The lyrics, according to Gartside, are about “the notion of the ultimate truth about the world.” “We’re all running around and none of us is quite grasping what it is,” he told Sounds about a month before the album came out. “The point of the song was a) there isn’t one and b) it’s somehow a terribly difficult myth to live without. It’s hard to reconcile yourself to the idea that
there’s nothing on this earth that’s more than other people’s opinions.” His writing across Cupid and Psyche ’85 reflects his obsession with what he saw as the illusion of absolute truth, though you wouldn’t always know it without his own voluminous on-record interpretation to guide you. The album’s title, a reference to a Greek myth in which a human woman spoils her affair with a deity by trying to understand him too closely, is itself a giant signpost advertising Gartside’s ideas about unresolveable tensions between love and knowledge, essence and language, the fiction of the real and the honesty of the fake.
The third verse of “Absolute” goes like this: “Where the words are worn away/We live to love another day/Where the words are hard and fast/We talk of nothing new but the past.” He’s talking about the fixity of language, the way it tries to pin life’s infinite variety to a static set of concepts and descriptors, grasping for absolutes that don’t exist. But he’s also talking, more plainly, about a communication breakdown in a relationship: that moment in an argument when you sit in silence and find tenderness again, the moment’s sweetness charged with the possibility that you’ll resume fighting, prodding at the same old wounds, as soon as you open your mouths.
Gartside tended to lead with the deconstructionist angle on his writing, and most critics seemed to take it as a given that all the lovey-dovey stuff was conceptual cleverness, a way of infiltrating pop and turning its lingua franca in on itself. But these are love songs, just as thoroughly as they are songs of ideas. The experiment wouldn’t have worked otherwise. He may have been suspicious of such seemingly basic concepts as “human feeling,” but Cupid and Psyche ’85 is full of it: in its careful attention to counterpoint and its sheer sonic giddiness; its fixation on love, heartbreak, flirtation, girls, passion and vulnerability masquerading in plain sight as intellectual tricks; and even in its intellectualism, which seems driven less by a desire to impress than genuine terror at the prospect of a world without meaning.
Gartside’s pop dreams came true. Cupid and Psyche ’85 yielded three major hits in the UK. “Perfect Way,” the fourth single, even became a surprise smash stateside. It just missed the Top 10 with its synth-bass precision strikes and a chorus that neatly summarized Gartside’s dueling appetites for profundity and inanity, his heroic quests for meaning and affection from the opposite sex, which were maybe a single quest after all: “I’ve got a perfect way to make certain a maybe/I’ve got a perfect way to make the girls go crazy.” He did it all without compromising his status as an aesthete, though he probably lost some cred with his mates in the Young Communist League along the way. He may have departed from Marxist orthodoxy, but he never abandoned his conviction about the evils of hegemony. When asked whether he had any closing remarks at the end of a particularly combative L.A. Weekly interview about his pop transformation, he answered, “Yes, I think you should fight ignorance and wreck capitalism.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
