“His band may have been falling apart around him, but in one crucial aspect, Robert Smith was a lucky man. Over the past three years and three Cure albums he’d suffered a very public meltdown and done his best to alienate his audience, his friends and his bandmates. But the one constant in his life was Mary Poole, his long-time girlfriend. Even when he’d sunk lower than he thought possible, with The Cure having crashed and burned at the end of a period Smith described as “more like a rugby tour than a Cure tour”, Poole stood by her man. Smith was smart enough to recognise her remarkable, unswerving faith in him and acknowledge how much she helped him keep his head together.
‘I was quite out of sync, a bit disturbed,’ Smith said of his hard times in the early Eighties. ‘I knew then that Mary was the girl for me, because she stuck by me. But everyone I know reaches a point where they throw out their arms and go berserk for a while – otherwise you never know what your limits are. I was just trying to find mine.‘”
“Mary means so incomprehensibly much to me. I actually don’t think she has ever realized how dependant I’ve been of her during all these years we’ve been together. 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.”
- Did you take the picture of Mary on the cover of ‘Pictures Of You’? Where and when was it taken?
- Yes - on holiday in Scotland in 1981 i think…
- If you could go back and repeat something you have done in the past, what would it be?
- My first dance with Mary.
(Another of Smith’s early music heroes was David Bowie. He and his lifelong partner, Mary Poole, would share their first dance to the accompaniment of Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars’.)
“She’s fab. My best friend. She’s got black hair and very striking looks. In fact she looks like Betty Boop. When I’m with her I just sit back and watch – I don’t have to perform any more.”
“Mary is even weirder then me - she often disguises herself as a witch and goes out to scare people. She is the perfect woman for someone like me.”
“At the time, Smith had also started work on a musical sketch called ‘Lovesong’, a song that had a noticeably different mood to the rest of his new material. It was a gentle strum in the midst of some genuine fire and brimstone. For Robert Smith it was a first – and the title said it all. ‘It’s an open show of emotion,’ he admitted.
‘It’s not trying to be clever. It’s taken me 10 years to reach the point where I felt comfortable singing a very straightforward love song. In the past, I’ve always felt a last-minute need to disguise the sentiment.’ What Smith was actually writing was a gift to Mary Poole – a wedding gift. ‘I couldn’t think of what to give her,’ said Smith, ‘so I wrote her that song – cheap and cheerful. She would have preferred diamonds, I think, but she might look back and be glad that I gave her that.’ Finally, after 15 years together, they were married in Worth Abbey on August 13, with much of The Cure along for the party. Simon Gallup was best man, while Smith played DJ for much of the night-long party that followed their nuptials.”
- What was your favorite wedding present? Who gave it to you?
- A platinum heart from Mary.
- Do you and Mary have nick-names for each other? If so, what are they?
- I call her “m”. She calls me anything she wants; it changes depending on what time it is…
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