The Cult interview: ‘Cultural appropriation? A crown of thorns? Just antics’
In his dressing room far beneath a darkly ornate Spanish Gothic theatre in the tumbledown grandeur of downtown Los Angeles, Ian Astbury briefly lowers his sunglasses. Barring two songs during the encore of his concert later, when he appears on stage in milky tribal-style make-up, it’s the only time in the eight hours I spend on-and-off in The Cult singer’s company that I see the whites of his eyes. The reason? I’ve just told the 61 year-old that he looks remarkably sprightly. “I’m knackered,” he says, secretly a bit chuffed, giving me the glimpse. “These are prescription” – he gestures at the shades – “It’s not just to be cool.” And they’re back up.
Such human moments are as rare as a lunar eclipse in the public perception of Astbury. As the frontman in one of the UK’s most enduring bands – it’s 40 years since The Cult helped invent the Goth youth culture – Cheshire-born Astbury has attracted millions of fans. He’s also drawn a fair dollop of ridicule for being a contrarian hard rock wildman enthused by Native American mythology, political punk music and the doomed romance of Jim Morrison.
Sitting here in beads and black – from his baggy culottes to his topknot, black is the colour – Astbury both confirms and torpedoes this mystical image. How come he looks so young? “Spirit,” he nods, fist-bumping his heart. Spirit and, it transpires moments later, counting the caloric density of his food. Talk about the sacred and the profane co-existing. It turns out that Astbury is terrific, if earnest, company.
The Cult are returning to their youth in other ways. Astbury and co-founder Billy Duffy are touring the UK as Death Cult, their initial 1983 incarnation in which their sound morphed from angular post-punk to reverb-heavy Goth music (they dropped the “Death” bit in 1984). The timing couldn’t be better: a Goth revival is underway.
Three books on Goth’s history have recently been released, while Billie Eilish’s thrillingly dark, stadium-filling music is essentially electronic Goth. One of the scene’s anthems is The Cult’s 1985 hit She Sells Sanctuary. Darkness you can dance to, the song has amassed almost 250 million streams on Spotify and YouTube. It has recently appeared on Gen-Z TV shows like Euphoria, snaring a new generation of fans and becoming a TikTok favourite (the song features in Death Cult’s setlist).
“In the same way that people identify with Billie Eilish at a certain age, they can identify with the earnestness, the youth and the sincerity that pours out of that song,” says Astbury. To what does he attribute the more general Goth revival? “I think it’s perhaps the environment. The world is in absolute, total chaos now,” he says.
In his tour bus in the parking lot outside, guitarist Duffy distances the band from the “Halloween horror” image that Goth conjures. But he’s thrilled that She Sells Sanctuary endures. “It’s just one of those songs. We’re blessed that it ever happened,” he says, his broad Mancunian accent undiluted by being a part-time LA resident.
She Sells Sanctuary’s evergreen allure stems from a deliciously comical mix up. In 1985 the band requested that their label Beggars Banquet hire producer Steve Lillywhite to produce the song due to his work with the crepuscular Siouxsie and the Banshees. But a miscommunication saw the label book Steve Brown, who’d recently produced Wham!’s sunshine smash Club Tropicana. Astbury wryly recalls going to Beggars’ London office to meet “Steve”.
“This guy turns up and says, ‘Hey, I’m Steve.’ We sat down and we started to work out that it wasn’t Steve Lillywhite, it was Steve Brown. But he was cool. We said ‘What have you produced?’ and he said ‘Wham!’. I’m like ‘Wham!?’ We just went with it.” Duffy calls it a “glorious mistake” and says Brown’s populist antenna added a “pop and dance sensibility” to the Cult’s sound. The murk sparkled. Their career took off.
