i almost believe that they’re real

The wallet came out of the fire. Robert Smith has told the story more than one way, but the version that stuck is this: a fire went through his home, and when he went back over what was left he found his wallet, and in it the photographs of Mary — the girl he had met at fourteen at St Wilfrid’s in Crawley and married in August 1988. One of those pictures is the single sleeve. The song is what happens when you look at a photograph for long enough — I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / That I almost believe that they’re real — and on the album it takes him seven and a half minutes to say so.

It was made at Hookend, a country studio in Oxfordshire, between November 1988 and February 1989, with Smith closing in on thirty and wanting, in his words, an environment that was slightly unpleasant. Six names sit on the writing credit — Smith, Gallup, Thompson, O’Donnell, Williams, Tolhurst — though Lol Tolhurst was drinking himself out of the band while it was being made and turns up on the sleeve credited with “other instrument”. Roger O’Donnell’s keyboards are the weather the whole of Disintegration sits under; here they roll for a long time before anyone sings, which is why Fiction had to carve the thing down to under five minutes to get it out as a single in March 1990. It reached number twenty-four in Britain. The album cut is the one to have.

Tim Pope shot the video in the snow at Ballachulish, in the Highlands. Having spent serious money on a set for “Lovesong”, this time he took three Super-8 cameras up the glen, passed them round on a tray, and let anyone who fancied it film. The cold kept killing the batteries, so each burst of footage runs a few seconds before it dies — a lot of small pictures, none of them quite holding, which is the song. Smith said he had never been so cold. The evening finished with a snowball fight. Then go and find the long version, and wait for the voice.