Why The Cult had to leave Britain...

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The Cult are probably one of the most complicated and contradictory bands of the 1980s. And consequently one of the most misunderstood. Frequently written off as Britain’s answer to Spinal Tap, with their epic guitar solos and wolf-child posturing, they grew too big for the 80s indie scene that gave us The Cure and The Smiths. Departing for the US halfway through the decade, their output and its critical reception illustrate the contradictions of rock in the 1980s, as well as the lineage between post-punk and grunge. 

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Formed in Bradford in 1983, when singer Ian Astbury defected from Southern Death Cult to start a new venture with Theatre of Hate guitarist Billy Duffy. The duo at the heart of the band have worked with a revolving cast of over thirty musicians, in a career that has spanned five decades. While the concept of a duo worked well for synth-pop acts like Eurythmics or Yazoo, the way in which The Cult were initially presented was very much in the mould of a post-punk band of brothers, with Astbury and Duffy augmented by Nigel Preston (drums) and Jamie Stewart for the first two albums. And yet, as Astbury recalls, they always conceptualized themselves as something more avant-garde: 

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The band was very much entrenched in the genesis of the American postmodern scene. Then we came back and did another tour with Love. The CMJ Awards gave us Single Of The Year for 'She Sells Sanctuary' and we were on Saturday Night Live, too. We were very much an independent, postmodern band. (Ian Astbury)​

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In this direction, the band's critics called-out their appropriation of American rock aesthetics, and the legacy of bands like Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, as parodic and insincere. It flew in the face of punk's rejection of musical virtuosity in favor of romantic notions of political and social authenticity. Thirty years on, however, it is easy to see this ideological posturing for what it was: a construct created by the music press.

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More significant is the way in which The Cult embraced classic rock as a genre with the potential to evolve. John Brand's production for 1984's Dreamtime echoed U2 and took them to the top of the Indie charts. The singles 'Go West', 'Spiritwalker' and 'Resurrection Joe' stand out for their easy rock 'n' roll swagger and danceability. However, it was Steve Brown's intervention on the singles 'She Sells Sanctuary', 'Rain', and the subsequent album Love, that broke the band through into the mainstream.

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Though Brown had worked with Thin Lizzy and the Sex Pistols as a recording engineer in the 1970s, what he brought to The Cult was a mainstream pop sensibility fresh from producing Wham, ABC, and Alison Moyet. While Duffy was skeptical, Astbury was entranced. Recalling his first meeting with the band to Andy Hollis in 2013 Brown had this to say:

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I took in a ghetto blaster and I said to them, knowing what you know about me 'Do you want to be on Top of the Pops?' to which they replied ''yeah all right'. I then hit the play button and Billy immediately said 'that's one of our fucking songs' and I said ‘yeah, I know, it's absolutely one of your song songs I have just chopped it around a bit’. (Steve Brown)

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And so 'She Sells Sanctuary' was born out of an original riff and a working-practice that owed as much to developments in sample-based dance music as the invocation of the 70s rock mysticism, for which they were lampooned. Simultaneously anticipating The Stone Roses and Manic Street Preachers, Love bridged the gap between post-punk aesthetics and 70s rock virtuosity. In a parallel version of the Eighties, ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ would have been number one, but in reality it got to number 15.  For a moment, in 1985, it looked like Ian Astbury was going to be bigger than Simon Le Bon: Madonna allegedly tracked down his phone number. However, for their next album, they decamped to America, to work with Beastie Boys producer Rick Rubin, abandoning further sessions with Steve Brown.

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Electric marked a departure from the layered sound of Love, with a rawer aesthetic convened by the Def Jam producer, redolent of a digitally-enhanced AC/DC  Visually Astbury moved away from the new romantic overtones of the English post-punk scene, invoking the psychedelic imagery of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Reflecting on the album in 2004 Astbury commented:

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Rick Rubin said to us, ‘Do you guys want to make this kind of tepid, English, with lots of digital effects, arty music, or do you want to make big boys music?”. And we went “yes please”. (Ian Astbury)

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The singles 'Lil Devil', 'Love Removal Machine' and 'Wild Flower' all made the top 30 in the UK, and were hits on the US Rock chart. However, a Hot 100 hit continued to elude them.

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The follow-up to Electric was 1989's Sonic Temple, produced by Canadian producer Bob Rock. A fan of both Love and Electric, Rock reputedly wanted to recapture elements of Billy's guitar playing that he felt had been lost with the move to the US. While Electric made the top 40 in the US, Sonic Temple hit number 10, propelled by the success of the single 'Fire Woman', which peaked at 46 and number 2 on the newly-collated Modern Rock Chart. The album positioned The Cult alongside up-and-coming metal acts like Guns and Roses and Metallica, with the band now located permanently in Los Angeles. It also established Bob Rock's credentials as a producer with an ear for the mainstream. In the 1990s he went on to produce hit albums for Metallica, Cher, Bon Jovi, and Bryan Adams.

