The no-nonsense advice Rick Rubin gave Billy Duffy and The Cult that changed their career
Rick Rubin is credited with giving many artists a leg up at a crucial time, from Johnny Cash to Red Hot Chili Peppers. One of his most vital interventions, however, was for English rockers The Cult in the late 1980s. The Cult, which stars frontman Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, started as something of a gothic post-punk act, masters at crafting atmosphere thanks to Astbury’s powerful delivery and Duffy’s effects-laden lines. However, the band always had a traditional hard rock edge, and it was thanks to Rick Rubin that they would metamorphose into an outfit deeply ensconced in this style. This came by way of some no-nonsense advice from the American producer.
Notably, the band’s third album, 1987’s Electric, was a deliberate break from the gothic style of their first two records. Its predecessor, 1985’s Love, was a wildly successful record that spawned three hit singles, including ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ and ‘Rain’.
At first, the band encountered struggles making Electric, as they attempted to use the same writing and recording approach of Love, but after hearing a Beastie Boys song that Rick Rubin produced, The Cult knew they wanted to form a new collaboration. It proved to be a masterstroke, helping them enter the next chapter of their career. Significantly, Electric equalled Love‘s charting place by peaking at number four, but it exceeded its stay, spending 27 weeks on the chart. It became the most successful run for an album by The Cult.
Speaking to string manufacturer Ernie Ball’s Pursuit of Tone in 2019, Duffy recalled the problems they encountered when first making Electric. He said: “So, we’ve done well. I’ve got this sound, the band’s got an identity, we’ve broken through, we go on tour, we do the Love album, we start writing new songs, and we started making steps towards more of a rock sound. So, the album that was the follow-up to Love never really got a title, but it was supposed to be Peace, maybe – that was the working title of it. And it was what became Electric. The songs were there, but we tried the same production and layering techniques that had worked on Love, and they didn’t work on Electric. And the producer was pulling his hair out because he’d had a great hit album with The Cult doing Love, so he came back to do the next album, and it just wasn’t working.”
Outlining how the band went wrong at this point, he continued: “So, like any proper stupid band, instead of stopping, we’d man it out ’til the end. We’d record the album at an expensive residential studio with an extensive wine cellar and a chef. We’d go to the most expensive mixing studio in London; we mix it and realise it isn’t any good.”
However, The Cult were offered a way out of the impasse after hearing a Rick Rubin-produced Beastie Boys track that sampled AC/DC. Duffy didn’t specify the song, but I presume it’s 1984’s ‘Rock Hard’, which uses snippets from ‘Back in Black’. After first meeting Rubin, the producer didn’t hold back in telling the band what he thought they were doing wrong. It proved to be a lightbulb moment.
Duffy said: “So, we’d been exposed to Rick Rubin by listening to a song he did with The Beastie Boys, which was beats but AC/DC riffs. It was fresh and new, and we were excited by it. So we got hold of Rick. It’s a true story, we went to New York, met Rick, and he just said, and I quote him: ‘Why you doing all this kinda pussy English stuff? Let’s get to the essence of it.'”
He added: “And we told the record company and our managers we were going to recut one song – bearing in mind we’d spent hundreds of thousands of pounds making an album – nobody was going to say, ‘Throw that away and make a new record’. They said, ‘Well, recut one song because that’s Rick’s rule. He’ll do the album if you let him cut one song from the ground up.’ And that was going to be ‘Love Removal Machine’, and he would remix the album. In retrospect, that was never ever going to happen because the way we’d done that album and the way Rick Rubin works are completely different.”
New York was a completely different environment from what the band was used to. It was an exciting place where some of the era’s biggest names were on the scene. Duffy said: “So, we get to New York. It’s an amazing, dangerous, exciting place. You know, LL Cool J’s there, The Beastie Boys, it’s all going on, Slayer are around, Anthrax, we’re like, ‘Woah, what’s this stuff happening?'”
Before too long, Rubin provided Duffy and the band with the key that would change their sound for good. It was to be unfettered hard rock moving forward, where the band’s primary weapon, Duffy, was to change his sound, leaving behind his trusty Gretsch White Falcon for a more muscley instrument, the Gibson Les Paul.
He concluded: “We basically had a conversation, which went something like this. Rick went, ‘You like early Zeppelin, right?’, we went, ‘Yeah, early’. And he went, ‘You like early Aerosmith, right?’, we went, ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘Do you like AC/DC?’, and we went, ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘So, let’s make a record.’ That was about as complicated as it was. He just said, ‘All that stuff, that Gretsch and echo, get rid of all that. That’s a Marshall, that’s a Les Paul, off you go.'”
