It’s the summer of 1986 and rock is down the toilet. So what can a poor boy do, except to go home and sit in a darkened room playing with knives? Make like Mötley Crüe is somehow real? Or Poison? Come on, man.
A year later, things would begin to change drastically with the arrival of Guns N’ Roses, straight from the streets of Hollyweird, blitzed on neon and permanent midnight. But it would take time for their impact to fully unload.
First though, came a British band that would score a gargantuan hit straight out of the box. A group of fuck-’em-all braves who showed true vision, real courage, ultra-panache by shaking off their shiny punk-pop skin to reveal the kind of snake-hipped, tra-la-la, riff-addicted rock we hadn’t seen since before Bonzo left the planet.
Article continues belowThey were The Cult, and they were hated as much as they were ever loved and they knew it and just didn’t care. And in 1987 they would become the unlikely saviours of rock – real tattooed moonchild rock – with the release of their third album, Electric.
Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy had done the hard yards on the British post-punk scene - the former as singer of Southern Death Cult, the latter passing through Manchester punks The Nosebleeds and the more successful Theatre Of Hate. After Southern Death Cult fell apart, Astbury kept two-thirds of the name and recruited Duffy, Theatre Of Hate drummer and bassist Jamie Stewart.
“The music we made back then was much more complicated than what we were doing by the time we came to Electric,” recalls Stewart. “There was a lot more to do on the bass, the guitar didn’t figure as much. As time went on, though, things got simpler and simpler, to where on Electric it was all about the guitar, and I was basically just strumming a D chord.”
The process of stripping back the post-punk pretensions began with the final shortening of the name, in 1984, to simply The Cult. Their first album, 1984’s Dreamtime, sounded like a swirling version of Astbury’s beloved The Doors. It was clear that Astbury saw himself as a direct descendent of rock’s golden age, the late-60s. ‘I will wear my hair long,’ he threatened on the title track, ‘an extension of my heart’. “It was just as a protest,” says Stewart now. “This is a post-punk band saying, well, we’re gonna do it our way, thanks.”
Then, in October ’85, came their second album Love, their big, chart breakthrough. The sound of Love was the sound of The Cult in excelsis: reverb-heavy, lightning-flash drama, gothic, psychedelic, pop-to-punk-to-rock moreish.
If you wanna make a record that people outside of LA and New York are gonna buy, you have to ditch the reverb.
Jamie Stewart
The three singles released from it – She Sells Sanctuary, Rain, and Revolution – significant chart hits. A follow-up, Peace, was started at Richard Branson’s upmarket studio, The Manor, then abandoned. It was Astbury who was the main driver in bailing on the Peace sessions.
“Ian had moved on,” says Stewart. “He’d gone back to listening to more blues – and the Beastie Boys. Ian just lost interest in the reverb, echo, big wall of noise thing we’d had on Love. He’d lost interest in it almost before we’d started recording, and got even less interested in it as we went along.”
It was across the Atlantic that The Cult would hook up with the man who helped them leave their recent past behind and complete their transformation into an undiluted rock band: Rick Rubin.
In 1986, Rick Rubin was a 23-year-old chancer from Lido Beach, on Long Island, who still ate pizza and burgers, though didn’t drink. Music had been his passion for as long as Rubin could remember. Interestingly, considering the career he was to have, he loved The Beatles but “never really liked the Stones”.
At the time he began working with The Cult, Rubin had already produced career-defining albums for The Beastie Boys (Licensed To Ill), LL Cool J (I Need A Beat), and, most recently, Reign In Blood for Slayer. He’d also produced Walk This Way, the first major rock-rap crossover hit, for Run DMC and Aerosmith.
He was also a devoted AC/DC fan. As Rubin later recalled: “When I’m producing a rock band, I try to create albums that sound as powerful as Highway To Hell. It sounds simple, but what AC/DC did is almost impossible to duplicate.”
