The Cult have recently arrived in Australia and are bringing with them their much acclaimed tour in which they’ll play their legendary 1985 goth-rock album ‘Love’.
Shortly after touching down in Sydney, guitarist Billy Duffy picked up the phone and had a chat with Undercover’s Tim Cashmere about old Cult, new Cult and all things Cult and the first thing on my mind was “Why Love”?“Why not?” Duffy bluntly stated. “Love was an interesting point for us. We were still new and while it wasn’t technically our first album, it was our first globally released album and it was probably our truest too, because after that we had commercial success and we became more raucous with ‘Electric’ and ‘Sonic Temple’.
“You have got to remember, we’ve been playing a fair chunk of ‘Love’ for most of our career. There’d probably be an uprising if we didn’t play ‘She Sells Sanctuary’.”
It’s not that he is ashamed of the band’s commercial rock career. “I have never been afraid of commercial success,” he added. “All of the bands I was listening to like Thin Lizzy had singles in the charts. It wasn’t a bad thing! It wasn’t until years later that I got into the deeper, darker bands.”
When probed about the influence of The Cult on later “deeper, darker bands”, he half joked “I imagine there were plenty of those Seattle bands that had a few Cult albums in their collection.”
The Cult now have two kinds of live shows, sparked by a special performance at the Royal Albert Hall, Duffy claims “I ran into Ian a while back and said to him ‘I’ve got an idea about playing the Royal Albert Hall’. He wasn’t really into it at the time, but we did it and it was great. The day after we added a show at Shepherds Bush Empire, which is half the size and standing up and that was really sweaty and raucous.”
“We’re trying to put forward two different aspects of The Cult. We’re playing a seated venue in Melbourne and then by demand we had to put on a second show. We’re presenting it in two different ways. If you go to the seated show you can sit there and listen and we might not give the full on assault from the standing show.”
Miss this, and miss what will quite possibly be tour of the year!
Tour dates are:
MAY
6 - Luna Park, Sydney, NSW
8 - Palais Theatre, Melbourne, VIC
9 - Palace Theatre, Melbourne, VIC
10 - Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide, SA
12 - Metro City, Perth, WA
14 - Studio Coast, Tokyo, Japan
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