But The Cult soon moved on. In 1987, not wanting to be tagged, they embraced AC/DC-style heavy rock with the Rick Rubin-produced Electric album. Arenas beckoned (1989’s Sonic Temple album sold 1.5 million copies in the US alone). These were the party years in which drink, drugs and weirdness prevailed. During one show supporting Metallica, an audience member brandished a sign saying “The Cult suck”. “Ian runs down, takes the sign, rips it up and starts eating it,” says Duffy. In Texas, Astbury escaped cops keen to arrest him for profanity by shimmying down a drainpipe, boarding the tour bus of support act Guns N’ Roses, donning a disguise and pretending to play cards with the driver. “Just antics,” says Astbury, long-since sober.
The band also got in trouble with MTV. The music station insisted they cut scenes from 1992’s Heart of Soul video after Astbury wore a crown of thorns and brandished a gun. He claims he was simply bored on set and wasn’t trying to be provocative (being deliberately controversial is “like small change in your pocket,” he says). Despite the edit, he prevailed. “That image was put up as a poster in Valencia when the Pope was there,” he says.
Astbury was clearly a huge influence on GnR’s young singer Axl Rose, another cantankerous rocker (just watch Astbury’s dance moves in the She Sells Sanctuary video – Rose lifted them almost wholesale). Astbury says the enigmatic Rose is misunderstood. “He’s an incredibly sensitive person, and a deep feeler and a deep thinker.”
To understand The Cult’s stylistic shifts, you need look no further than Astbury’s peripatetic upbringing. Born to a Glaswegian mother and a Merseysider father, he moved from England to Canada to Scotland before he was 17. After his mother died on his 17th birthday, he followed punk band Crass around Britain “like a homeless kid drifting”. Astbury has always felt an outsider. “When I was in Scotland I was a Sassenach, when I was in England I was ‘Haggis’, when I was in Canada I was a Limey, and when I came back I was a Yank.” He lives in LA today but has a British accent. So does he feel British or American? “I feel global,” he says, which is possibly the most Ian Astbury comment imaginable.
But growing up, he was – by necessity – a cultural sponge. Canada exposed him to FM rock radio bands such as Led Zeppelin, verboten music in prescriptive post-punk Britain, and sparked a lifelong interest in Native American culture. As an immigrant at school he was labelled “other” along with indigenous children. They were his “crew”. He visited reservations. Astbury has no Native American blood in him, but felt affinity as an 80 per cent Celt (fellow “tribal people”).
He says this: “Robert Bly, the American poet, said all the [world’s] trouble started when we lost touch with wild animals. When I first heard him say that my heart just broke. It’s so true.” His fascination explains Cult songs like Brother Wolf, Sister Moon, or the bit in Wild Flower when he sings “I’m a wolf child, baby, and I’m howlin’ for you”. Astbury is keen to see Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a Western about contested Native American land. “I’m aware of the story. It’s quite a poignant time for it.”
On the bus, Duffy is the meat and two veg to Astbury’s exotic gumbo. The down-to-earth 62 year-old memorably recalls first seeing Astbury in the early 1980s. Astbury’s band Southern Death Cult (a name he and Duffy truncated for their subsequent venture) was playing at Keele University alongside Duffy’s then-band Theatre of Hate.
Pre-gig, Duffy saw a “spectral figure running through the woods” behind the campus. “The best way I can describe it is Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans,” he says. Later, watching the show, he recognised Astbury. “He had the mohawk, the loin-cloth, bells on his moccasins, chaps, the full get-up,” he says. He also thought, “Wow, the voice.” Shortly after, Astbury quit his band, tracked Duffy down to Brixton and asked him to join forces.
Astbury’s Native American leanings have produced eye-rolls in corners of the music press. One journalist once labelled him “two tipis short of a reservation”. “That really hurt,” he says, still sounding bruised. It’s why he rarely gives interviews. But Astbury denies cultural appropriation – the borrowing of imagery from other cultures.
“In terms of cultural appropriation, I was very conscious [that] I was being influenced by certain aesthetics in Native American culture and as I was progressing through that I began to find another voice because I knew I wasn’t an indigenous kid. Buddhism took over. I stopped wearing feathers in my hair,” he says.
