I gave up trying to hide my adoration for The Cure many decades ago — and the band has never given me a reason to stop being a fan. Revisiting their discography once again, I made this new selection. After all, few lyricists in the history of popular music have treated literature as seriously as Robert Smith. From the band’s early days, he turned books into songs, characters into metaphors, and feelings into chapters.

The world of The Cure — melancholic, introspective, at times haunting — is born from the same source as that of the great authors who shaped him: solitude, fragmented identity, and the inevitable passage of time.

Smith has always been a voracious reader. Over the decades, his lyrics reveal a private library composed of Camus, Kafka, Baudelaire, Penelope Farmer, Mervyn Peake, Conrad, Carroll, Proust, and even Orwell. These are not “echoes” or passing references, but books he read, lived, and transformed into sound.

Shall we dive into a playlist that feels more like a walk through his library?

“Killing an Arab” (1978) — Camus by the sea

Smith’s first literary reference came early. Killing an Arab was written after reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

“Standing on the beach with a gun in my hand…”

The lyrics describe, almost word for word, the novel’s pivotal scene — Meursault shooting the man on the beach, an act of absurd detachment.

Smith has always insisted that the song is not political, but a meditation on existentialism and alienation.

He now performs it as Killing Another, but its essence remains: indifference as a form of despair.

“Charlotte Sometimes” (1981) — the girl trapped in time

Inspired by the novel Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, this is one of the most faithful literary adaptations ever turned into a song.

Smith read the 1969 book — about a girl who travels through time and exchanges places with another student — and became fascinated by the notion of losing one’s identity.

The video, filmed in a Victorian boarding school, mirrors the book’s setting, and the song quotes its closing lines directly:

“Charlotte sometimes / crying for herself / and the others.”

It’s The Cure at its most fragile and dreamlike: childhood, memory, and loneliness blending into a single ghostly echo.

“The Drowning Man” (1981) — the tragic fate of Fuchsia Groan

Also from Faith, Smith drew from Mervyn Peake’s gothic Gormenghast Trilogy.

“She stands twelve feet above the flood…”

The song portrays Fuchsia Groan, the doomed heroine whose suicide marks the decay of Gormenghast itself.

Smith has said Peake was more important to him than Tolkien — and The Drowning Man plays like a medieval elegy wrapped in fog and mourning.

“The Hanging Garden” (1982) — Conrad’s apocalypse

Jungle chaos, terrified animals, moral collapse — Smith told NME in 1983 that The Hanging Garden drew from readings of Joseph Conrad, especially Heart of Darkness.

There are biblical shades of Revelation too, but at its core lies Conrad’s vision of nature as the mirror of human madness.

“Cold” (1982) — Proust and Peake in the snow

At the time, Smith was reading both Mervyn Peake and Marcel Proust, and Cold emerged from that collision of decay and memory.

“It’s about loss of self. The decay of everything you once thought was stable,” he said in 1982.

It’s the Faith album distilled to its essence — time as prison, love as disintegration, Proust’s nostalgia frozen into gothic despair.

“Piggy in the Mirror” (1984) — Carroll and the distorted reflection

On The Top, Smith stares into the mirror and finds what Lewis Carroll described in Through the Looking-Glass: a self that no longer resembles itself.

“It’s about self-hatred — looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself.”

The mirror — a recurring Cure symbol — becomes a portal between identity and illusion, turning Carroll’s whimsy into psychological torment.

“How Beautiful You Are” (1987) — Baudelaire in Paris

A direct adaptation of Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem The Eyes of the Poor (Le Spleen de Paris).

“You want to know why I hate you? Well, I’ll try and explain…”

Like the original story, the song recounts a moment in which a man and woman observe a poor family from a café window: he feels compassion, she only contempt.

Smith translates Baudelaire’s prose into one of his sharpest portraits of love and moral decay — empathy turned into estrangement.

“At Night” (1980) — Kafka’s invisible labyrinth

Smith has long cited Franz Kafka as a major influence.

At Night, from Seventeen Seconds, could easily belong in The Castle or The Trial: fear without shape, guilt without cause, and endless searching.

“It’s about fear and guilt you can’t define — pure Kafka,” Smith explained in 1980.

“Alone” (2023) — Dowson, Camus, and the end of every song

When Robert Smith opens Alone with the line “This is the end of every song that we sing,” he is quoting the poem “Dregs” by Ernest Dowson (1899).

The original verse — “This is the end of every song man sings” — carries the same exhaustion and melancholy that haunt the song.

Dowson, one of the fin-de-siècle Decadent poets, wrote of disillusionment, lost love, and the bitter residue of life’s fleeting pleasures — the “dregs” left at the bottom of the cup.

Smith transforms that verse into an existential refrain: the end of all songs as a metaphor for the end of art itself — and of time.

Dowson died tragically of tuberculosis in 1900, at just 32, after years of poverty and heartbreak. His voice, fragile yet eternal, finds a strange afterlife in Smith’s modern elegy.

If Dowson gave words to romantic despair, Smith answers with Camus’s calm acceptance — not revolt, but quiet recognition that even beauty must fade.

Robert Smith’s invisible library

Between Dowson and Baudelaire, Peake and Carroll, Camus and Tolkien, Robert Smith has built a body of work that reads the world through melancholy.

For more than four decades, The Cure has been a literary band: each song a short story, each album a novel.

If a thread connects Faith, Disintegration, and Songs of a Lost World, it is this — the ongoing dialogue between human sorrow and the words that attempt to name it.

“Books saved me,” Smith once said. “They gave me words for feelings I didn’t know how to name.”

And perhaps that’s what The Cure has always done — give sound to the nameless, turning silence into literature.