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I never thought that I would find myself
In bed amongst the stones
The columns are all men
Begging to crush me
No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes
And no flags wave me home
In the caves
All cats are gray
In the caves
The textures coat my skin
In the death cell
A single note
Rings on and on and on
In bed amongst the stones
The columns are all men
Begging to crush me
No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes
And no flags wave me home
In the caves
All cats are gray
In the caves
The textures coat my skin
In the death cell
A single note
Rings on and on and on
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Things went from bad to worse. My mother (my aunt's sister) because very unexpectedly and gravely ill that October. She died two days later, on 21 October 2009, aged 59. So I lost two of the very dearest people in my life over the span of just six months.
Still I could not listen to the song, though luckily I had associated it more strongly with my aunt's death. Finally, on 26 April 2010, a year and a day since she passed, I listened to All Cats Are Grey. Very loud. In my office after everyone had left for the day. It was a tremendous relief for me to find that, somehow it didn't carry with it the same awful emotional resonance as a year earlier. The time that had passed since those deaths had also healed, in some ways, the weight of this song.
Now I can listen to the song somewhat freely. I'll always associate it with tremendous loss, but at least I no longer fear it. I'm a pretty casual Cure fan, but there have been very few songs in my life that can compare with the impact that this one made. It is truly unforgettable.
That means: In the dark, all cats are grey...
Apparently it means that any woman can be beautiful in the dark. Perhaps Robert Smith is having a very pathetic hook-up and feels disgusted by himself?
how sad.
"Just a nightmare of being lost/trapped in caves - echos of the grave and of prison cells and again of growing old".
When I hear this song, I always think that the caves and stones were symbolic of a cemetery. Which would match the "deat cell" line. The Cure are masters of creating mood with music. This song is an excellent example.
"I never thought that I would find myself / In bed amongst the stones"
Rather than being whisked away to the afterlife, he finds himself lying at the bottom of his grave, on soil that is full of stones.
"The columns are all men / begging to crush me"
The image of lying in this grave, looking up, and seeing "columns" of men (gravediggers) shoveling dirt over the grave. And so in a sense, crushing him under the weight of it all.
"No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes / And no flags wave me home"
The first part could easily be taken as a loose reference to greek mythology; where the figure of Charon ferries the souls of the dead across the river Styx, from the world of the living to Hades. The second line is fairly obvious I think. No flags waving me home, no dead loved ones standing at the end of the light, beckoning me to come.
"In caves all cats are grey / In caves the textures coat my skin"
Maybe more difficult to interpret. Someone pointed out the origin of that phrase and looking it up: "Things are indistinguishable at night. Used in a variety of contexts." If you accept the previous parts of the interpetation, it can be taken as a loss of sensory input as he's being buried. He can't see anything, he can't make out anything. It doesn't matter anymore wether something is black, white, whatever. In the absence of light it may all as well be grey. Textures coating his skin would then be describing the feeling of touch. Maybe dust or dirt settling on his immobile corpse, or simply the stale air smothering him (if in fact he was buried in a coffin).
"In the death cell / A single note rings on and on and on..."
His coffin (or just the ground he was buried in if there's no coffin) is of course the death cell. Again, in the context of this interpretation the word "cell" makes perfect sense. It's not a final resting place, it's a prison, because he has awareness. Eternal solitary confinement if you will. A single note rings on and on, driving home the concept of an eternity in this state of being.
The song actually takes on a bit of a scary horror vibe, if you think of it like that.
Cheers.