Many people, though, are drawn to Astbury’s mysticism. In an era when pop stars’ normalness is celebrated – Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift – his otherworldliness is all too rare. In John Robb’s new history of Goth – The Art of Darkness – he calls Astbury “one of the last great rock ‘n’ roll romantics”. It’s not just indigenous Americans he’s interested in: our chat takes in the artist Rammellzee, Syd Barrett, Ridley Scott’s 1984 Apple computers advert, and walking with nomads in Tibet. Polymathic Astbury fully admits to being “earnest”, but I can attest that he believes every word he says.
This sincerity saw him join the reformed Doors in 2002 in place of the late, none-more-serious Morrison. (Oliver Stone approached Astbury to play Morrison in the 1991 Doors film; he declined and soon found out that his friend Michael Hutchence of INXS had also been approached. Val Kilmer took the role). If you like your rock stars to hover above the humdrum, Astbury’s your man.
Duffy has quite the backstory too. As a Manchester teen, he formed a band with one Steven Morrissey. The Nosebleeds were short-lived. But outside a Patti Smith gig at the Manchester Apollo in 1978, Duffy introduced Morrissey to his close friend Johnny Marr. The pair went on to form The Smiths, one of music’s most fêted bands. Duffy describes Morrissey as creative, arch and obsessed with getting US punks the New York Dolls on British telly. “He was a strong character. Very funny,” says Duffy.
Has it ever struck Duffy that he was essentially responsible for forming two of the biggest alternative bands of the 1980s – The Smiths and The Cult? “There was a time when I remember walking down [Soho’s] Wardour Street with Ian, and Johnny and Morrissey were coming the other way. There were a few glances exchanged,” he says with a satisfied grin. Duffy and Marr remain close friends, but he doesn’t see Morrissey.
While Duffy is aware of Morrissey’s recent controversial comments (apparent racial slurs and sympathy for far-right groups such as For Britain) he hasn’t joined the “cancel Morrissey” brigade. “I like to think of myself as a libertarian so I’m not really getting a pitchfork out just yet. There’s a bit too much of that going on at the moment.”
Duffy and Astbury are chalk and cheese. How would he characterise their relationship? “The marriage analogy is a cliché but pretty close. We’re bonded.” Talking of marriages, Duffy is engaged to former Real Housewives of Cheshire star and regular GB News commentator Leilani Dowding. He briefly appeared in the reality show himself. “I was dragged into that show,” he states, knowing it’s hardly the epitome of rock ’n’ roll. The things you do for love, I say. “Well, you know, she is good-looking,” he quips dryly (Duffy was also in a 2010 reality show called Married to Rock, for which he says he was paid handsomely). When not in the US, he lives on a farm in Staffordshire with Dowding. “She’s a wonderful woman and I’m very happy. Finally,” he says.
The 1,800-capacity Death Cult concert that evening, the first of the tour, is a triumphant gathering of the tribes. The band walk on to the dystopian theme of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. In the fan-vaulted gloom of the former United Artists theatre – built in 1927 by another US-dwelling British entertainer, Charlie Chaplin – Astbury prowls, howls and yowls while Duffy and the band weave squalling melodies. Astbury’s accent has gone full American.
In air thick with incense, band tech Vinnie has set a stage-side table with the skull of a small animal and other offerings. In the crowd, punks with mohawks punch the air amid leather-clad rockers, folk in carnival masks, and women in burgundy ball gowns. Merchandise sales average a staggering $28.19 per ticket (by comparison, Taylor Swift’s pre-Eras Tour merch sales averaged $17 per ticket). This music still attracts a loyal, committed crowd for whom Goth never died.
The same is true for Astbury “Forty years on, I’m still the same person,” he says. “Maybe a bit wiser. But I still feel it the same way.”
Death Cult tour until Nov 22. Tickets: ticketmaster.co.uk
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