. Underneath lyrical ambiguity and the layers of differing influences from poems or literature, numbers such as ‘Pictures of You’, ‘How Beautiful You Are…’, and ‘Untitled’ are suspected to be lyrically imbued by the pair’s romance, and who else is Smith singing about on the funky ‘Hot Hot Hot!!!’?
There are two much-loved singles that we know Smith wrote explicitly for his wife, however. The first was inspired by a particularly foggy stroll in East Sussex’s Beachy Head, notable to industrial fans as the location of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats cover. Following several hours of drinking, and afraid his obscured vision may result in a fall off the steep cliffsides, the dream-like moment fraught with an edge of trepidation sowed the thematic seeds of Kiss Me Kiss Kiss Me’s ‘Just Like Heaven’, the surrealist slice of enchanted passion devoted to his old school girlfriend, who also features in Tim Pope’s hypnagogic and MTV hogging video.
After 15 years together, Smith and Mary wed in August 1988 in their hometown’s Worth Abbey. Rather than offering a material gift, The Cure frontman penned Disintegration’s ‘Lovesong’, a surprisingly bright number among the album’s dramatic shroud that still pangs with ruminative energy, conceptually standing aside the numbers all crafted during a bout of reflection as Smith was nearing 30 and reassessing his life. ‘Lovesong’ was his most naked lyrics yet, an open declaration of love, eschewing any nebulous veneer or artful disguise to mask the single’s open and heartfelt sentiment. It was a commercial success too, sailing to number two on the US Billboard 200.
“Mary means so incomprehensibly much to me,” Smith confessed to Pop in 1996. “I actually don’t think she has ever realised how dependent I’ve been of her during all these years we’ve been together”.
Adding, “She’s always been the one that has saved me when I have been the most self-destructive, she’s always been the one that has caught me when I have been so very close to fall apart completely, and if she would have disappeared—I am sorry, I know that I’m falling into my irritating miserable image by saying it—then I would have killed myself”.
