PEACE, LOVE & THE CULT

PEACE, LOVE & THE CULT

FEATURES

Jim Farber

Pop culture is choking on its own vomit again. Everywhere you look, signs of psychedelia are being thrown-up in a mix with all of rock history since, creating the utter mish-mash we’ve come to think of as pop present.

Take for example, the Cult—a good new British band who’ve regurgitated more than their fair share of psychedelic surfaces. Yet beneath their long hair, love beads, light show, groovy song titles and the mystical cover of their first U.S. LP, Love, they’re just an everyday bunch of 1986 kids. “We’re not out to revitalize the ’60s and say, ‘OK, everybody’s got to wear the gear and get all the lights and drop acid,”’ explains lead belter Ian Astbury, brushing back his neo-long hair. “We’re just saying there were some positive elements from that period which we’ve been influenced by.”

Such as? “The main thing about that period to me was the imagination and the color,” Astbury answers. “I’m stimulated by those colors and the flamboyance of the clothes and their ideas.”

The band’s actual music, in case you haven’t heard it, is about as psychedelic as the Psychedelic Furs, which is to say, not very. True, it’s got a good beat, you can chant mantras to it. But it’s more like an exciting modern mix of post-punk and metal. Sort of like the Cure meets early Black Sabbath. Or as guitarist Billy Duffy explains: “If people come to our shows and expect to see some psychedelic standing about, freaking out, they’re going to be very disappointed. We’re not about 90-minute guitar solos.”

So why bring on the wrath of historians and dredge up all this loaded imagery to begin with? Ian Astbury provides the background. “Basically, when punk rock finished I was looking around for some new music to listen to. I wasn’t into the new avant-garde music that was being made in England. I just heard Jimi Hendrix on the radio and I thought it was a brand new sound. I thought, ‘what the hell is this?”’ [Note: Astbury is 23—old enough to have known better.] “I didn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was until I was 19 or 20,” the singer maintains. “I heard ‘Purple Haze’ on the radio and thought, ‘Shit, this is brilliant. I’ve got to go see this guy play.’ Then I sussed out that Jimi Hendrix was a bit dead.”

After he got over that minor setback, Astbury says: “I started buying his music and reading a lot about the period. I started to look at films and I saw those (liquid) lights.”

Astbury and Duffy began adopting more and more psychedelic influences as a reaction against the punks’ rigid anti’60s shtick. “It’s like since the punk thing, there’s been rules laid down—the ’60s stunk,” says Duffy. “That’s wrong because there was some great innovative music then.”

Of course, using ’60s imagery to shake up punk prejudices is nothing new. That’s the whole reason the Psychedelic Furs took their name five years ago. Astbury admits the influence. “The first bands I really went to see in small clubs were things like Echo & The Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs and the Cramps. That’s more my beginnings of interest in music.”

Astbury began the first band of his own in 1981—Southern Death Cult. Then he teamed up with Billy in a new group call-

“I didn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was until I was 19 or 20.”

—Ian Astbury

ed, whimsically enough, Death Cult. But they soon got rid of the “death” part because, as Ian explains: “the name was negative, you know.”

Today, the group claim that punk, and even the glitter music of their early teens, has been as much an influence as the ’60s stuff. But the question remains— what does the group really think of the ’60s beneath the surface? Obviously their main interest is in alluding to the general “experimentation” and “imagination” of the period. But what about specific stuff—like politics? “The world’s a different place from what it was then,” Duffy answers. “In the ’60s it was more affluent. People had jobs. They could afford to be self-indulgent. They could afford to take people for a ride and say, ‘yeah, revolution,’ and all that sort of crap. But now it’s a lot more serious.”

A pretty cynical view, but Duffy doesn’t want that to go too far. “We’re not taking a piss out of something people put their heart and souls into,” he qualifies. “I suppose to a certain degree, those people did accomplish something...they stopped a war.”

One ’60s influence the band seem to unashamedly endorse is a terribly romantic view of native American Indians (carried in the song “Brother Wolf, Sister Moon.”) But Astbury maintains there’s nothing specifically hippie-esque about his deep-seated interest. (Oh well, the song’s the only major clinker on the album anyway.)

Musically, the closest real ’60s connection is the early heavy metal influence in songs like “Love” and “The Phoenix,” carried in Billy Duffy’s guitar work. That comes across even stronger live, where the band do occasionally sound like “Paranoid”-period Sabbath (a compliment). This is revealed a few days after our penetrating interview, when the Cult make their N.Y. debut at the Ritz. It takes a while for the group to recreate the thick, soupy sound of their LP, but eventually they find their groove/plod. The light show doesn’t really come across too well live. It looks better in the nifty “She Sells Sanctuary” video. But I guess that just helps axe some 1968 references so we can concentrate on the new. The band are obviously concerned about that, live. Towards the end, Astbury is sure to tell the crowd, “Oh yeah, peace and love— I’m too young to remember that.” And for some reason he introduces the encore twice as “a song by Bob Dylan,” before going into “Wild Thing.” Just goes to show you, I guess, even when history repeats itself, you never know how it’s going to turn out.