69. The Cult - Rain (Beggars Banquet)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 2nd November 1985

Back in the days when such things commonly existed, I sometimes wrote for a radical politics and music fanzine called “Splintered”. I haven’t kept any of my copies, but from memory, it was a ragbag of rants, reviews, articles and occasionally heartfelt opinion pieces from people with nowhere else to sensibly place their grievances; like most zines in that era, if somebody had a bee in their bonnet about anything from body image to the fact that Gaye Bykers on Acid had signed to a major label, the well-meaning editor often gave it the green light, typing it up then cutting, pasting and photocopying it into that fuzzy, washed out grey copy common to such organs.

One opinion piece in “Splintered” had such a lasting effect on the impressionable teenage me that I would quote it to friends endlessly. It talked about the rapid passing of time, and the way that youth wasn’t a period of life to be drifted through. Why, it argued, it’s literally the only period of your life when you’re likely to have the Energy to Experience new things and the gumption to create, so Do It Now. Pick up the pen, the guitar or the paintbrush – or even all three! - at once, or end up becoming one of those old, crabby no-marks who either did nothing, or has only just started to try, and has found out that in the winter of their lives, they are flapping, empty binbags with nothing left to say.

There were a number of individuals the article could have picked on to prove its point, but for some reason it zeroed in on Ian Astbury for particular abuse, pointing out that he had started his career as an innovative, considered lyricist for a sharp and original post-punk band, then reached his late twenties and found himself capable of little more than some monosyllabic “yeahs” and “babes”. What a disgrace he now was, we were told, and what more evidence did we need of the undignified effects of the ageing process, which removed all poetry from the soul.

I wonder what the author of that piece thinks now he’s in his fifties (or possibly even his sixties). I hope he’s kinder to himself, and also gentle to every other writer who is still compulsively Just Doing It and never knew how to stop.

Should he have been kinder to Ian Astbury? When Southern Death Cult first emerged in 1982, there was definitely something primitive and spiky about the group, the hard right angles of the rhythm section meeting Astbury’s commanding howls. His lyrics couldn’t really be described as poetry, but fulfilled the dank, morbid brief the group’s austere clattering provided him; the frame needed to be filled with theatric wordplay rather than flowery verse.

As the years progressed and the group’s membership changed, The Cult simplified not just their name, but their whole approach – gradually, at first, then by the point of “She Sells Sanctuary” the metamorphosis was complete. The Cult became not “just” a rock and roll band – they didn’t look like another Motley Crue, Poison or Twisted Sister, and they certainly didn’t sound like them either – but certainly something closer to one than not. For all the flowing goth clothes and mystic hand shapes they displayed onstage, their reliance on anthemic riffs, almost meaninglessly simple lyrics and the good, solid thunder of a reliable backbeat became central. They emerged from the confused tarpit of early British goth and ended up somehow influencing Guns N’ Roses. It seems an unlikely story.

If “She Sells Sanctuary” was a glorious mix of everything great about the commercial and underground aspects of mid-eighties rock music, “Rain” is just Desert Rock – an attempt at a rousing stomper tailor-made for a video featuring the band rolling through an arid landscape in a jeep (in the event, the promo defies your expectations and just sees the group pouting and throwing shapes on a studio stage set, so obviously Beggars Banquet’s budget didn’t stretch to a shoot in the outback).

Lyrically speaking, its complete rock conservatism, riddled with cliches - “Hot sticky scenes/ you know what I mean”, begins Astbury, “I've been waiting for her for so long/ Open the sky, and let her come down”. The rest of the song just repeats the lines “Here comes the rain”, “I love the rain”, “here she comes again” and the words in the first verse over and over, making it deeply minimalistic. Clearly the lyrics do their job and allow the listener to forge an accurate impression, but they’re so effortless as to be almost childlike.