Robert Smith, and the trick hiding in a happy song

Robert Smith was twenty-six years old when he wrote "yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die." Twenty-six. And then he set it to the bounciest guitar hook of his entire career.

That is the whole trick of "In Between Days," and I am a little embarrassed by how long it took me to hear it. The song came out in July of 1985. It jangles. It is bright and fast and sounds like a good day. Underneath, the words are about panic, and aging, and somebody walking out the door. Most people dance to it. Most people never make it to the verse where he is shivering like a child.

The gap between how it sounds and what it says is what I wanted to paint. So the palette is not the palette of the song. It is the palette of the lyrics. Frozen slate, ice pale, bruise violet, ash grey-green. The color of a February you cannot get out of. One warm mark in the whole piece, and it is his mouth.

The sleeve for The Head on the Door is a photo of his little sister Janet, blurred until she is barely a person. The lettering was made by a man named Andy Vella using a cotton bud, household bleach, and photographic paper. Not a font. Bleach.

The video was shot on black-and-white film, then somebody spent two extra weeks hand-painting color onto it. Fluorescent socks come flying out of a piano in the first three seconds. Smith said for years he never understood the socks. He also said it is one of his favorite Cure videos, because it captures the song.

Which is a strange thing to say about a video with flying socks, attached to a song about wanting to die. Except that is the song. Bright nonsense on top, the real thing sitting underneath where you have to go looking.

Mojo put "In Between Days" at number two on their list of the greatest Cure songs. Billboard put it at three. In America in 1985, it peaked at ninety-nine. Nobody was listening to the words then either.