{"id":511939,"date":"2025-10-19T12:51:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T12:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/511939\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T12:51:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T12:51:18","slug":"the-poem-that-inspired-the-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/511939\/","title":{"rendered":"The poem that inspired The Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Robert<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Sam Rockman)<\/p>\n

Sun 19 October 2025 5:00, UK <\/p>\n

As much as I love them dearly, The Cure<\/a> were fully in elder statesmen territory last year. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, the status suited them. They were universally beloved national treasures whose live shows could still be absolutely slaughter at a moment\u2019s notice. Need proof? Look at their rapturously received headline slots at Glastonbury and Reading Festivals, along with a few of the biggest headline dates they\u2019d ever played at Hyde Park in 2018. <\/p>\n

As much as Robert Smith kept stringing us fans along with promises of a new album, you\u2019d be hard-pressed to find someone who really needed one. <\/p>\n

After all, the band\u2019s last album of new material came in 2008 with the thoroughly decent, far from life-changing 4:13 Dream. No one really needed to hear any new material when generations of new bands were still coming up worshipping The Cure. Then, their first album of new material in 16 years, Songs of a Lost World was announced. Fair enough, we all thought. It was about time Bob\u2019s talk of a new album actually paid off and if we got a tour out of it, high fives all around. Then, the weirdest thing happened. <\/p>\n

Songs of a Lost World absolutely fucking ripped. It was their best album since Disintegration<\/a>, one of the best they\u2019d ever done and it wasn\u2019t even close. With one album, The Cure had effortlessly proved they still had it and the first signs that the band were well and truly back came from the album\u2019s first single \u2018Alone\u2019. A prime slice of dreamy, classic Cure-esque psyche-pop that took a full three and a half minutes before Robert Smith\u2019s plaintive vocals came in, singing \u201cThis is the end of every song that we sing.\u201d <\/p>\n

What inspired the first single from The Cure in 16 years? <\/p>\n

In amongst how spectacular the album was, it was also pretty apparent that Songs of a Lost World was a desperately sad album. Yes, even by the standards set by The Cure. That\u2019s how you know things have not exactly been rosy at Chez Smith. The record was mainly inspired by the loss of Smith\u2019s brother, and the album\u2019s lush, gothic sound has very little to do with their back catalogue of pop hits like \u2018The Lovecats\u2019 and \u2018In Between Days\u2019. <\/p>\n

\u2018Alone\u2019 is a perfect example of this. The song had a very specific inspiration, one that came neither from any other band or a specific song, but rather a poem. Ernest Christopher Dowson published the collection of poems Decorations: In Verse and Prose in 1899, the last collection of his work published before his untimely death in 1900. Many of his turns of phrases, like \u201cgone with the wind\u201d and \u201cdays of wine and roses\u201d have passed into popular culture but \u2018Alone\u2019 comes from a more specific source, his poem \u2018Dregs\u2019. <\/p>\n

Both pieces of art share a similar sense of desolation, with the opening line of \u2018Alone\u2019 being a paraphrase of the closing line of \u2018Dregs\u2019. In a press release for the record, Smith said, \u201cAs soon as we finished recording, I remembered the poem \u2018Dregs\u2019\u2026 and that was the moment when I knew the song \u2013 and the album \u2013 were real.\u201d <\/p>\n

A sign, if one was needed, that you never truly know what is going to inspire your next move. What\u2019s more, if you keep your mind open, then you also never truly know just how far that next move can take you. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Sam Rockman) Sun 19 October 2025 5:00, UK As much as I love them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[77,269,22417,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-511939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-the-cure","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115400926160952892","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}