Supplying Riffs

It's been five years since The Cult released their last album, Born Into This, and seven since singer Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, the core of the UK hard rock institution, reconvened after several years apart pursuing side projects that included, for Astbury, working with the surviving members of The Doors, and for Duffy, a variety of bands including Coloursound. They've just released a new album, Choice Of Weapon, recorded across various sessions in New York City, Los Angeles, the California high desert and Ian Astbury's Witch Mountain studios in the Hollywood hills (“It's really his living room,” Duffy explains. “One of the guys from The Black Ryders helped us out on the engineering on it.”), between July and December last year, before they headed into Hollywood Recording Studios to finish things off with bass player Chris Wyse and drummer John Tempesta, who have been with the band since 2006.

“I'm kind of like the engine room guy, you know what I mean?” a perky Duffy admits self-effacingly, on the line from his home in Los Angeles, his Manchester accent as strong as ever, “shovelling coal in the beast, but I'm coming out of that mode into objectivity mode and I'm really enjoying playing [these songs] live.”

The reason for the five-year gap between albums isn't a lack of creativity – the band released a single, 2010's Every Man And Woman Is A Star, which became the lead track off enhanced EP, Capsule 1, followed the next year by the Capsule 2 EP. It was a case of feeling that they had an album worth recording.

“When we put out the [Born Into This] album and toured around a bit – we've been pretty much touring every year, but when me and Ian took a little break before deciding it was time to get back in the woodshed to write, it was difficult. He'd moved to New York and I was living in LA so we were as far away from each other as we could in America, but I went to New York and we worked a while and he came to Los Angeles and we started amassing some songs, but Ian was like, 'I really don't want to make an album. I don't want to have to write twenty songs and then go through that tortuous process of getting a producer and tracking the album and months and years… Why can't we just do like what a lot of younger bands are doing? Let's put out some EPs – let's get the new music out there; let's be more modern and instant and more reflective of what's happening.'

“So those were the Capsules. We got them out quicker, we got to use Chris Goss as a producer and it kind of freed me and Ian up as writers. We threw them out like sort of practise laps, going round, and we felt good about what we were doing and refined the process and that led us into Choice Of Weapon. We didn't really know whether we were going to come up with enough good songs to not include the Capsules in the album but in the end we felt we did. And a lot of the time spent really was just like getting studio time, getting a producer who was available, kind of lining up the logistics; you know, everybody's got lives and families – we're not kids anymore.”

Chris Goss, whose CV includes working with Queens Of The Stone Age, U.N.K.L.E. and his own band Masters of Reality among others, began coproducing Choice Of Weapon with Astbury and Duffy, but they then turned to Bob Rock (Metallica, Bush among many), who back in the day had been Aerosmith's sound engineer and had produced one of The Cult's most successful albums, 1988's Sonic Temple. As Duffy gleefully points out, “The Cult first, Metallica and Mötley Crüe after us”.

“The miracle is that the record doesn't sound all kind of like over-polished and stodgy and kind of stale. You know, we kept a certain energy somehow, and even when we changed producers, because we got to a point with it where we kind of, to use a running analogy, we hit a wall and didn't seem to be making any progress. So we just felt that a new set of ears, like with Bob Rock, he could come in and really just finish it off. No disrespect to Chris Goss, who spent months in the trenches producing us, working the songs from the ground up, but me and Ian were just running out of time and money and we had to make, like, the adult call, which was, 'I think we need Bob to come in with fresh ears and fresh energy to just push us to finish.'

“They're both guitar players who I like a lot. They're both '70s-oriented guitar players like myself; they're a wee bit older than myself but essentially the same slightly pre-punk music. Chris produced an Ian Astbury solo album in the '90s [actually 2000's Spirit/Light/Speed] and they became very good friends. Chris is an American obviously and Bob Rock is a Canadian whose lived in America, and they're both Anglophiles, both like English music, and that really resonates with me and Ian and how we grew up, with the kind of pre-punk glam rock and all that. So all that background goes into their production, so when they're trying to help me and Ian realise our songs, that's kind of their tool set – that's where they go to help us – and I think that's very beneficial for me and Ian.

“Technically me and Ian are useless,” Duffy admits. “I can barely turn my TV on without assistance! But I've got an iPhone, a laptop and a guitar plugged into a practice amp – I'm the low-tech dude. My job is to supply the riffs and the melodies.”