The cure alone with you
Four months later, I got in my car and drove away.For a long time, I thought I was going crazy. I couldn’t take the drama and the back biting and all the shit anymore. Yeah, not very good memories of that trip and it was the beginning of the end for me. The next day we tried to get home but the whole of Britain was gripped in this massive storm and we only got as far as Birmingham, I think. We actually had battery-powered amps and played the song for real. So we were all set up in the snow and playing the song over and over again in front of some fake palm trees in the freezing cold, drinking brandy. Things were so bad that Simon actually didn’t play on that recording. There’s quite a lot of b-roll video of this floating around of us pushing the van in the snow (and) practicing “Hello I Love You” (which we were about to record for an Elektra special album). Bruno (Brunning, the band’s assistant) was roaming around in a polar bear suit and was probably the only person who was warm. It was freezing and miserable and of course took hours. Somebody actually died on the mountain behind us that day. It was in Glencoe I think, and luckily for Tim it did snow the day we shot the video and it didn’t stop.
We traveled up to Scotland, where it was shot, by train the day before. I took Leslie, my girlfriend, with me to Scotland but I was the only one (who did that) so that was a bit weird as well. Lots of shit going on, very personal shit. There was very, very bad feeling between Simon (Gallup) and Boris (Williams) which was later turned on me. The atmosphere within the group was terrible. It was shot long after the end of the tour in January 1990 I think. I have probably blanked it out, as it was such a bad memory.
I had all but forgotten about “Pictures Of You”. Its music video shows the band in the snow dressed in winter clothing as it is revealed they are actually in the tropics surrounded by palm trees, a concept also found in their 1987 b-side “Snow In Summer”. The lyrics continue the atmospheric imagery of “Plainsong”, tying in the theme of rain. Smith believes it was taken in Scotland in 1981 while on holiday. The photo on the cover of the song’s single is the same one used as the cover of “Charlotte Sometimes”, just not heavily distorted. It must also be taken into consideration that Smith confessed to Smash News in 1985 that he lies to interviewers because “I bore myself if I don’t make things up.” However, the name Myra Poleo is an anagram of his wife’s maiden name Mary Poole, and no such poem has been found to exist. Yet another tale, found in the liner notes for the band’s compilation album Galore, Smith wrote that the song was “loosely based on an essay by Myra Poleo entitled The Dark Power of Ritual Pictures – after reading it I destroyed all my old ‘personal’ photographs, and almost all of my ‘home’ cine and video collection – I think I was trying to wipe away my past… within days I was suffering great regret I still am!” Another story is that he once threw away all of his personal photos and home movies. One is that it was written after a fire at Smith’s house and he found pictures of his wife, Mary Poole in the wreckage – so the song was written in response to his nostalgia. Smith has given different stories about what inspired the song. It reached the top 30 in the UK and Germany, and was a minor hit in the US and The Netherlands. “Pictures Of You” is the fourth and final single released from Disintegration.