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With four big singles, the follow-up to Sonic Temple was hotly anticipated. Instead of reprising their collaboration with Bob Rock, The Cult opted to work with Ritchie Zito, whose CV included The Motels, Cheap Trick, Joe Cocker, and Heart. The resultant album Ceremony was released in the Autumn of 1991, with the lead single 'Wild Hearted Son' peaking at number 4 on the Modern Rock Chart. However, it stalled at 40 in the UK, a market which had previously rewarded The Cult with five Top 20 placings between 1985 and 1989. This shift in mainstream taste was marked by the concurrent breakthrough of grunge and alternative rock from Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Ceremony divided fans with its emphasis on Native American heritage, accusations of cultural appropriation, and a lawsuit over the cover art. However, the second incarnation of The Cult was not over yet.

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The industrial sound of the one-off 1992 soundtrack single 'The Witch', from the Ralph Bakshi film Cool World, hinted at the direction the Cult would take next. Tooled by Electric producer Rick Rubin, it owed more to the dance-infused style of Nine Inch Nails than anything on Ceremony. A Youth remix of 'She Sells Sanctuary' followed at the beginning of 1993, preceding a CD anthology of the band's singles to date: Pure Cult: For Rockers, Ravers, Lovers, and Sinners. The remix of 'She Sells Sanctuary' repeated its chart feat of 1985, peaking at number 15. However, the anthology was a surprise hit, giving The Cult their first ever number one album in the UK. In part, this success reflected the wider consumer culture of retrospection cohered around the CD at the beginning of the 1990s. Compilations represented better value, and everyone was cashing in with their greatest hits on the expensive new format. However, it also revealed something that their mysticism and 70s rock affections had obfuscated, which was what a thrilling singles band The Cult were. From 'Spiritwalker' in 1984, to 'The Witch' eight years later, Pure Cult was every bit the high octane ride it promised to deliver.

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In following up Pure Cult the band returned to Bob Rock, who had produced their most commercially successful album, Sonic Temple. The result, however, was very different. Eschewing the polished stadium rock sound of the late-Eighties, the self-titled album recalled the influence of pre-punk and bands like The Stooges and MC, while gesturing also to the more current sounds of grunge and US alternative rock. Two singles 'Coming Down' and 'Star' grazed the Top 75 in the UK and got some recognition on the US Rock charts. However, after the success of Pure Cult, it was more than a little underwhelming. In part, the downturn in the band’s fortunes could be attributed to the rise of Brit Pop in the UK. And, ironically, a return to sounds influenced by the English post-punk scene earlier incarnations of The Cult were part of. However, it is also an example of how greatest hits compilations repeatedly curse the viability of an artist going forward, freezing them in time, and fixing bands as heritage acts. Astbury and Duffy, however, were not yet 35. It would be a long time before they would be ready to play the role of rock's elder statesmen. 

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Going their separate ways in 1995, Billy Duffy spent the remainder of the decade playing with Mike Peters of The Alarm in Coloursound, while Ian formed a new band the Holy Barbarians, who released a garage rock album Cream in 1996. An industrial-sounding Astbury solo album was sneaked out in 2000, with The Cult reforming later that year to record the Diane Warren-penned 'Painted On My Heart' from the film Gone in 60 Seconds. Although The Cult were no strangers to the power ballad formula, it was an unusual move for a band grounded in the songwriting partnership of its two founding members. More characteristic of the adrenalin-shot rock with which the band were synonymous was the Bob Rock produced 'Rise'. It was the lead single from 2001's comeback album Beyond Good and Evil, which hit number 3 on the US rock chart. While the reunion was short-lived, it proved The Cult were far from a spent force.

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It would be six years before The Cult would remerge with 2007’s Born Into This, produced by Youth, the bassist of post-punk contemporaries Killing Joke. It would also be the first time the band would record in the UK since the aborted Manor Sessions with Steve Jones in 1986. Led by the single 'Dirty Little Rock Star', the album struggled to find a footing in a music market transformed by downloads. Frustrated with the LP format, the band proceeded to put out two EP's in 2010: Capsule 1 and Capsule 2. Twenty-eleven saw the band reunite with Bob Rock at multiple locations in the US to deliver Choice of Weapon, which was followed in 2016 with Hidden City. Both albums made the top 20 in the UK, with Choice of Weapon also peaking at 36 in the US. As the 2010s drew to a close, The Cult have found themselves in the unique position of being more than just a heritage act, with a renewed credibility and appreciation of both their legacy and their new music.

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Their place in pop history, however, remains contested. The tension between the legacy of their English recordings up until Love, and those recorded in the US after Electric, divide fans and critics, precisely because they exist on a line of fault between British and American ideology. While British pop music takes itself seriously, it has always been more playful and ironic. Though American rock is often much shinier, it is invariably cohered around fixed notions of musicianship and authenticity. Think Bowie versus Springsteen. The Cult's carnivalesque appropriation of indigenous Amerindian culture and 70s rock worked within a postmodern narrative of British pop situationism. However, framed within a narrative that believes in geniuses and heroes and it became more problematic. The Cult were, in this sense, ahead of their time. Too sophisticated for 20th Century audiences, their successful manipulation of US rock idioms was often mistaken for unselfconscious pomposity. Thirty years on, however, and the prescience of that aesthetic has, perhaps, revealed itself.