The Cult and Rubin holed up in Electric Lady studios in New York’s funky Greenwich Village. Across the street from was a retro rock memorabilia store called Rock And Roll Heaven, where Astbury would spend hours entranced by its collection of 60s and 70s American music mags, buying up vintage psychedelic posters by Rick Griffin and hard-to-find vinyl LPs.
“It was a holy grail of this period we were enamoured with,” he recalled years later in Rolling Stone. “We’d take these artifacts back to the studio, like, ‘Check out this picture of Jimmy Page in Creem magazine from 1975!’ We even had ‘Zoso’ T-shirts made up.”
When I’m producing a rock band, I try to create albums that sound as powerful as Highway To Hell.
Rick Rubin
At the same time as beseeching them to abandon their “pussy English music” in favour of rock with a capital ‘R’, Rubin brought his experience as a hip-hop producer to bear. Specifically, the instant gratification a monumental kick-drum guarantees.
Drummer Les Warner, who was making his first album with The Cult, was a super-talented player whose idol growing up had been Thin Lizzy’s Brian Downey. Percussive, clever, powerful, he was into the sheer dynamics of drumming. When Rubin insisted he rein it in for a far simpler backbeat that recalled AC/DC’s workmanlike drummer Phil Rudd, Warner was appalled.
But then Duffy had also been directed to flush the flash and concentrate on non-effects, hard-edged rhythm, so Warner reluctantly went along. The end, though, more than justified the means. Rubin recalled how he would wait for his engineer to finish playing back a mix, allow the band to make their observations, “and then I’d push the kick-drum up five decibels. That’s what ended up on the record – ridiculous kick-drum!”
All but four of the tracks that ended up on Electric had originally been recorded during the Peace sessions. Only one of the four, Lil’ Devil, with its AC/DC-on-stilts riff and hot-lips Jagger lyrics, had real impact though, giving the band their biggest hit single in Britain yet. The other seven were remade by Rubin.
“There were some great guitar riffs that were in the [Peace] sessions that got lost in the [Electric] sessions because of the complete turnaround sound shift,” says Stewart. “I’m thinking of Electric Ocean and the first version of Love Removal Machine. It was almost baby with the bath water, but we just had to do it.”
Indeed the Peace version of Electric Ocean had a groovy, spiralling 360 riff that is completely missing from the more juddering Electric version. Love Removal Machine had the same ‘borrowed’ riff from the Stones’ Start Me Up as on Peace, but was shorter, more manicured, right down to its new finale, another ‘borrowed’ moment, this time from Zeppelin’s Heartbreaker – that glorious 90 seconds at the end where Page ditches the intricacies and simply rocks the fuck out. Another cornerstone Electric track, Aphrodisiac Jacket, with its horny, descending riff, unashamedly evokes Cream’s Tales Of Brave Ulysses.
The most glaring appropriation of a classic rock guitar riff, though, comes on the lead track, Wild Flower: an exact replica of the riff to Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer by AC/DC.
We’d take these artifacts back to the studio: ‘Check out this picture of Jimmy Page in Creem magazine from 1975!’ We even had ‘Zoso’ T-shirts made up.
Ian Astbury
“There was a lot of AC/DC going on at the time, it’s true,” Stewart says with a laugh. “It was on in the studio a fair bit. Billy told me some years ago he’d talked to Angus Young about that riff [to Wild Flower] and apologised, and Angus said: ‘Don’t worry about it. We all borrow stuff all the time.’”
With work in New York continuing right through Christmas 1986, when Astbury and Duffy returned home to England in the New Year they looked ahead emboldened, to a 1987 loaded with 50-state dreams and a stars-and-stripes future.
According to Stewart, Duffy and Rubin were the main drivers for wanting Electric to be The Cult’s ticket to ride in America. “Billy’s always been a business head, and I’m sure Rick had his finger on that too,” he says. “So if you wanna make a record that people outside of LA and New York are gonna buy, you have to ditch the chorus reverb and… I don’t know. You’ve got to change your guitar amp.”
