PORNOGRAPHY
The songs on "Pornography" were written either "stream of consciousness" ("streams of extreme drunkenness"!) style on an old typewriter in my bedroom at home in Crawley, or on torn scraps of yellow paper on hallucinating early mornings walking through and around horrible bits of London in cold December 1982.
They range from acutely personal observations on my immediate surroundings and friends, to general rants against the futility of everything and everyone, to back to the horrors going on inside...
It is very difficult to explain the songs, as even within each verse of any one, there are several layers of (logically) unconnected ideas. But I will colour...
"Pornography", an album that almost chokes on itself, remains a dairy of one of my blackest times. But it's one of my favourites!!!
One Hundred Years - Is pure self loathing and worthlessness, and contains probably the key line - the line that underpinned this period of writing: "it doesn't matter if we all die"... everything is empty. This song is despair
A Short Term Effect - Is about a drug and it's effect. Short-term I thought.
The Hanging Garden - Is something like about the purity and hate of animals fucking, and I think.
Siamese Twins - Is about the hate and purity of people fucking too...
The Figurehead - Was a grotesque skull sculpture I discovered in the disused asylum we used in the "Charlotte Sometimes" video. I took it home to talk to - to confess to? And this song is about guilt.
A Strange Day - Was how I would feel if it would only be the end of the world - and...
Cold - Is another song about another drug and it's grip...
Pornography - The last song, and in fact the last song I wrote for a while, is fueled by the same self-mockery, self-hate, that burned in 100 Years, but it is, if only very slightly, a little more hopeful than the others... I am escaping (I escaped) by blaming someone else. A murder or suicide? "I must fight this sickness..."
Inspirations from Robert Smith were published in Cure News fanzine n° 9 in April 1990.