Released in March 1987, Electric divided everyone. The hard rock mags acted suspicious, like what are these punks trying to pull? The new wave bibles also smelled a rat, for different reasons. Even some of the band’s fans were frankly baffled. Instead of the sparkly fairy dust of Love, there were now tightly compressed guitar riffs. The kind of high, dry, blam-blam sound that sounds great bursting out of tiny radio speakers. Or cheap stereos, straight out the window, delighting the neighbours.
“We lost a lot of the British, kind of goth audience at the time, but we still kept a bunch,” says Stewart. “Maybe half of the Mission fans and people that liked that kind of thing went: ‘This Electric stuff is not for us’. But half of the folk who did like Love could also get on with Electric, despite it being quite a shift. You weren’t supposed to do that and yet we did.”
In America there was also a hasty rethink among their existing supporters. “College radio, who were all over Love, weren’t quite as all over Electric. But then there were tons of classic rock stations in the States who would have been up for it. But then somehow or other in Britain it took off as well.”
As with Love, there were three hit singles on Electric – Love Removal Machine, Wild Flower and Lil’ Devil – only this time they also began climbing the US charts. Like Love, Electric also got to No.4 in the UK. Unlike Love, Electric also reached the US Top 40, eventually selling more than a million copies there.
Billy told me he’d apologised to Angus Young about that riff to Wild Flower. Angus said: ‘Don’t worry about it. We all borrow stuff all the time.’”
Jamie Stewart
By the end of 1987, as the world tour that followed finally came to an end, The Cult had proved their doubters wrong, and drawn a road map for all who would now follow, not least Guns N’ Roses, who opened for the band on the North American leg of the summer ’87 tour, after being invited on to the tour personally by Ian Astbury.
Speaking three decades later, Billy Duffy put it like this: “We heralded a change that culminated with everyone buying Appetite For Destruction, and we were treated badly for standing up and saying there’s nothing wrong with organic rock music. Ian wears his heart on his sleeve, and he shows where he’s at in his dress. We were into heavy rock but we weren’t a metal band, and the English music press felt scared by that. They didn’t have a clue what we were doing.”
On tour, Duffy suggested they needed a second guitar player to play Electric material live. So Jamie moved over and former Zodiac Mindwarp bassist Kid Chaos came in. “It was hard to find somebody else, because we weren’t in the Whitesnake camp and we weren’t in the punk camp any more,” explains Stewart. “We needed someone in tune with The Cult, and that wasn’t going to be easy.”
They were on the road, hitting the sky, for eight months. By the end of it the band was almost finished. “There were no drugs, that was never really our thing,” says Stewart. “Ian liked wine and Billy liked Jack Daniel’s. Then somebody decided smashing gear would be a good idea, and that was the beginning of the end, really.”
When, on the last night of their Australian tour, Kid Chaos “gave away his bass amp to some kid in the audience”, it was the last straw.
Back home for Christmas 1987, a year exactly since they’d finished working with Rick Rubin on Electric, The Cult didn’t know what they wanted anymore, just what they didn’t want. Warner was fired soon after. Kid Chaos went back to Zodiac Mindwarp. Astbury, Duffy and Stewart “fled from each other, really”, and The Cult went into forced abeyance for nearly nine months.
When they began work on the next step towards American superstardom, with Canadian producer Bob Rock, with whom they would make the multi-platinum, planet-quaking Sonic Temple album. After that, Guns N’ Roses stole their new drummer Matt Sorum to help them make the two Use Your Illusion albums, and Metallica made off with Bob Rock to record their own shape-shifting mega-hit, the Black album.
It was with the Electric album, though, that the real rock revolution began. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Zeppelin, AC/DC and the Stones as they churned out one drop-dead-gorgeous classic after another. The kind of album the then recently rejuvenated Aerosmith could still only dream of making. The one that sent the jolts that fried your wolf-child, sweet honey baby brains. Right on.
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 238 (July 2017)
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